SomehowGeekyPolyglot wrote:Some compare the non-phonetic spelling of Swedish to the non-phonetic spelling of French.
Is this a bit of a stretch (i.e. an exaggeration), or is that comparison rather straight-forward?
I'm gonna tackle this first since I'm tired and this is a much shorter thing to answer than your previous post.
I would say that it's much easier to learn how to deduce the pronunciation of a word from written Standard French than written Standard Swedish, but if you do it the other way around, it's a bit less difficult to guess the correct spelling from the pronunciation when dealing with Standard Swedish rather than Standard French.
Or at least that was the case until Standard Swedish started to be overtaken by spelling pronunciations, but it has honestly only added to the complexity. Some speakers have gone down this rabbit hole, others haven't, and even among the first group there are certain words that sound oddly pedantic if you pronounce them as written in normal speech.
Standard Swedish is also sort of based on the Västerås dialect of the 16th century, although it wasn't truly standardized until three centuries later and underwent a massive spelling reform in the early 20th century. The thing is, some traditions die hard and that spelling reform didn't care much for etymology... At the same time, the Modern French orthography was designed to be at least semi-etymological while balancing the pronunciation of the standard variety.
Long story short, it's not really an exaggeration or straight-forward, the situation is just different.