[phoe-krk]

If that is the case, how would you describe the act of comparing English to languages which actually have consistent letter-phoneme pronunciation throughout the language (starting with e.g. the same number of available letters and phonemes and a 1:1 mapping between them)?

[rcoveson]

Spanish is "strictly phonetic"

English is "[very] loosely phonetic"

Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"

[lazyasciiart]

Funnily enough, Egyptian hieroglyphs were in fact phonetic: they just used recognizable pictures instead of abstract symbols to represent the sounds. It's possible they were sometimes used as ideograms too, but not the standard.

Chinese ideograms are not phonetic, because seeing the written character gives you no indication of what the sound of the spoken word is.

[josefx]

> Hieroglyphic systems are "non-phonetic"

Wasn't there at least one that just encoded letters almost identical to the alphabet we use?

[wl]

The Latin alphabet is ultimately derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

[wl]

Egyptian hieroglyphs are, for the most part, phonetic.

[TRiG_Ireland]

I would say that English has a greater level of orthographic depth than some other languages (but far less than, say, Thai).