And instead of making new letters to encompass all these sounds like a sensible language you just stick to basic Latin alphabet. And then you go and take a sensible letter like c and use it for sounds that already have letters for them, so you have one less.

I've always had this feeling that English (and French) squandered the great invention of alphabet. In Polish when you read a word you've never seen written before all it takes to say it properly is to say all the letters. All you need to know is alphabet. There is of course the matter of those double letters for phonemes that sometimes makes writing tricky. That's why sometimes someone asks how something is written but you don't say the whole word because it's obvious - just which one of those you use. This is why the movies about spelling bee contest sound really stupid after translation. In English you still need to memorize the whole words you could as well use ideograms - they take less space .



I had an impression those differences are the differences between different dialects of German. I sometimes only get



This is always the problem with translation. There was a great debate about the translation in Poland. Whether it should stay as close as possible to original or whether the deviations are allowed to better translate the feeling of original. I feel the second one are usually more successful. For example the Polish translation of Shrek was very successful and won awards because it often didn't translate the jokes directly but used the local references (the guy who did it is now hired for all the animated blockbusters because he knows how to make it funny for Poles).

One of Poland's best translators said that a translator has to be proficient in the language s/he translates from but must be a master of the language s/he translates to. This is probably why the best ones are poets and writers themselves.



I live now in a small town in US but luckily it is one built around big University so the library even has some books in Polish