> you can easily tell how they're pronounced by the way they're written, as opposed to English
I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on where in the UK one grew up. Which one is the spelling supposed to represent?
It seems to me that Dutch would be just as likely to have regional variations in pronunciation as any other language.
If Shakespeare had written phonetically he would be all but unreadable now.
Of course there are regional variations, but when speaking Standaardnederlands (standard Dutch) they are relatively small and consistent, nothing like Norwegian. With consistent meaning that the same syllable will almost always be pronounced the same way within that region. Not like English, where "bread" and "great" have completely different ways of pronouncing the "(r)ea" sound, despite being written the same way. Poems rhyme usually, wherever you go within the language region.
Local dialects have larger differences, but if they are written (relatively rare), it usually uses some form of phonetic writing, and those aren't standardized anyways.
That's certainly how we'd like to look at it, but it's only true by defining "standaardnederlands" fairly narrowly. Plenty of regional accents change phonemes, like 'ij' -> 'ie', hard 'g' to soft 'g', and some of those changes don't happen the same way across all words. Dutch is certainly not the big mess of inconsistency that English is, but it still has some inconsistencies.
For example, the word "lijk" is pronounced different from the suffix "-lijk". And then there's the difference between "een" and "een".
I see variations of this suggested for lots of languages, even my Norwegian teacher tried to convince me that Norwegian was spoken just as written. But this takes no account of regional differences in pronunciation. The words castle, boat, house, mouse, grass, for instance, all have different pronunciations depending on where in the UK one grew up. Which one is the spelling supposed to represent?
It seems to me that Dutch would be just as likely to have regional variations in pronunciation as any other language.
If Shakespeare had written phonetically he would be all but unreadable now.