Smoothing over historical changes and dialectal variation.
Chinese does this to a much larger extent, of course, but that doesn't have an alphabet.
Note that it can be the subject of a bit of snark: There's 21 Pilots'
Hide you in my coat pocket, where I kept my rebel red
I felt I was invincible, you wrapped around my head
Now different lives I lead, my body lives on lead
The last two lines may read incorrect until said
The lead is terrible in flavor
But now you double as a paper maker
I despise you sometimes, I love to hate the fight
And you in my life is like
Sippin' on straight chlorine
As for stress differences, most languages with alphabets show the same difficulty unless they indicate stress--but then they often indicate stress redundantly or have built in rules. Russian has its share of alphabetic weirdness without stress and vowel changes marked; Belorusian spells all the sound changes, to my horror, while Ukrainian has few sound changes but spells them. Czech writes out sound changes in ways that confuse non-Czechs (or speakers of substandard Czech).
It gets worse when you start adding inflections. I watch native Spanish speakers untrained in Spanish writing screw up a test by saying "Ana hablo con Rafael" without a stress on the [ o ] in /ha'blo/.
= new reply since forum marked as read
