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I can answer your question for Devanagari: - You normally think of clusters as single "letters". The word for them in Marathi is "joined letter". This notion o
by Manishearth 9y ago
I can answer your question for Devanagari:
- You normally think of clusters as single "letters". The word for them in Marathi is "joined letter". This notion of "letter" may not be totally in line with what English speakers would expect.
- You still think of clusters as having component parts that make it up. However, क्ष/ज्ञ and sometimes त्र are thought of as their own "fundamental" consonants even though they're clusters. I think folks think of things like क्र as being both -- a letter of its own, that is built up from component letters.
- Most of the clusters in Devanagari are predictable. So for any given pair you usually know how to make a "half form" for the first one and join it on, or you know how to stack them. Usually whilst reading it's obvious because you see the components; and whilst writing it's usually fine to try what makes sense.
- For unpredictable clusters, you just eventually get used to them. No different from learning that some words are spelled weirdly in English, really. Though I very much dislike ह्म , ह्य, and द्य since they're kinda confusing.
I think Bengali has a lot more unpredictable conjuncts; I stumbled across this a lot when I tried to learn the script a year ago. I suspect folks just get used to those.
- bhasi 9y agoI'm no linguist, but Malayalam has a more predictable stacking rule than Devanagari, more so in the modern alphabet/sandhi scheme than the old. For instance, one can barely tell apart ह्म and ह्य, but their Malayalam equivalents are pretty distinct: ഹ്മ (old scheme) and ഹ്മ (modern scheme) for the first, and ഹ്യ for the second.
- Someone1234 9y agoAs someone who can read both Devanagari and English/Latin script, I'm just curious, when you read Devanagari does the text size need to be larger for good comprehension? There seems more subtlety with the word structure, like tiny little flicks which seem to have significant meaning. While Latin-like script has characters like the comma/full-stop, and modifiers like the dot on the i, these are far rarer than Devanagari's modifiers from what I have seen. Another related question is, because Devanagari's information density seems higher, does that mean shorter text for the equivalent information? PS - Sorry if anything I said was offensive, that wasn't my intent. I am just an ignorant idiot wanting to learn someone's experience with a different language script, nothing more.
- umanwizard 9y agoHow could anyone possibly consider this offensive?
- Manishearth 9y agoNot really, I can read at normal text sizes. But it is somewhat annoying (much like how tiny English can be readable but annoying to read) and used to have my default font size bumped up by one in my browser. I currently have it bumped up quite a bit for Chinese because I really have trouble with the "tiny little flicks" problem in Chinese. The consonants of Devanagari are easy to tell apart; they are pretty different. In most cases the "similar" ones are basically with an extra line (प/ष, ब/व) or with a little loop (य/थ, ट/ढ) . (The line/loop has no semantic meaning, these letters are just random letters that look similar) . The only super annoying one is घ vs ध -- the thing up top is a loop in the second one, but depending on the font/handwriting can be rather unclear. The vowels are also easy to tell apart. There are 12 main ones, and they're made up from some really basic components which are quite distinguishable. So you can easily distinguish consonant+vowel combos. Consonant clusters can get tricky, like I said there are a bunch of ambiguous ones. Fortunately you end up realizing which is which and then it's nbd. But like, द्म and ह्म can be infuriatingly similar and you just get it from context. Bear in mind, at one stage you start sight-reading words, so the actual details of the word matter less. > Another related question is, because Devanagari's information density seems higher, does that mean shorter text for the equivalent information? Visually? Yeah. Words can be really small. But it ends up roughly being the same number of code points (and probably more bytes in UTF-8).
- Someone1234 9y agoThat was really interesting. Thank you for the insight!
- imron 9y ago> I currently have it bumped up quite a bit for Chinese It really annoys me when websites/apps keep the same font size for Chinese that they use for English. 8pt Chinese is awful to read.