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While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, whi

by cletus 7y ago

While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%). Consider in comparison SE Asian languages (eg Mandarin) that are _incredibly_ difficult to learn to read let alone write. I learned some German years ago and the one thing I appreciated was that it is phonetic. You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations.

gridlockd 7y ago
> While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%). Claims about the success of the Ataturk's reforms are probably about as credible as Soviet claims about worker productivity. Other sources claim a literacy rate of 68% in 1975: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016&start=1970 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016... Of course it can't be denied that school reforms had a massive impact on literacy, but it's not so clear how previously illiterate adults fared when learning to read and write for the first time.
CydeWeys 7y ago
> You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations. If they're already familiar with the Latin alphabet, anyway (which admittedly is a good chunk of the world at this point; even if you're, say, Japanese or Korean, you know the Latin script because it's used pervasively). If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit.
- sumedh 7y ago
  > If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit. It would still be easier than learning 1000+ characters in Mandarin.
Mvandenbergh 7y ago
At the same time though, the new Turkish state pushed universal literacy as a policy goal and invested enormously in it in a way that the Ottoman empire didn't at all. It's very difficult to extract from data of that period (which may also have been manipulated for political purposes) how much of that change as due to the script vs other factors. While I don't think it's controversial that phonetically written languages are easier to learn at first, nor that the Turkish Ottoman alphabet based on Arabic was not ideal for writing Turkish, I don't think it was uniquely difficult. I think it's about as difficult as writing English correctly using our alphabet, which is to say it is harder than Spanish but much easier than writing Chinese languages. Note that literacy rates in Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman empire - most of it - where the script and the language matched was also low. You can make the argument that Arabic diglossia was responsible for some of that but still)

by cletus 7y ago

gridlockd 7y ago

> While I agree with you about plasticity there's a pretty good counterexample to your claim about literacy: in 1929 Turkey switched from the Arabic alphabet, which never quite fit the Turkish language phonetically, to a Roman script variant that they still use today. This was largely credited to the massive increase in literacy over the next decade (random searches suggest it went from 5-10% to 80%). Claims about the success of the Ataturk's reforms are probably about as credible as Soviet claims about worker productivity. Other sources claim a literacy rate of 68% in 1975: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016&start=1970 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SE.ADT.LITR.ZS?end=2016... Of course it can't be denied that school reforms had a massive impact on literacy, but it's not so clear how previously illiterate adults fared when learning to read and write for the first time.

CydeWeys 7y ago

> You can probably teach someone to pronounce German (badly) in a day or two. Likewise if you hear a word you can probably spell it with very minor variations. If they're already familiar with the Latin alphabet, anyway (which admittedly is a good chunk of the world at this point; even if you're, say, Japanese or Korean, you know the Latin script because it's used pervasively). If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit.

sumedh 7y ago
> If not, then just learning the characters is gonna take a bit. It would still be easier than learning 1000+ characters in Mandarin.

Mvandenbergh 7y ago

At the same time though, the new Turkish state pushed universal literacy as a policy goal and invested enormously in it in a way that the Ottoman empire didn't at all. It's very difficult to extract from data of that period (which may also have been manipulated for political purposes) how much of that change as due to the script vs other factors. While I don't think it's controversial that phonetically written languages are easier to learn at first, nor that the Turkish Ottoman alphabet based on Arabic was not ideal for writing Turkish, I don't think it was uniquely difficult. I think it's about as difficult as writing English correctly using our alphabet, which is to say it is harder than Spanish but much easier than writing Chinese languages. Note that literacy rates in Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman empire - most of it - where the script and the language matched was also low. You can make the argument that Arabic diglossia was responsible for some of that but still)