6 ms·

"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many soun

"the Fulbhe people never developed a script for their language, instead using Arabic and sometimes Latin characters to write in their native tongue... Many sounds in Fulfulde can’t be represented by either alphabet". That's not really how alphabets work. English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had. It sounds like what Fulfulde was lacking was a standard orthography, not an alphabet of its own.

pmontra 7y ago
Koreans used the Chinese characters, then one of their kings decided they should use their own writing system and commissioned one. That's how the Hangul alphabet was born in 15th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul This is very similar to what happened to this African language. A people using someone else alphabet, developed their own. Old English people could have done the same for their language. They decided not to, maybe because it fit English well enough. I also think about the Polish language. Its alphabet is based on the Latin one but letters are modified with signs that multiply the available characters and make them fit the language. Even Italian (geographically very close to Latin) has more sounds than characters and compounds multiple characters to express some sounds. Example: sc, for the English sh.
- gumby 7y ago
  check out the shapes of the hangul characters: they attempted to make the letterforms suggest the shape your mouth makes when you make the sound.
klyrs 7y ago
For what it's worth, English learners are tortured by the lack of stanard orthography. Imagine the situation if English was rendered in Cyrillic half the time, with equally abysmal orthography. You want to fix this situation. Do you keep one alphabet or both, and impose new phonetics; or do you avoid the hodge-podge and propose a new alphabet. I can appreciate the clean design.
- sametmax 7y ago
  Wouldn't the International Phonetic Alphabet be a good starting point ?
  - klyrs 7y ago
    Sure, if you're bikeshedding with an outsider's perspective, that could totally work
  - wbl 7y ago
    Absolutely not. Slavish adherence to phonetics means you need to standardize a dialect for your orthography, include extraneous changes (like shifts in vowels caused by adjacent words) and isn't done by any writing system I know of.
    - gumby 7y ago
      Sure it is, just look at the various phases of German spelling reform. The most recent one was implemented via international treaty.
      - taejo 7y ago
        German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.
  - toast0 7y ago
    IPA is useful for expressing phonetics, but the phonetics for a given word in English shift over time and space. Written language is useful for expression that is durable in time and space. If you read English texts from the wrong side of the pond, there's some spelling divergence, and if you read old enough texts, there's more. And of course we have new words, and new uses of old words, such as literally which now means figuratively. But if you read old books of rhymes, you can see that spoken English has diverged a lot more -- many clever rhymes of the past no longer sound rhyming.
mrighele 7y ago
But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language, so inventing an alphabet may have its merits. Keep in mind that even among the languages using Roman alphabet there are variations, so that the english alphabet is different from the french alphabet which is different from the italian alphabet
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  > But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language why do you say that? The relationship between a letter[0] and the sound is entirely arbitrary - I could write 'A' and pronounce it as 'T'. Why would one set of charcters be less fit than another? [0] or symbol, more broadly eg. in welsh 'dd' and 'ff' are letters, even though 'd' and 'f' also exist in the alphabet. And in english we have sounds not represented by a single letter eg. 'th' sound
  - mrighele 7y ago
    While in theory the relationship is arbitrary (in the end we just need the letter "0" and the letter "1") I think that there are practical reasons, such a conciseness (I don't want most of my sounds to use two or more letters, especially those that are used a lot), similarity between similar sounds, and similarity with other languages using the "same" alphabet (I hope nobody will every use the letter "a" to sound as a "t").
    - yorwba 7y ago
      "A" is derived from the Phoenician consonant ʾālep, which is the glottal stop represented by ʾ in that transliteration of the letter's name. The Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the vowel sound instead, probably because there was no glottal stop in Greek. So on a very long timescale, it's possible that "a" will end up being pronounced as "t".
      - tempguy9999 7y ago
        Upvoted for that nugget, but incidentally I noticed your name before and wondered if it was a ref to Yoruba the language?
stereo 7y ago
Look at the Vietnamese alphabet, which is basically hacked together from Portuguese, colonialism, a massive amount of diacritics and bits of French. The most common surname in Vietnam, for example, is Nguyễn, with both a circumflex and a tilde on the e. One alphabet isn't always the best at expressing a particular language.
forinti 7y ago
My native language is Portuguese. When I learnt the Cyrillic alphabet I realised it would be perfect to have letters for diphthongs in Portuguese. It would simplify and obviate many diacritics. Take "simpatia" and "ânsia". In the first case, the last "ia" is not a diphthong. In the second it is and you need the diacritic over the a to make it the tonic syllable (Spanish is more clever in that the general case is that the "ia" ending is taken to be a diphthong unless you put an acute sign over the i - ía). But, when diving further into Russian, I soon found out that they do weird things like pronouncing a G as a V (его - his). So, my conclusion is that even if you have the perfect alphabet, it will soon become obsolete.
- jhbadger 7y ago
  In a way, we already have the "perfect alphabet" -- the International Phonetic Alphabet[1] that linguists use to describe the sounds of all languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
  - tempguy9999 7y ago
    Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes. But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english! Heavy glaswegian can be murder for me. Heavy geordie (newcastle) is a struggle. And that's even when they are using the same words (ignoring differences in vocabulary and idiom that have developed, because that isn't an alphabet issue).
    - throwaway9281 7y ago
      Words that have the same spelling in the English alphabet but different intonations due to accents or dialects would have different spellings in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The point of the International Phonetic Alphabet is that you can stumble across any new word you haven't heard before, and be able to pronounce it correctly. If you master the International Phonetic Alphabet and, say, stumble across a Mandarin or Russian word spelled using that alphabet, you'll be able to pronounce it. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique "key" (letter) for every sound that the mouth/tongue/throat can produce basically. (Or at least it tried to, it seems extensions to the IPA have been released to account for other "qualities of speech", like tooth gnashing, lisping, sounds make with a left cleft lip and cleft palate... I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... right now).
rightbyte 7y ago
"English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had." Forgot about the Futhark? English is written with the latin alphabet because the bibles were written in latin.
- murkle 7y ago
  Bibles were written in Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_languages
  - rightbyte 7y ago
    Ye, I meant the copies the English priests had was literally written, as copied by hand, in Latin. Not the originals.
aasasd 7y ago
> That's not really how alphabets work Might want to have a look at the story of Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets before speaking so categorically.

pmontra 7y ago

Koreans used the Chinese characters, then one of their kings decided they should use their own writing system and commissioned one. That's how the Hangul alphabet was born in 15th century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul This is very similar to what happened to this African language. A people using someone else alphabet, developed their own. Old English people could have done the same for their language. They decided not to, maybe because it fit English well enough. I also think about the Polish language. Its alphabet is based on the Latin one but letters are modified with signs that multiply the available characters and make them fit the language. Even Italian (geographically very close to Latin) has more sounds than characters and compounds multiple characters to express some sounds. Example: sc, for the English sh.

gumby 7y ago
check out the shapes of the hangul characters: they attempted to make the letterforms suggest the shape your mouth makes when you make the sound.

klyrs 7y ago

For what it's worth, English learners are tortured by the lack of stanard orthography. Imagine the situation if English was rendered in Cyrillic half the time, with equally abysmal orthography. You want to fix this situation. Do you keep one alphabet or both, and impose new phonetics; or do you avoid the hodge-podge and propose a new alphabet. I can appreciate the clean design.

sametmax 7y ago
Wouldn't the International Phonetic Alphabet be a good starting point ?
- klyrs 7y ago
  Sure, if you're bikeshedding with an outsider's perspective, that could totally work
- wbl 7y ago
  Absolutely not. Slavish adherence to phonetics means you need to standardize a dialect for your orthography, include extraneous changes (like shifts in vowels caused by adjacent words) and isn't done by any writing system I know of.
  - gumby 7y ago
    Sure it is, just look at the various phases of German spelling reform. The most recent one was implemented via international treaty.
    - taejo 7y ago
      German is a good example. The pronunciation of Standard German is different in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. If we wrote German in IPA, it would be different in all three countries. Even within Germany, somebody from Munich would either write something very different from somebody in Berlin, or they would have to imagine how a Hannoverian would pronounce the word, in order to write the standard spelling. Because German orthography is standardized and is not a phonetic alphabet, people in Switzerland can say /r/ and people in the Rhineland can say /ʁ/ but they both write <r> and thus spell words the same way.
- toast0 7y ago
  IPA is useful for expressing phonetics, but the phonetics for a given word in English shift over time and space. Written language is useful for expression that is durable in time and space. If you read English texts from the wrong side of the pond, there's some spelling divergence, and if you read old enough texts, there's more. And of course we have new words, and new uses of old words, such as literally which now means figuratively. But if you read old books of rhymes, you can see that spoken English has diverged a lot more -- many clever rhymes of the past no longer sound rhyming.

mrighele 7y ago

But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language, so inventing an alphabet may have its merits. Keep in mind that even among the languages using Roman alphabet there are variations, so that the english alphabet is different from the french alphabet which is different from the italian alphabet

tempguy9999 7y ago
> But not all alphabets are equally good for a specific language why do you say that? The relationship between a letter[0] and the sound is entirely arbitrary - I could write 'A' and pronounce it as 'T'. Why would one set of charcters be less fit than another? [0] or symbol, more broadly eg. in welsh 'dd' and 'ff' are letters, even though 'd' and 'f' also exist in the alphabet. And in english we have sounds not represented by a single letter eg. 'th' sound
- mrighele 7y ago
  While in theory the relationship is arbitrary (in the end we just need the letter "0" and the letter "1") I think that there are practical reasons, such a conciseness (I don't want most of my sounds to use two or more letters, especially those that are used a lot), similarity between similar sounds, and similarity with other languages using the "same" alphabet (I hope nobody will every use the letter "a" to sound as a "t").
  - yorwba 7y ago
    "A" is derived from the Phoenician consonant ʾālep, which is the glottal stop represented by ʾ in that transliteration of the letter's name. The Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the vowel sound instead, probably because there was no glottal stop in Greek. So on a very long timescale, it's possible that "a" will end up being pronounced as "t".
    - tempguy9999 7y ago
      Upvoted for that nugget, but incidentally I noticed your name before and wondered if it was a ref to Yoruba the language?

stereo 7y ago

Look at the Vietnamese alphabet, which is basically hacked together from Portuguese, colonialism, a massive amount of diacritics and bits of French. The most common surname in Vietnam, for example, is Nguyễn, with both a circumflex and a tilde on the e. One alphabet isn't always the best at expressing a particular language.

forinti 7y ago

My native language is Portuguese. When I learnt the Cyrillic alphabet I realised it would be perfect to have letters for diphthongs in Portuguese. It would simplify and obviate many diacritics. Take "simpatia" and "ânsia". In the first case, the last "ia" is not a diphthong. In the second it is and you need the diacritic over the a to make it the tonic syllable (Spanish is more clever in that the general case is that the "ia" ending is taken to be a diphthong unless you put an acute sign over the i - ía). But, when diving further into Russian, I soon found out that they do weird things like pronouncing a G as a V (его - his). So, my conclusion is that even if you have the perfect alphabet, it will soon become obsolete.

jhbadger 7y ago
In a way, we already have the "perfect alphabet" -- the International Phonetic Alphabet[1] that linguists use to describe the sounds of all languages. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe...
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  Well, I don't know but for the sake of argument, yes. But how does that account for differences in accent and dialect? Some areas of the UK can be close to unintelligible for me without a few hours of acclimatisation and they are all using english! Heavy glaswegian can be murder for me. Heavy geordie (newcastle) is a struggle. And that's even when they are using the same words (ignoring differences in vocabulary and idiom that have developed, because that isn't an alphabet issue).
  - throwaway9281 7y ago
    Words that have the same spelling in the English alphabet but different intonations due to accents or dialects would have different spellings in the International Phonetic Alphabet. The point of the International Phonetic Alphabet is that you can stumble across any new word you haven't heard before, and be able to pronounce it correctly. If you master the International Phonetic Alphabet and, say, stumble across a Mandarin or Russian word spelled using that alphabet, you'll be able to pronounce it. The International Phonetic Alphabet has a unique "key" (letter) for every sound that the mouth/tongue/throat can produce basically. (Or at least it tried to, it seems extensions to the IPA have been released to account for other "qualities of speech", like tooth gnashing, lisping, sounds make with a left cleft lip and cleft palate... I'm quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... right now).

rightbyte 7y ago

"English is written in the Roman alphabet not because its sounds are particularly well suited to that alphabet, but because it's the alphabet we had." Forgot about the Futhark? English is written with the latin alphabet because the bibles were written in latin.

murkle 7y ago
Bibles were written in Hebrew (OT) and Greek (NT) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_languages https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_languages
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Ye, I meant the copies the English priests had was literally written, as copied by hand, in Latin. Not the originals.

aasasd 7y ago

> That's not really how alphabets work Might want to have a look at the story of Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets before speaking so categorically.