this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2025
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This joke doesn't work for a normal language like spanish that has regular orthography, only languages like english or french that have broken spelling.
Klingonese is read the way it's spoken so it also wouldn't suffer from this problem.
que necesitas para entender que esto es algo falso? Un Casco?
Every letter in spanish is always pronounced with regular rules. You don't have to guess. Things like "pingüino" and the u having the diaresis makes it obvious that you have to pronounce the u in the word vs "quitar" where you don't pronounce the u.
Just because you can pronounce s and c the same and c and k the same doesn't make it bad orthography.
yes it does
Source : Turkish speaker.
EDIT : It's not just s c and k, q also gets involved. LL and Y and some variations having J and G enter into it, the constant H letters that don't get pronounced, etc etc.
No romance language can say anything about being "regular" from an orthographic sense.
Redundant can still be regular. It may not be easy to write, but it's easy to pronounce.
No it really doesn't. The joke is about not knowing how to pronounce a word when you read it. That isn't a problem in spanish because the rules are exact on how the words are pronounced. You can read any word in spanish no matter how complicated or new and as long as you know the spanish pronunciation rules and it isn't a foreign word you will know how to pronounce it. Foreign words, like foreign words in most languages, don't usually follow spanish orthography so those are a crap shoot.
Edit:
All those things are completely regular. They vary in pronunciation by dialect but every person with the same dialect will pronounce the word the same when they read it.
and is there any data loss that happens when pronounced words are written using these rules?
Why would there be? If you know how to read then you know how to write because again, spanish is completely regular in that aspect.
so you never have had to double check how to spell something in english or in spanish?
When did I say that ?
well, when you know how to pronounce a word, or are told a word through speech, you are familiar with it as a sound. being able to take characters and turn them into sounds is a transformative process that has rules and such, yes, but when they are encoded into sounds, trying to get them into text doesn't necesarily have the same amount of information. The distinction between c,s , k and q just turn into s and k sounds, which need to be sorted into c,s,k and q letters.
Quota and Cualquier have data loss. you need to choose which letter the K sound turns into, and the rules are gone at that point.
Otherwise you would never need a dictionary to spell things, because it would be orthographically perfect. If you knew how a word sounded, it would be a 1 to 1 mapping.
There are non-romance languages that work like this, turkish, germanic languages, and I assume, Indonesian and Malay. Ironically, despite being the source of romance languages none of them (maybe romanian?) are able to have orthographic consistency.
There is no spanish word quota. The word is cuota. Because in spanish there are no quo words (at least none I can think of off the top of my head). I know this because I know the spanish pronunciation rules.
Spanish is regular, dude. If you read a word you can pronounce it. If you can pronounce a word you can write it down. I'm not sure why you're having such a problem with it but this is my last comment in this chain.
Spanish is one of the best languages for having the spelling match the pronunciation, but it's not perfect. First of all, you can't spell something just based on hearing it because a /k/ sound can be a 'c' or a 'k', and a /s/ can be an 's' or a 'c'. It also has silent letters like 'h'. Going the other way, seeing the spelling of Mexico, Xalapa, Oaxaca, etc. would lead someone who didn't know to try to pronounce them with a /ks/ sound, but they're really pronounced as if they were spelled Mejico, Jalapa and Oajaca. Then, there are loan words like "psicologia" where the "p" is retained from the original language, but not pronounced in Spanish.
Yes you can. K isn't often used in spanish except for loan words. C and S aren't interchangeable in spelling they just sound the same when pronounced in certain phonemes. There are very specific rules about which letter is used in each phoneme. If you know spanish then you'd know this since they are some of the first lessons you learn about spelling.
Every other example you gave was a loan word.
Proving my point that you can't tell which one to use based on sound alone.
Yes, English has rules about which letter to use in which situation too.
Oh, and I forgot the biggest one for Spanish: the /k/ sound can be "qu" or "c".
Tell me you don’t speak spanish without saying it.
Tell me how confidently wrong you can be without saying it.
Eh, French isn't that bad, although there is some general fuckery.
If you didn't know how to pronounce something in English before the internet, you were basically shit out of luck.