[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.