Spelling is the structure of word-the letters that make up the composition of a word. In my opinion, I think spelling is more unchangeable, it is set in stone more or less. The letters that make up a particular word are often already determined and often not up for debate/don't differ from person to person. On the other hand, I understand sound to be far more nuanced. It is the primary mode of conveyance for every language and thus has the power to determine meaning. Although one might argue that there is, much like spelling, a "standard" or "correct" way to sound out a word, nonetheless even native speakers of the same language pronounce (sound out a word) in different ways. For instance, an inside joke that my roommates and I have is that one of our roommates pronounces "theater" as "thee-aye-ter" whereas the two of us pronounce it "thee-ter". We always call the former roommate pretentious for her pronunciation, and of course, she argues that that is the correct way to pronounce it. All this is to say that sound is flexible and not as static as spelling. On another note, another one of my roommates is a Brazilian native Portuguese speaker and at least once a week she reminds us about how "annoying" of a language English is because according to her "what is the point of spelling if it is not phonetic". In my language learning, Afaan Oromo has adopted the Latin alphabet and this has become both a positive and somewhat negative aspect in my language learning process. Positive because as a fluent English speaker, the pronunciation and "look" (for lack of better words) of the alphabet remain largely the same. However, negative because there are letters in the alphabet that are pronounced drastically different than how they are usually pronounced in English but look the same which is ought to confuse my mind when learning Afaan Oromo. For example, the letter "x" is pronounced "tsa".
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