Most alphabets are trivial. It is only latin that tends to be hard, especially french or english latin (german to lesser intent), because of loose correlation between letters and sounds.
I'd be careful about that generalization, since a fair number of scripts require you to be able to speak the language before you can really even transliterate properly.
In many semitic languages, they don't write the vowels, which is no problem if you're versed in the language, but makes it much harder as a learner. (Not to mention the multiple letter forms if you're at the start/middle/end of a word in Arabic, but that's easy to get used to.) I believe there are cases were you _can't_ identify a word without understanding the context of the sentence, but I can't cite proof of that off hand.
It's probably fair to say that most western alphabets, and virtually all contrived alphabets are trivial though.
> I believe there are cases were you _can't_ identify a word without understanding the context of the sentence, but I can't cite proof of that off hand.
How about `wind' in English? You need context to see how to pronounce it, and (related) which word it is.
A good example in Arabic would be قرن, which can mean 'horns' or 'century', and (as far as i know, not an expert) doesn't have any related origin.
I imagine if you were writing machine translation software you could pretty easily figure it out statistically from nearby words, but it adds another level of challenge to learning the script.
As an aside; if anyone has any interest in learning the _script_ used by Arabic/Persian, 'The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read & Write It' by Awde and Samano is awesome, and you can burn through it with all the exercises in a few dozen hours total. The book makes no attempt at teaching the language, but it's a nice leg-up before you hit the real books, which seem to all do an abbreviated job of teaching the script.
Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech. To me at least French is more difficult in thespeech-to-text direction (because of all those mute letters at the end of most words esp. verb forms that sound the same parler, parlez, parlais, parlaient, parlai, parlé) while English is more difficult in the text-to-speech
This is definitely true, though not such a big deal for basic understanding in practice, as the near-homophones usually have only subtly different meanings. I also don't often find myself having to transcribe stuff, and if I do, I can usually ask the speaker to check my spelling. On the other hand, reading something and immediately being able to pronounce it with some accuracy is very helpful, but attempting that with English words and especially names ("Cholmondeley" anyone?) often leads to unintentionally bizarre results.
(FWIW I speak English to a level that native speakers can't tell it's not my first language unless I trip over words I only know from reading - People ask me, "so where in England are you from" all the time. My French is just about passable - I can get by for basic everyday conversations as long as the other person doesn't speak too fast and they don't mind explaining/rephrasing the occasional sentence. I'd agree that perfecting your French is a lot harder than perfecting your English despite what I've said above.)
> Ideally there is a one-to-one mapping between text and speech.
Ideally, yes, in the sense that if you were to create an artificial language, you would strive for that (at the beginning at least).
In practice, the speech->text direction isn't nearly as important as text->speech when learning a second language. If you aren't immersed in the environment of the target language, you have to rely on texts in order to acquire vocabulary. And a messy script like English makes that very hard (although not as hard as Japanese). I've been learning English for years and can pass an English proficiency test with a perfect score, but I still make basic mistakes in pronunciation.
English is very difficult to learn to pronounce from the writing, or to write from the pronunciation because the different words stem from a large number of roots, each with their own pronunciation and conjugation peculiarities.
Writing in French is difficult to learn because there are many more verb conjugations and tenses, and nouns have often seemingly arbitrary sexes. The silent consonants are fairly consistent and systematic.
I'm sure it's cold comfort to someone learning it, but I've always liked having English history baked into the language.
Saxon, French, Latin and Greek words are all readily identifiable by their spelling, unlike say, German or Italian where most spellings have been naturalized.
French pronunciation might be okay, but it's definitely quite difficult the other way round because many words have some parts which just change how the rest is pronounced or have no sound at all.
Loanwords can be interesting, though. I remember asking the proper pronunciation of "poulet super grill" and getting two different answers concerning "grill."
(Two Ls make a Y sound in French. And Spanish, for that matter.)
Cyrillic is pretty straightforward, for example.