>Wizards who study magic from an eclectic array of cultures

>>48952083
So they use IPA?

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>>48952385
Well, that shit DOES look like ancient runes

>>48952385

Or Hangul, depending on how precise "no ambiguity" is meant to be.

>>48952723
You cannot denote a German "ch" nor a Romanian "î" nor a whole lot of sounds you might encounter in "an eclectic array of cultures" in Hangul.

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>>48952083

>>48952608
>Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store: six spoons of fresh snow peas, five thick slabs of blue cheese and maybe a snack for her brother Bob. We also need a small plastic snake and a big toy frog for the kids. She can scoop these things into three red bags. And we will go meet her Wednesday at the train station.

Is that about right?

>>48952608
That's what Read Magic is used for.

My language is build around "read as written" rule, this doesn't even need any special characters, it's achieved by having tons of accents on regular letters.
First problem is that it doesn't work the other way around - we have many word pairs (sometimes triples or quadruples) that read the same but are written differently. This makes dictation exercises absolute nightmare.
Two, this completely breaks apart when we try to import any foreign words whatsoever or when people used to this as a native try to learn foreign language.

My language was made up some 200 years ago by bunch of upper class drunkards with too much free time on their hands who wanted to spite the government. As a base they used ghetto accent which had neither written form nor anything resembling consistent grammar mixed with various grammatical peculiarities of German and Russian.
Then they masterfully fabricated historical evidence that this abomination of a language has historical precedence a cultural value. By the time this ruse was called out, the thing already caught up with middle class.

The only thing that prevents this form being the single worst language in Eastern Europe is the fact that Magyar (Hungarian) exists.

TL;DR: bad idea

>>48954305
As a quarter-Hungarian, I take mild offense to that.
But I never managed to learn Hungarian, because it's such a horrible language. And because of my family.

What language would yours be?
One of the Slavic languages, from the sound of it.

>>48954305
Which language?

The only language I know other than English is German. It's not bad, and the majority of things sound as they are written. The problem is that sometimes the same word can mean different things. The language as a whole is very context-sensitive. For example, the word "sie" (pronounced "zee") can be used as a formal version of "you", the third-person feminine "she" (when written down, this one's easy to spot because it's capitalized), and third-person plural "they/them". And one more definition "it" due to the fact that in German, everything has one of three genders: male, female, or neuter. And this is the part where the language really starts to suck. Every word has a gender, as I said. This affects other words, such as articles. It's similar to Spanish, but with one important difference: In Spanish, most times looking at the last vowel will clue you into the gender of the word. In German, very few clues like this exist, so not only do you have to memorize the word, but also its gender, of which there are three, rather than the two in Spanish. Also note that there are MANY different articles. Because not only do they change in accordance with gender, but also how the word is being used: Subject, direct object, indirect object, etc. Apparently, German had tells to clue you into the gender of a word, but apparently they just sort of disappeared as the language grew and changed, which really sucks.

>>48955935
You capitalize the formal "you", not the equivalent of "she".

Being a German native speaker comes with a neat superpower. We can instinctively assign the "right", i.e. generally agreed upon, article and therefore gender to any loanwords, even if we've never heard them before.
This would suggest that there still is a certain system governing the gender of any given word, but nobody has managed to get it into a written form.

>>48955935
English used to have genders, too, but centuries of invasion, conquest, and reconquest caused it to be dropped. English is just a very complex pidgin.

>>48956309
>You capitalize the formal "you", not the equivalent of "she".
Damn. I know that, but added it later, obviously to the wrong sentence.

>>48956387
Oh yes. Started German, got simplified by French, and after adding some French words, decided to do the same with every other language it could find. That's not getting into the Great Vowel Shift either, which is why English has such fucked pronunciation rules and why it seems so alien to all the other European languages.

You can see some more German influence if you go back a few hundred years. The Declaration is written with capital nouns, as is done in German.

>>48952723
Lots of scripts are unambiguously phonetic, Anon. Barring the irregularities with particles like は, を, and へ, Japanese kana is unambiguously phonetic. Just because a script is phonetic doesn't mean it's comprehensively phonetic, though. And if you were a wizard, you'd want to know EXACTLY what you were reading and how to pronounce it.

>>48955935
>pronouncing 'sie' as 'zee'
no
it's pronounced 'sea'

>>48959835
Actually, it's /ziː/, or /zə/ colloquially.

>>48959835
I've never heard it pronounced that way. Where'd you hear that? Might be a regional dialect.

>>48952385
IPA isn't the only comprehensive phonetic alphabet fampai. There's also visible speech, and also Romic. IPA is just the modern standard.

>>48961119
I think it might be some Austrian dialect.
The only time I can remember hearing "sie" with an unvoiced 's' is in Lissi und der wilde Kaiser.

>>48962005
I never said it was.

>>48961119
>>48965164
>>48960447
Frankfurt, Berlin, Bremen, Nüremberg and the different schools in Denmark where I learned German.

Looking it up it appears that you're not wrong that this is what is corroborated by several independent sources, so maybe I've just been mishearing it all the time since it's a very soft 'z' and when spoken in an actual sentence, it sounds to my non-native ears as just a regular 's'.

I will admit that the online sources seem to back you guys up, but I literally have never, ever heard it pronounced with an audible 'z', not in Germany, not in Switzerland, not in Denmark.

>>48965229
Nürnberg*
I accidentally caught the Anglotardation, mea culpa

>>48965229
Pretty sure you've been mishearing it, because "sie" is spoken with a very audibly voiced 's' down here in Bavaria. Or at least anywhere in Bavaria I've been to, including Nürnberg.

>>48965286
Yes, an audibly voiced 's', not an audibly voiced 'z' is how I hear it.

>>48965229
Fair enough.

I'm not a native German speaker either, I'm just good at picking up differences in pronunciation. In English phonetic spelling, I would write the German "S/sie" as "szee". But then again, English phonetic spelling only really works perfectly for English.

You can do that in Latin with a few added characters, English pronunciation/spelling discrepancy is just insane.

>>48966552
Yes, that is because there is no such thing as a voiced 'z' in German.

>>48967463
Are you trying to point out that 'z' is pronounced 'ts'? Because we're obviously using the IPA 'z', not the German 'z', and what was being argued was whether 'sie' is pronounced with an IPA 'z'

>>48967671
No. If we're talking about voiced and unvoiced 's', we're about the German consonant, not the IPA symbol.
Because an unvoiced German 's' is an IPA 's', but a voiced German 's' is an IPA 'z'.
And following from that, there is no such thing as a voiced 'z', because the German 'z' is always an IPA 'ts' and it makes no sense to classify IPA symbols with "voiced" and "unvoiced".

>>48967894
That's completely wrong though.
>I literally have never, ever heard it pronounced with an audible 'z'
This is stating that the audible 'z', i.e. the phonetic 'z' is not present to the listener.
Then was the response:
> "sie" is spoken with a very audibly voiced 's'
An audible 's' would of course be an 's' you can hear, i.e. a phonetic 's'.

>Yes, an audibly voiced 's', not an audibly voiced 'z' is how I hear it.
Seeing as 's' and 'z' are both sounds, this is a statement that one is present and the other is not

>Yes, that is because there is no such thing as a voiced 'z' in German.
A voiced 'z' that is not present in German can under no circumstance whatsoever mean the written 'z'. If it were the written 'z' being voiced, then that does exist in German: it's 'ts'.

Saying that describing letters' audibility does not make sense is wrong. It's redundant in a sense, but it is for the purpose of clarity. There is no sound of 'z' in 'sie'. This could alternatively be written as "I don't hear a 'z' in 'sie', I hear a 'z'" and would be functionally identical in meaning, and so the statement is not nonsensical, just phrased in a perhaps awkward way

>>48968111
"audibly" is not the same word as "audible", nor is "voiced" the same word as "spoken".
"audibly" is an adverb and describes "voiced", not 's'.
So "audibly voiced 's'" means that you can hear that the 's' is voiced, i.e. a written 's' that is read as a phonetic 'z'.

>If it were the written 'z' being voiced, then that does exist in German: it's 'ts'.
No, it does not. If the written 'z' were voiced, it would be read as the phonetic 'dz', which the German letter 'z' never is.

I never said that describing letters' audibility does not make sense.
The sentence I was referring to is:
>Yes, an audibly voiced 's', not an audibly voiced 'z' is how I hear it.
The phrase "voiced 's'" must refer to the German letter 's', as the IPA symbol 's', by definition, is an unvoiced consonant.
The phrase "voiced 'z'" is found in the same sentence and can therefore be assumed to be used in the same function as "voiced 's'", i.e. referring to the German letter. However, since the German letter 'z' is invariably read as the phonetic 'ts', which is, by definition, unvoiced, this phrase, in the given context, does not make sense.