As a Welsh speaker, my English colleagues are sometimes apoplectic about
Welsh orthography... we use joint roman characeters to represent distinct
consonants like "dd", "ff" and "ll" ( not unlike Spanish).
My worst case scenario in written vs spoken forms was (is?) Somali. When I
worked for the Overseas Service of the BBC, I sometimes worked on the news
in Somali.
I was handed the script in English, and the newsreader would read the
news in Somali from the same English paper I had in front of me.
Apparently there was no written form in Somali, so the standard written
form was English! A deeply interesting phenomenum
Should I believe this story? I can not help think that Somali like Swahili
is close to Arabic and would have had an Arabic form.