Eli5: why do languages have spelling and pronunciation in common? Counting is the easiest example. Most words that are in a foreign language can be almost guessed in English which is very weird to me.
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Counting is easy because there is a really easy context for it.
If I say “one” and hold up a single finger, “two” and hold up a second, “three” and hold up a third, and so on… it’s really simple to see that I’m saying the words for numbers.
Ditto if I say “un, deux, trois” or “uno, dos, tres” or “ichi, ni, san” or “ein, zwei, drei” with the same hand gestures (apologies for any of those languages’ numbers whose spellings I butchered.)
And with the exception of Japanese, these were all languages that evolved on the same continent as one another – If you hop into Africa you get some stuff that you just can’t easily guess. Divorced from the context of the above examples, can you really guess that “saba, nane, tisa” means “one, two, three” in Swahili?
If you said yes, then *you just activated my trap card!* Because that actually means “seven, eight, nine” – “one, two, three” would be “moja, mbili, tatu”
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