Page "Alphabet" Paragraph 52

Some national languages like Finnish, Turkish, Serbo-Croatian ( Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian ) and Bulgarian have a very regular spelling system with a nearly one-to-one correspondence between letters and phonemes.

Strictly speaking, these national languages lack a word corresponding to the verb " to spell " ( meaning to split a word into its letters ), the closest match being a verb meaning to split a word into its syllables.

Similarly, the Italian verb corresponding to ' spell ( out )', compitare, is unknown to many Italians because the act of spelling itself is rarely needed: Italian spelling is highly phonemic.

In standard Spanish, it is possible to tell the pronunciation of a word from its spelling, but not vice versa ; this is because certain phonemes can be represented in more than one way, but a given letter is consistently pronounced.

French, with its silent letters and its heavy use of nasal vowels and elision, may seem to lack much correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, but its rules on pronunciation, though complex, are actually consistent and predictable with a fair degree of accuracy.