PURE PHONETICAL Language

Guest   Sat Jun 21, 2008 6:31 pm GMT
The Latin script is best suited for languages with a small set of phonemes, so it is not surprising that Spanish or Italian are more phonetic than let's say French.
Guest   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:18 pm GMT
<<In that aspect Spanish come pretty close to its "father" Latin, unlike its other romance brothers.>>

Spanish sounds a lot more like Arabic to me...
Aryan Master   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:19 pm GMT
German seems more phonetic than Latin in my opinion.
Guest   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:24 pm GMT
German sounds much like Arabic, with those guttural sounds and glottal stops. Refined languages are pronounced with the mouth not with the throat .
Travis   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:28 pm GMT
>>All languages with a "native alphabet" tend to be purely phonetic, examples include Greek, Latin and Norse.<<

I did not write this, and actually I disagree with this statement considerably (especially in the case of Old Norse, whose use of the Younger Futhark did not get close to representing its native phoneme inventory, and which even when written in Latin script does not mark nasal versus oral vowel phonemes).
Dariusz   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:38 pm GMT
"Refined languages are pronounced with the mouth not with the throat "

Guttural or nasal languages are not very nice. I am a Polish guy and we all loved how Karol Wojtyła, the ex-Polish Pope (John Paul II) spoke and prayed in Latin. We still have Latin in church, and Latin is a beautiful language, clear and crisp (no nasal or throaty sounds) more beautiful than any neo-latin language, or any language.
Pro Latin   Sat Jun 21, 2008 10:43 pm GMT
<<Guttural or nasal languages are not very nice. I am a Polish guy and we all loved how Karol Wojtyła, the ex-Polish Pope (John Paul II) spoke and prayed in Latin. We still have Latin in church, and Latin is a beautiful language, clear and crisp (no nasal or throaty sounds) more beautiful than any neo-latin language, or any language.>>

I fully agree. It's nice that people like Latin in Poland.
Aryan Master   Sat Jun 21, 2008 11:38 pm GMT
<<Refined languages are pronounced with the mouth not with the throat .>>

Spanish is spoken with the tongue. Every time I hear it I am reminded of the savage Arab-Islamic declaration: alahu akbar.
Guest   Sun Jun 22, 2008 12:05 am GMT
"Spanish is spoken with the tongue. Every time I hear it I am reminded of the savage Arab-Islamic declaration: alahu akbar."

>Then you're not hearing well, you need to clean your ears more often.
LM   Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:33 pm GMT
> A perfect example of how a phonetic language should be! What you hear is what you write down and vice versa.

What a strange observation. No one actualy knows how Latin should sound because it is a dead language. It is "phonetic" because people speak it as it was written.

>Cyrillic alphabet languages are phonetic
They are actually not. The difference between orthography and pronunciation is not that big as in French or English, but still they are far from being phonetic. The Byelorussian language is considered to be more phonetic than other slavic languages.
Ramon Serrano   Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:38 pm GMT
Spanish is the ring between Italian/French and Arabic Language.
Guest   Sun Jun 22, 2008 2:48 pm GMT
True: Most of the names starting with Al-, Ar-, Cala-, Guad- and Medina are corrupted forms of Arabic names originally given to places, rivers, mountains and other natural features during the Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal. These names were later adopted in the Americas after the migration of Hispanic population to Florida, California, Mexico, Central and South Americas in 1500s and later centuries, following the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the continent.
Guest   Sun Jun 22, 2008 9:14 pm GMT
"No one actualy knows how Latin should sound because it is a dead language. It is "phonetic" because people speak it as it was written."

Latin sounded clearly as Sardinian, Italian, etc (except few nasal Romance like French, Portuguese, etc)

You got to understand that Old English is dead as well. And Modern English is the New English, just like Old Latin is dead and there are Neo-Latin languages.

Old English - Modern English transformed to a higher degree compared to Vulgar Latin - Italian. Every Romance language is a variant of Vulgar Latin, hence there are many Latin variants today, named LATIN LANGUAGES.

Unlike some extinct tribal languages that disappeared LATIN TRANSFORMED.
Guest   Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:26 am GMT
>Latin sounded clearly as Sardinian, Italian, etc (except few nasal Romance like French, Portuguese, etc)

How do you know that? Where you there? Do you have a sound record from those times?
Nobody can prove that "i" in Latin was pronounced like "i" in present Italian, or that it was actually a chirp or a triple oink: "oink-oink-oink" :)
Post a reply (Please read   Mon Jun 23, 2008 8:49 am GMT
Umm, didn't the Romans have "linguists" in a primitive sense who wrote down precisely stuff like how Latin was pronounced?