No practical difference unless you split hairs.#38
I presume you mean "a language with a phonetic writing system," since the term "phonetic language" doesn't really mean anything.
There is nothing like a phonetic alphabet. In fact as enunciated by Gangesh, a language can exist without a script, but a script needs a language to mean anything.Phonetic writing systems vary tremendously in their perfection. Both English and French use a phonetic alphabet (very nearly the same one) but both are ridiculed for the poor consistency between spelling and pronunciation that makes learning the written version of either language a daunting task, even for someone fluent orally.
So, Roman script as linked to English is far from phenetic system. It is inconsistent. For example the same sound is produced by c and k. So, kauphy is as good a brew as coffee. But not so in Devanagri. There is one and one brew called कौफी. Unlike English, spellings are 100% consistent, provided you prounce correctly.
Czech is often praised for having one of the best phonetic systems, but why does the letter C exist when its sound could be spelled just as accurately as TS? Why are there at least four different ways to transcribe the semivowel Y, one of which is a diacritical mark over a vowel, another to the right of a consonant?
And why chemistry, but char is written as kar!! c, k, ch, ck, qu etc prounce alike.
Of course, you don't about Indian languages either.I'm not familiar with the abugidas used for many of the languages of India. But I would suggest that the sheer number of symbols (each "letter" represents a consonant-vowel combination if I'm not oversimplifying) is a handicap to learning.
Symbols used in Devanagri are 62. Consonants are 52, Roman has 26 symbols, vowels and consonants included. So how can Roman be used to write Sanskrit, without complicated dicritics? Like it or not, you MUST know all the symbols if you really hope to read Sanskrit from original texts.
Pitman created a phonetic system for his short hand system. ith and thee are different sounding.
Of course, Gangesh is correct. No script exists without a linkage to a language.It's impossible in a truly phonetic alphabet (i.e., each symbol represents only one phoneme) for each letter's name to define its meaning, because the symbols representing consonants have to have a gratuitous vowel added before the name is pronounceable. I suppose we could name a letter F or N, by simply dragging an FFFF or NNNN sound out rudely, but we can't do that with B or K. So we name them EF, EN, BEE and KAY, names which do not precisely tell us how they're pronounced.