Date: Tue, 12 Aug 97 15:26:39 EST From: Jacques Guy [...] Let me take Vietnamese (what I remember of it 30 years later). Most words are monosyllabic. Rather, they all are. Those which are not are compounds. A word can end only in a vowel, p, t, c, ch, m, n, ng, nh. Ng and nh are single sounds, written with two letters. The sound of "f" is always written "ph". D and b (which can occur only a the initial), are ... forgot the exact term, implosive? You close your mouth, lower your Adam's apple, (keeping your vocal chords tightly closed), so that the air pressure inside your mouth is less than outside, let go of lips (or tongue against teeth), and vocal chords. Air rushes in, making a sound like a cork popping. Now, suppose you were to write such sounds down with the lating alphabet, or Greek for that matter. Wouldn't you tend to use several letters to write it "descriptively" as it were? And that is not the end of it. Final ng and c (pronounced "k") become a very strange sound after o and u. Strange but common in some languages of the Pacific Islands, and which you also find in Africa. You articulate "k" and "p" together, and "m" and "ng" also together. Like in the name of the Voodoo divinity Legba. It's not Leg-ba, it's Le - gba, with g and b articulated at the same time (not one after the other). So, "learn", hoc, in Vietnamese, is pronounced ho(kp), and "uncle", o^ng, ow(mng). If Vietnamese were spelt in that manner, you would find those strange clusters, kp and mng (or pk and ngm) only after o and u. I am sure that Vietnamese is not alone in doing such strange things with sounds. Spelt phonetically, it would do equally strange things with entropy. Ecco!