Hungarian is NOT even an 'Indo-European' lang.
Neither is Finnish or Estonian.

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On Thursday, September 10, 2020, 01:21:41 PM MST, Timothy Collinson - timothy.collinson at port.ac.uk (via tml list) <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:


On Thu, 10 Sep 2020, 19:13 Jim Catchpole - jlcatchpole at googlemail.com (via tml list), <xxxxxx@simplelists.com> wrote:
According to a friend of mine who speaks Welsh, it's actually very simple.

Because the Latin alphabet was used to transcribe the language phonetically, there is
one way to write down spoken language and one way to pronounce the written form.

The only problem for English speakers is that to cover all the phonetic components of
Welsh, letter combinations are used, not just single letters and they mostly represent
*different* sounds than in English. Hence, the pronounciation is not what an English
speaker expects.

Yes.  Thats what I've found.

But your friend is right and once I'd learned a few rules suddenly words in Wales made a lot more sense.  Eg knowing w = an 'oo' sound suddenly made the sign to the 'sw' (zoo) a doddle.  In that sense I believe it's fairly regular and thus 'easy'.

But like Czech.  Looks horrendous but everything is pronouced, and pretty regularly too.  So show me a Czech word and I can take a good stab at pronouncing it correctly.  Although if it's got an ř in it I'll whimper.

(Roll an 'r' - difficult for Brits in any case - and bung in a 'zh' just for good measure.)

Course, that doesn't help with the grammar.  Seven cases for starters.  Seven!  (Still, the Finns have a whole bunch more!)


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