[Urbane Guerrilla]

The two most phonetically written languages I have any experience of are Turkish, whose Roman alphabet was designed a mere century ago with regularity in mind -- and was a lot easier to learn and use for Turkish than Arabic script had been -- and Russian, which is almost purely phonetic. Spanish is right up there with them, even unto diacriticals to cue the reader if the stress on a word is for some reason in a funny place -- as well as keeping "the" separate from "he." French's system is looser, with so many silent letters around you have to really stay alert. Welsh spelling, rather like French, is described as less phonetic than phonemic -- you get a small number of variations in writing a sound down, viz., /f/ gets written Ff or Ph, depending.