ILE foreign languages represent

Used to be fluent in "official Irish", i.e. the version that has nothing to do with what native speakers speak. Have gone from fluent to passable in German through lack of use. Also passable in French - I can watch a movie without subtitles but at best I catch 80% of what's happening. I have a degree in Sanskrit but at this point could not read or produce a single sentence.

I've got a question: What, linguistically, could be deemed the most efficient world language? The one that's pronounced how it's spelled. The one that has the fewest exceptions to the rule. Is there such a thing?

I’m going to guess that it’s not one using the Latin Alphabet or a least if it does they’ll be a lot of diacritics.

But then what about regional variation? If spelling will reflect some form of standardised pronunciation then regional differences will break the relationship.

Standard Italian is follows the spelling very closely if you are Milanese but not if you are Sicilian.

Spanish is pretty good on the whole "pronounced like it's spelled" front

i've got a new strat for my French. Les Pieds Sur Terre from France Culture. a new 30-minute podcast episode every day. if i can get to the point where I'm enjoying it and not having to pause and go back etc then I'll be v happy.

Ed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographia_bohemica ?

That was interesting and led to this

Languages with a high grapheme-to-phoneme and phoneme-to-grapheme correspondence (excluding exceptions due to loan words and assimilation) include Maltese, Finnish, Albanian, Georgian, Turkish (apart from ğ and various palatal and vowel allophones), Serbo-Croatian (Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian), Bulgarian, Macedonian (if the apostrophe denoting schwa is counted, though slight inconsistencies may be found), Eastern Armenian (apart from o, v), Basque (apart from palatalized l, n), Haitian Creole, Castilian Spanish (apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z), Czech (apart from ě, ů, y, ý), Polish (apart from ó, h, rz), Romanian (apart from distinguishing semivowels from vowels), Ukrainian (mainly phonemic with some other historical/morphological rules, as well as palatalization), Belarusian (phonemic for vowels but morphophonemic for consonants except ў written phonetically), Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used), Mongolian (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k), and Kazakh (apart from и, у, х, щ, ю).

"apart from"

(apart from h, x, b/v, and sometimes k, c, g, j, z)

not what you're looking for but making use of the fewest sounds is kind of efficient: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotokas_language

Russian is pretty much pronounced as spelled - Polish probably as far in the other direction as any language I can think of.

I need create own polish alphabet, it will be gut pic.twitter.com/XYqcRZbtXZ

— ⭐Jag. Thornproof♠ (@SanJaguar) October 10, 2017

presumably thanks to this?: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#The_post-revolution_reform

my dad's parents* were reds in the 30s: my dad told to me once that he could remember his mum teaching herself russian in the bath, adding that she was learning from a tsarist-era guidebook so it probably would have done more harm than good come the worldwide bolshevik revolution

*one of them ended up very reactionary, the other stayed secretly red till the end in her 90s, i don't really know how they negotiated this personally

adding: my dad was naturally good at languages, picking up the useable basics very quickly -- he taught himself serbo-croat in order to read an untranslated paper abt karst landscapes* and once (in lapland) held a halting conversation with the woman running a post office in esperanto lol

might learn Volapuk one day so I can curse the Esperanto-speaking masses

starting scottish gaelic classes on saturday, something I've been meaning to do for about a decade. procrastination is bad news.

Ashamed to say as a Scot that pretty much the only words I know in Gaelic are a song about porridge

i know next to nothing apart from the words that are similar/the same to the bit of Irish I learned on Duolingo.

I don't think it's incumbent of Scots to know any gaelic - as long as they don't have that tiresome anti-gaelic road sign attitude - I just have always been interested in threatened languages in general and it seems like it makes sense to learn the one that's closest to your home. I was inspired by walking past a classroom at the university I work at here in Vancouver and hearing young indigenous people learning the Squamish (Sḵwx̱wú7mesh) language

kinda neat

https://localingual.com/