Rayman Pirate-Community

I've only been to the Faroe Islands but I understand both languages are close enough.

I think they're pretty similar all right, but as I understand it Faroese spelling is about as screwed up as English, whereas Icelandic is a bit easier to read

Indeed, English seems to have the least logical pronunciation of them all:

Xavier Marjou uses an artificial neural network to rank 17 orthographies according to their level of transparency. Among the tested orthographies, Chinese and French orthographies, followed by English and Russian, are the most opaque regarding writing (i.e. phonemes to graphemes direction) and English, followed by Dutch, is the most opaque regarding reading (i.e. graphemes to phonemes direction); Esperanto, Arabic, Finnish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish are very shallow both to read and to write; Italian is shallow to read and very shallow to write, Breton, German, Portuguese and Spanish are shallow to read and to write.

I'm surprised that Spanish is rated less shallow than Italian. I guess because of the alternation between 〈ll〉 and 〈y〉, and between 〈c/z〉 and 〈s〉. But some dialects still need that so an analysis of those particular varieties might have yielded a "shallower" result…

But regarding French's opaqueness to write, yeah… I used to be surprised to find native speakers here making so many orthographical errors all the time (like mixing up infinitive -er with past participle -é, and such), but as I learned to speak the language more naturally I realized that there really is a considerable cognitive load in maintaining those distinctions, and it's quite easy to screw it up!

To think there are languages so transparent that people barely make any orthographical errors at all! Sounds otherworldly for a French speaker.

I'm wondering where Irish fits on the scale. The spelling looks really scary to anyone unfamiliar with the language, and I think people here generally struggle with it. But then its phonology is really complicated, with broad/slender and soft/hard consonants, and even though everybody learns it in school, most don't really learn to produce/distinguish all those sounds. For people who can (e.g. the dwindling population of native speakers), the spelling probably makes a lot of sense in most cases!

Actually, thinking again about Spanish, it does have etymological 〈h〉s, which are pretty opaque for writing. Maybe that's why it's less transparent than Italian!