Source Benchmark: Spanish 5-Vowel 1:1 Orthography vs French Historical Homophones
SPANISH TRANSPARENCY
98.2%
Silent Letters: 0.0% | Friction: Low
ITALIAN TRANSPARENCY
86.4%
Rhythmic geminates: strict 7-vowel rule
FRENCH TRANSPARENCY
42.5%
Silent Grapheme Ratio: 46.0%
ENGLISH TRANSPARENCY
36.8%
High etymological orthographic depth
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Linguistic Reading Friction Finding
Spanish exhibits near 1:1 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence with zero silent letters in the sample, whereas French requires collapsing 4 distinct historical spellings into identical /so/ and /fu/ phonemes with 6 silent codas.
Spanish Phonemic 1:1 MappingClick a token to isolate
ORTHOGRAPHY (WRITTEN GRAPHEMES)
PHONOLOGY (IPA PHONEMES)
Predictability: 1 letter maps cleanly to 1 sound. No silent coda consonants. Learners read aloud accurately on day one.
French Historical Multi-Grapheme CollisionsHover links to trace phonemes
ORTHOGRAPHY (WRITTEN GRAPHEMES)
PHONOLOGY (IPA PHONEMES)
SOURCE EVIDENCE: THE 4-WAY HOMOPHONE COLLISION
saut (jump)
•
sceau (seal)
•
seau (bucket)
➔
/so/
Three radically divergent spellings (s-a-u-t, s-c-e-a-u, s-e-a-u) collapse into identical 2-phoneme sound /so/.