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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:17:36 +1100
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On 24/02/2025 7:29 am, Jeroen Belleman wrote:
> On 2/23/25 16:53, john larkin wrote:
>> On Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:42:25 +0100, albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl wrote:
>>
> [Snip!]
>>
>> We are so lucky to have a phoenetic character set. The early teletype
>> machines used a 5-bit Baudot code. And how did the Chinese manage to
>> use the telegraph?
> 
> Surely you are joking? The latin characters may have been phonetic
> in Latin, but they certainly aren't in English!

They weren't in Latin either. The critical point is that most written 
language uses a limited character set, which can be roughly matched up 
to the numbers of phonemes used in the spoken language.

UK English has 44 phonemes, American English has 40. The difference is 
in the diphthong count, and diphthongs are written as paired vowels.

The original phonetic alphabets may well have been phonemic  in the 
languages they were devised for, but that was a long time ago, and 
they've been adapted to represent many different languages since then.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney