[davidivadavid]

I'm not sure you're really comparing qualities of alphabets here.

Whether there is a good phonetic correspondence between phonemes and written syllables is independent of the alphabet.

If you read German or Italian, the correspondence is close to perfect. In English or in French, it's awful.

It's possible that there is a better phonetic correspondence between Hindi phonemes represented by Devanagari characters and French phonemes (in the case of "Poisson") than with English phonemes represented with roman characters (e.g. no satisfactory transcription for the French "on"), but that's unrelated to the alphabets.

If you were talking to people who could read French, you'd show them "Poisson", and they'd pronounce it perfectly. It just so happens that English speakers pronounce "on" a different way.

[guitarbill]

This is a good comment, but slightly complicated and took my a while to figure out what you were saying. I think your point is that he said "alphabet" but meant "language".

Basically, you can't really figure out English pronunciation from the way a word is written at all, because English isn't phonetic (e.g. Polish and polish, and many, many more).

For phonetic languages, the correlation between spelling and pronunciation is close to perfect (i.e. words are pronounced the way they are spelt [or spelled - wtf English]) - but only for the sounds in that language. Hence it may be possible to transliterate most English word to Devanagari. Most famously, e.g. English into Japanese doesn't work, even though Japanese itself is also phonetic but is e.g. missing the 'r' sound. The reverse is also true, unless you use extra punctuation to signify syllable boundaries or stress. E.g. Asakusa is 浅草 Asa-kusa and thus the stress changes and it's pronounced AsaKSA, not ASAkusa. I guess you could also transliterate it close enough with asaxa and people would probably get the stress right, further proof than English isn't the best tool for this.

(I think all the explanation of the previous paragraph is encompassed by "phonemes", which I had to google and still don't quite understand.)

The only "language" that can handle transliteration of any language is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which isn't a language because it doesn't have grammar or vocabulary or really anything except well-defined glyphs/symbols and the corresponding pronunciation.

[yummyfajitas]

From what little I've seen of French, the French person just knows how Poisson should be pronounced and does it.

This is even how most of english works. And there is actually a much better phonetic correspondence between Devanagari and English phonemes than between roman letters/letter pairs and English phonemes.

Consider "The" (as in the 3 letter word) vs "Theranos". The roman string "the" represents a different sound in both words. In Devanagari the two sounds are represented by "द" and "ये" (the letter is य means "tha" and the े changes the "a" to "e" as in "egg"), respectively, so you'd transliterate to द and येरनौस respectively. (A native speaker please correct me if I'm getting this wrong.)

It's possible that in German and Italian, the correspondence between letters and sounds is a lot better than in English. But from what I can tell, devanagari would make a more phonetic English alphabet than Roman letters do.

[davidivadavid]

English is notoriously awful when it comes to phoneme/grapheme correspondence (French is pretty close).

Essentially what you're saying is that Devanagari is superior because there's something closer to a phoneme/grapheme bijection. Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

But that's entirely orthogonal to the alphabet. In fact, you could perfectly map Devanagari (or IPA) to unambiguous roman syllables, so that the "Th" sound in "The" is written differently than the "Th" sound in "Theranos." It's just a matter of coding.

[yummyfajitas]

Which may or may not be true, even though it wouldn't surprise me (I don't know it at all, but I assume some English sounds aren't as trivial to transliterate).

From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes. I can't think of any that don't transliterate well, certainly not any common ones. I've been told by several native Hindi or Marathi speakers that they rarely run into a western phoneme that they can't already pronounce.

I agree that we could make a better roman-like alphabet. My only point is that Devanagari already seems to do a good job of this, and this may be why it seems a bit more complicated than Roman letters - it expresses things that Roman letters don't.

[vinay427]

> From what I can tell Hindi phonemes are a superset of English phonemes.

This isn't exactly correct. There are a variety of allophones that many Hindi-native speakers use in their English that aren't used by most native English speakers outside of India such as the retroflex t, trilled or flap r, and others. There are also others missing from Hindi entirely such as /ʒ/.

See phoneme tables for English and Hindi/Urdu (in IPA for instance) for more details.

I agree with your premise, in any case, that Devanagari describes far more than the English/Roman script.