There's something you speakers of non-phonetic languages cannot fully grasp, I'm afraid!

We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.

And the converse was true as well! An Italian child is able to hear the surname of a new acquaintance, or the name of the village they are from, and write it down properly. In Italian, the question "How do you spell it?" does not make any sense! Again, this is something you can not do in English. Nor can you do it in French, because in the past centuries they had ink to spare and as such they started writing down useless letters that they do not pronounce.

> We Italians, when we were children, we were taught to read based on the written letters, and we were able to read any word. It was normal, during primary school, to pronounce a word correctly and then ask the teacher what it meant. This is something you can not do in English.

We're still taught very basic phonetic rules in English. Like how vowels have a long sound and a short sound, where "ee" is the long e sound, or "<vowel> <consonant> e" triggers the long sound for that vowel. But you're also taught that many words are exceptions (e.g. bear vs beard). And you learn there are patterns to the exceptions, like how "ea," if it doesn't sound like "ee," will sound like a short e, like in "head" or "breadth," and particularly in cases like "dream - dreamt" or "leap - leapt."

And if you do a lot of reading as a kid, you vaguely recognize in the back of your mind some words that seem to follow a different set of pronunciation rules not taught in school (e.g. rouge, mirage, entourage, entrée, matinée, parfait, buffet, memoir, soirée, patois), which you learn implicitly. I remember this as a kid, only later learning those were French.

And this lets you guess pretty well how you'd pronounce a word. Just with basic rules and a lot of input to learn from, you can guess how to pronounce pretty much anything with good accuracy, because there are rules, and even a logic to the exceptions, but the rules are overlapping, so it's more like a set of rules you choose from.

I'd liken it to machine learning. You can learn the rules without even being taught the rules, like I did in the case of French loan words. And there are probably rules we follow without even realizing it, just instinctively thinking it's the natural way to pronounce the word without knowing why.

I'm not saying it's as good as being as phonetic as Italian, but it's not like we just have to memorize the pronunciation and spelling of every word as though it were a structureless string of letters and a corresponding, unrelated sound.

Sorry for the long comment.

You can frequently do that in English too. Of course there are exceptions, but if anything it's typically because of words/names from other languages.

In my experience learning Spanish, their loan words are Spanish-ized, being made to be pronounced and spelled in a format that makes more sense in Spanish. Whereas in English, the pronunciation and spelling is usually taken more directly from the source, so you get a bunch of instances where a word's spelling doesn't really match its pronunciation.

Yes, but Italy had to centralize its language in order to accomplish this. 1000 Italian dialects were suppressed in a very heavyweight process. (And probably some people didn't like speaking Florentine, which became modern Italian.)

English is complicated because it's decentralized and there is no authority to regularize it. Which is a feature, not a bug.

You are wrong on several levels.

1 - Being fluent in the national language does not prevent people from maintaining their dialects in parallel.

2 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to political issues concerning dialects.

3 - Whether a language is phonetic has no relation to whether people like to use it.

4 - English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.

> English got decentralized starting with the Age of Sail, but the lack of correspondence between written and oral forms is systemic and older than that.

That's not really true -- there is and was a great deal of dialect diversity within England itself. It was widespread printing that allowed languages to be standardized at the scale of nation-states in the first place: the divergences that developed after the age of sail were reversing convergence that had only begun a couple of hundred years earlier.

And although versions of English from the south and east of England became the basis for modern standard English, other dialects persisted and sometimes spread around the world, so some of the differences between English dialects globally are due to disparate influences from different dialects originating within the British Isles.

being fluent in a language makes you less likely to be interested in a second when everyone speaks the first. This plays out over generations in killing the less common languages.

There is a still a lot more linguistic diversity in Italy than across the entire English speaking world.

e.g. Northern Italian languages are technically more closely related to Gallo-Romance languages from the other side of the Alps than to standard Italian.