The phoneme-grapheme correspondence in Spanish is better than English, but let's not pretend it is 1:1. Does it account for assimilation in rapid speech? Does it account for coarticulation of adjacent consonants? Does it account for regional/dialectal variation? Does it account for secondary articulation?
Even ignoring all of these, its clearly not bijective. For example:
C --> /k/, /θ/
Z --> /θ/ [0]
K --> /k/
Q --> /k/
G --> /ɡ/, /x/
J --> /x/
N --> /n/ (with several distinct secondary articulations), /m/ (rarely)
M --> /m/
R --> Can be tapped or trilled.
Etc. You can go here and see many bijection-failures here: [1]
I am being intentionally unfair to Spanish (which truly does have a much, much better phoneme-grapheme correspondence than English[2]), mostly to illustrate the point that there aren't really any languages which have a 1:1 mapping between spellings and pronunciations. Even if you decide to use the IPA to write your language, non-standard dialects end up needing to read words that don't match their pronunciations. What happens when inevitably the language undergoes change - do we update all of the books to use the 'new' spellings of words?
The ideal orthography shouldn't be completely 1:1, but it should be relatively shallow. From that perspective, Spanish orthography is a fairly attractive option.
[2] Look at how effective Spanish-speakers are at reading without "decoding" compared with Portuguese, which also has a good p-g correspondence. In particular, look how much faster the Spanish students are at pseudowords, on page 141: https://www.academia.edu/17872463/Differences_in_reading_acq...
Most of these examples are unambiguous in context. For example, C is always pronounced /k/ when preceding A, O, U, and always pronounced /s/ or /θ/ depending on the dialect when preceding E and I.
The function from written Spanish to spoken Spanish (provided we are talking about a single dialect) is surjective, but darn close to bijective, especially if we exclude words of recent foreign origin.
> Many people expect … to predict the spelling from the pronunciations-- not realizing that few orthographies meet this goal. It's far from true of Spanish, for instance, which is often held up as an example of a good orthography. I stopped fervently admiring Spanish orthography when I saw a sign in a Mexican bakery with about one spelling mistake every third word.
Well, rules can be simple and there can be few exceptions and people will still screw up, so I don't think that anecdote proves anything. In any case, my claim is that there is exactly one possible pronunciation per correctly spelled Spanish word. The opposite direction is not quite 1:1, but again, it's very close, and anyway it's far closer than English.
Even ignoring all of these, its clearly not bijective. For example:
C --> /k/, /θ/
Z --> /θ/ [0]
K --> /k/
Q --> /k/
G --> /ɡ/, /x/
J --> /x/
N --> /n/ (with several distinct secondary articulations), /m/ (rarely)
M --> /m/
R --> Can be tapped or trilled.
Etc. You can go here and see many bijection-failures here: [1]
I am being intentionally unfair to Spanish (which truly does have a much, much better phoneme-grapheme correspondence than English[2]), mostly to illustrate the point that there aren't really any languages which have a 1:1 mapping between spellings and pronunciations. Even if you decide to use the IPA to write your language, non-standard dialects end up needing to read words that don't match their pronunciations. What happens when inevitably the language undergoes change - do we update all of the books to use the 'new' spellings of words?
The ideal orthography shouldn't be completely 1:1, but it should be relatively shallow. From that perspective, Spanish orthography is a fairly attractive option.
[0] The non-1:1 situation with /θ/ gets much worse in most dialects of Spanish, where it is not distinguished from /s/. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Spanis...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_orthography#Alphabet_i...
[2] Look at how effective Spanish-speakers are at reading without "decoding" compared with Portuguese, which also has a good p-g correspondence. In particular, look how much faster the Spanish students are at pseudowords, on page 141: https://www.academia.edu/17872463/Differences_in_reading_acq...