Such systems are used, for example, in the modern languages Serbo-Croatian (arguably, an example of perfect phonemic orthography), Macedonian, Estonian, Finnish, Italian, Romanian, Spanish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish, and Esperanto.
Ancient languages with such almost perfectly phonemic writing systems include Avestic, Latin, Vedic, and Sanskrit (Devanāgarī—an abugida; see Vyakarana).
[5] For example, the digraph ee almost always represents /i/ (feed), but in many varieties of English the same sound can also be represented by a single e (be), the letter y (fifty), by i (graffiti) or the digraphs ie (field), ei (deceit), ea (feat), ey (key), eo (people), oe (amoeba), ae (aeon), is (debris), it (esprit), ui (mosquito) or these letter patterns: ee-e (cheese), ea-e (leave), i-e (ravine), e-e (grebe), ea-ue (league), ei-e (deceive), ie-e (believe), i-ue (antique), eip (receipt).
The spelling systems for some languages, such as Spanish or Italian, are relatively simple because they adhere closely to the ideal one-to-one correspondence between sounds and the letter patterns that represent them.
Proponents of phonics argue that this relationship needs to be taught explicitly and to be learned to automaticity, in order to facilitate the rapid word recognition upon which comprehension depends.
[9] Others, including advocates of whole-language who hold that reading should be taught holistically, assert that children can naturally intuit the relationship between letters and sounds.