"To spell" isn't used to clarify pronunciation though, it's only for clarifying how a particular word is composed using letters regardless of how it's pronounced. It's of course not commonly used in a medium where we communicate using text, like an internet forum, mainly only in speech.
Oh but I see, you mean that Russian is very consistently pronouncing letters independently like I talked in my first post in the thread:
Pokun wrote: Wed Jul 23, 2025 5:29 pm
Swedish is mostly pronouncing every letter independently, but there are many exceptions to that rule and several letters in the Latin alphabet would be redundant for Swedish.
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Then of course some letters are combined to form sounds not having their own dedicated letter such as "NG" the same nasal sound found in many other languages, "TJ" or "SH" which both are similar to English "SH" and the infamous Swedish "SJ" sound [ɧ] which is pretty unique.
I think Finish is even more consistent in pronouncing letters independently and Japanese is extremely consistent with the pronunciation of kana. The only exceptions are the particles "wa" and "e" which are written with the kana character for "ha" and "he" respectively as that is how they originally were pronounced.
Though some syllables do change when combined with others, such as the "NG" or "NK" which both turns the "N" into voiced velar nasal [ŋ] like in almost any other language.
So in Swedish you can often say "it spells like it sounds" when a word is consistently relying on the individual pronunciation of each letter without weird spelling rules or exceptions. I never heard that in English because spelling rules are so much more context-sensitive, which is because of a lack of spelling revolutions for getting rid of obsolete spelling constructions in the history of English.
Now, Japanese doesn't really have spelling rules, because when writing using kana (phonetic characters) everything is spelled as it sounds (except for those very few exceptions mentioned above), but to compensate for that it has kanji (Chinese characters). Knowing what kanji to use to write a particular word is causing at least as much headache and there are a lot more you need to memorize compared to more or less consistent spelling rules of written languages like that of English or French (both which has a lot of exceptions to their spelling rules). Kanji is both a blessing and a curse.
Russian phonology seems similarly easy and fun to learn to Japanese phonology which is extremely simple with relatively very few phonemes (a phoneme is a language's smallest phonetic building block that holds meaning, in Japanese that would be represented in writing by each kana).
The "Ё" (/jo/) letter in Russian just being a shorthand for "ЙО" (/j/ + /o/) seems similarly redundant to the "X" in languages like Swedish where it's a shorthand for "KS". You save one letter, but it's an inconsistency.
Same thing with "Е" (/je/), "Ю" (/ju/) and "Я" (/ja/). And BTW, "Ю" looks almost Korean!
"Ь" is described as a palatalizer of the previous consonant, meaning you put the tongue in the top-front of the mouth during articulation. I see know what you mean by hard and soft consonants (non-palatalized and palatalized respectively), and this just made Russian phonology much more complicated and effectively doubled the consonant sounds.
