Even I the anglophone am jealous of Cyrillic-script languages. Phonetic languages, where you say what you see, sound so convenient. Even worlds like anglophone have dumb gimmicks like ‘ph’ = ‘f’. The grass is always greener on the other side.
But even then, illiteracy often also means they can’t read basic English, so it’s not even them misspelling weird words like… ‘misspelling’ and ‘weird.’, a large proportion of the USA would seriously struggle to understand our conversation [see replies to this]. And when our alphabet is 26 symbols (52 including capitals) with 10 digits and a handful of necessary punctuation symbols, Chinese script is off by magnitudes.
And having seen some documentaries interviewing people in my country overcoming adult illiteracy, you realize this includes clearly intelligent people who within weeks could begin reciting their own small written speeches, who were often just neglected by the education system and then too embarrassed to seek help or reveal their inability.
Even I the anglophone am jealous of Cyrillic-script languages. Phonetic languages, where you say what you see, sound so convenient. Even worlds like anglophone have dumb gimmicks like ‘ph’ = ‘f’. The grass is always greener on the other side.
But even then, illiteracy often also means they can’t read basic English, so it’s not even them misspelling weird words like… ‘misspelling’ and ‘weird.’, a large proportion of the USA would seriously struggle to understand our conversation [see replies to this]. And when our alphabet is 26 symbols (52 including capitals) with 10 digits and a handful of necessary punctuation symbols, Chinese script is off by magnitudes.
And having seen some documentaries interviewing people in my country overcoming adult illiteracy, you realize this includes clearly intelligent people who within weeks could begin reciting their own small written speeches, who were often just neglected by the education system and then too embarrassed to seek help or reveal their inability.
Obligatory The Simpsons lecture excerpt
some Romance languages have one-to-one phoneme-letter relations as well (e.g. Spanish, but not Fr*nch)
Most Germanic languages, too, are spelled phonetically. English is sort of the rare exception in that family.