[enriquto]

> I disagree with spoken English being a sane language. I have yet to find a deterministic way of knowing how to pronounce a word I haven't heard before.

I do not understand what do you mean here. In spoken English, the only way to know about one word is by having heard it, so you know how it is pronounced. Illiterate people can speak perfectly correct English.

[pbhjpbhj]

But literate people can't speak all the words they know in an agreed way. It's like the whole "how do you pronounce Linux" thing.

Then you move, and local people (in UK, say) pronounce the word differently (eg bath, heard).

[mwyah]

That is exactly my point. If you've never heard a word you can never know how it's pronounced. That's not the case with Spanish where I can make up a word and everybody will pronounce it (almost) the same way.

[enriquto]

This is not exactly true. There are some fundamental differences between spanish dialects. For example, "yo", "calle", are pronounced in an unrecognizable way between Argentina and Spain. But I agree that the mapping from written to spoken spanish is mostly deterministic (like that for French, Italian, and other romance languages). The mapping from spoken to written, of course, is not deterministic at all, which you can verify by looking at how illiterate spanish-speakers try to write.

[JoeAltmaier]

Curiously, Polish is apparently spelled phonetically. Know the sound of the letters, you can read out a Polish newspaper and sound pretty much like a native speaker.

[HappySweeney]

Same with Hungarian (Magyar). Spelling is over by grade 2.