What are the most and least phonetic languages in the world?

[NiceCupOfTea]

As you do at 10 p.m. on a Friday, we were just wondering which written language was the most phonetic.

This obviously led to the other question: which is the least?

Can any one help?

[terambulan]

Mandarin...........'cause it tastes better

[NiceCupOfTea]

Most or least? C'mon, give me a clue....

[DrisgirI]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28949361@N02/

[NiceCupOfTea]

Bleeding heel lassie - what's that?

[jno]

esperanto is a manufactured language but it was created so that every letter has just one sound, if that's what you mean by phonetic. Least phonetic is quite likely English; 'ough' can be pronounced in 10 or so different ways.

[Quizmonster]

In support of J above, ghoti could be pronounced fish with the gh as in rough, the o as in women and the ti as in nation.

[swedeheart]

LOL Quizmonster, that's a good one!

[heathfield]

The Thai alphabet, with 44 letters and 11 vowels, can be used to phonetically write any language in the world, with the exception of Zulu, which has a 'click' sound not present in Thai.
You can even tell whether a Thai-English phrase book has been written using UK English or US English. The phonetic translation can be accurate enough for the different accents to be heard.
The least phonetic will probably be the 'tonal' languages, like those of China, where a word can have five different meanings, depending on whether the word is spoken with a high, middle, or low pitch, or the pitch rises or falls as the word is spoken.

[NiceCupOfTea]

I didn't realise that Esperanto was so phonetic. You are the controversial winner. We didn't even think about it, as we were naffling too much about natural languages, if that's not an oxymoron.

We�d still like to know the most phonetic �natural� language though.

Sorry for the 2* rating Quiz. You were just agreeing and I'd already seen that fabulous example of English phoneticity (?) before - please forgive!

Heathfield - well and truly wonderful example of non-phoneticity. Thank you. You are the winner on that one. We totally forgot about the whole of China when we were having our rumpus over this topic in my house. As you do when a nation is hosting the Olympics with all the attendant news and human rights abuse bulletins. Blush.

[NiceCupOfTea]

Sorry jno - should have mentioned you by name as our fabulous controversial winner re the Esperanto stuff. Stupid me and this silly paste, copy, spell checking do dah via Microsoft Word (if I can post that). I wish the AB Editors would enable some sort of spell checking in our posts before we post them to stop me missing bits off the stuff I paste back in...........

[jno]

thank you for the medal, NiceCup. You might be interested in this page:

http://www.esperanto.ie/english/zaft/zaft(4).h tm

which says Finnish and Swahili are phonetic too (and not invented languages).

A poem (not by me):

Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my pea sea.
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss Steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
and weight four it two say
Weather Eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid,
It nose bee fore two long,
And Eye can put the error rite -
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no,
Its letter perfect awl the weigh.
My spell chequer tolled me sew.

[NiceCupOfTea]

10q:)

[Quizmonster]

No problem re the two* rating, NCOT. More than I deserved, really, given that I wasn't claiming it as an original. In fact, wasn't it G B Shaw's?

Re a spell-checker, download the free Google tool-bar and there you have one. All you need do once you've typed your AnswerBank response is click on its ABC-tick- Check 'button'. Any errors will be reddened, but remember it is American-English orientated..

[NiceCupOfTea]

Their, yew r no ay 3*

[wernerheisenberg]

Turkish is %100 phonetic and as far as I know, the only language in the world having this property.

[Bababooey]

Korean is the most phonetic language. Hangul (Korean Alphabet).

[izkb1972]

I disagree with Bababooey that Hangul is phonetic. The sound for the G and K have the same Korean character. Same with the sounds of P and B, T and D. So it's clearly not the most phonetic. (reference to Korean alphabet http://thinkzone.wlonk.com/Language/Korean-big.gif)

[newhere]

izkb obviously don't know korean cause those letters you mentioned do have different characters. it was made to be phonetic.

[nitin_soni]

India Languages are 100% phonetic specially samskrit.