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From: kichenas@s6.math.umn.edu (Satyanad Kichenassamy)
Subject: Re: languages with phonetic alphabets?
Message-ID: <D60p5I.MMw@news.cis.umn.edu>
Sender: S. Kichenassamy (kichenas@math.umn.edu) 
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Organization: University of Minnesota, Mathematics
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Date: Sat, 25 Mar 1995 22:33:41 GMT
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In article <3kvjbl$qrc@spool.cs.wisc.edu> krisna@cham.cs.wisc.edu (Krishna Kunchithapadam) writes:
>tmoran@bix.com writes:
>:
>: My son asked if there are any languages where each letter of the
>: alphabet has a single pronunciation.  Are there?
>:
>

>Classic examples would include the classical languages (pun
>intended).  Classical Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (to choose three
>languages of the Indo-European family with abundant literature)
>all used phonetic scripts.
[...]
>
>The Dravidian languages Kannada, Telugu, and Malayalam all use
>phonetic scripts as well.  Phonetic scripts are also employed by
>many languages of the Sino-Tibetan family, notably the many
>Chinese languages.

But of course, the Chinese do not use an alphabet in China.
You must be referring to Indo-Tibetan scripts.

I am surprised you excluded Classical Tamil. There is a slight
variablity in Modern Tamil due to foreign (mostly Sanskrit-derived)
loan-words (via various Prakrits), and to the patterns they suggested. 
Many of those have been Tamilized to some extent. There is nevertheless
even today a quite predictable correspondence between speech and writing. 
A common feature of Indian
scripts is that they indicate the length of vowels explicitly. Of course,
this feature is certainly related to the existence of a rather 
thorough grammatical analysis of Sanskrit (PANini) and
Tamil (TolkAppiyam) which was available some 2000 years ago or more;
the reader is referred to these two texts for details. 
The degree of perfection in grammatical analysis
reached in India is well-known. 
>
>
>Moving to Central Asia and Europe, languages like Arabic, Hebrew,
>German, the Slavic languages (e.g. Russian) all use phonetic
>scripts.  Different languages using the same script may (and
>often do) assign different phonetic values to script characters,
>but there is internal consistency.

Semitic scripts usually do not indicate vocalization
(the most famous example is of course YHWH!);
they now can, using diacritics, but do not always, even today.

Also, in Russian, we know that g is pronounced v in some cases;
similarly, the pronunciation of o is variable (cf: govorite).
In  modern European languages, I think vowel length is not
systematically indicated (compare Name and Nacht in German),
and must be inferred. It is usually fairly easy to infer it with
some practice, but that was not the question. 
>
[...]
>
>--Krishna


                                Satyanad Kichenassamy
                                School of Mathematics
                                University of Minnesota
                                kichenas@math.umn.edu


