8 ms·
It is indeed a problem for any language that reuses another language's symbols and attempts to jam them into place to fit the phonology of its own. When a lang
by imjustsaying 10y ago
It is indeed a problem for any language that reuses another language's symbols and attempts to jam them into place to fit the phonology of its own.
When a language adopts the symbols of others of a nearby language relative, the fit can sometimes turn out ok, but of course you'll still have some bumps.
But the poor suit is especially apparent when, for example, you try to throw the Latin alphabet into a tonal Sino-Tibetan language.
I'd much rather learn 400 new unique phonetic symbols (or one set of IPA) than have to learn 26 alternate pronunciations whose sounds will compete with the pronunciations that fire off in my brain due to knowing the German, French, Spanish, English and Hungarian varieties of pronunciations of that same letter.
- nrjdhsbsid 10y agoMost languages of the world are written primarily in Latin characters. The only language these characters were designed for is long dead. The reason for switching to Latin characters has nothing to do with phonetics and everything to do with making the language more practical to use with computers. Keyboards with 400 keys don't really work. Countless other languages with no relation to English have been using romanized alphabets for many years. Your argument that Chinese is any different doesn't make sense.
- Markoff 10y agomost languages maybe, not so sure about most of the population when already India and China have more than 37% of works population plus most of the Muslim world and you end up with fact you are just reinforcing your Western view of world, while by statistics our Latin writing systems are in minority but because of our wealth we feel superior to think it's the easiest and fastest way to write