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There is a certain amount of misinformation in this post that I'd like to clear up: 1) In the 10th century, (Old) English and (Old) German were already somewha
by blahedo 15y ago
There is a certain amount of misinformation in this post that I'd like to clear up:
1) In the 10th century, (Old) English and (Old) German were already somewhat divergent, and not really mutually intelligible, but closely related.
2) The same goes for Norman and French. While in the same language family, these were not quite the same language.
3) Have you read any Chaucer? I'm not sure I'd call Middle English "mostly comprehensible". It takes a lot of work and a good ME dictionary at hand. By contrast, Early Modern English (think Shakespeare) is more in the line of "mostly comprehensible".
4) It's not just the fact there was no central authority that caused English to massively change. There still isn't a central authority, but change has been slow and non-radical for the last 500 years or so. Having a central authority doesn't really prevent change, either, although it might help to slow it down.
5) It's not at all clear what you mean by "arbitrary" in your claim about language change and state control, but you certainly have not backed up any claim about languages under "state control" being more "regular".
6) The alphabet switch for Turkish did not succeed because the Latin alphabet is "simple and phonetic". The Arabic alphabet is also simple and phonetic, as is (or as could be) any alphabet. It was not a great fit for the Turkish language, however, and the Latin alphabet (with a few additions) mapped better.
7) But much more important than any facts about the Latin alphabet was the fact that Kemal Ataturk was a dictator who pushed through a massive literacy programme on the population (who, it should also be said, was basically supportive of this goal). Had he done an alphabet reform instead---adding a few letters to the Arabic alphabet to make it a better fit for Turkish---and accompanied it with the same literacy policy, it'd do just as well. (Better, arguably, because it would have left the writings of the Ottomans much more accessible to the literate modern population.)
You might be right about computers arising in alphabet countries (I'd broaden that to any non-ideographic writing system, including Greek, Korean, and those of the Indian subcontinent and southeast Asia), but it might be more accurate to say that if computers had arisen first in China they would have looked very, very different. (Even in Japan, they might have gone the route of kana-only systems first, in a similar way to how early western machines had ALL CAPS interfaces.)
- mortenjorck 15y agoActually, isn't the concept of a kana-only character system how early, domestically-marketed microcomputers in Japan did in fact work? The only example I can think of is a home entertainment console, but the Nintendo Family Computer generally used kana with a few highly common kanji.
- w1ntermute 15y agoYes, early computers in Japan used katakana only. They were half-width (normally they are written in a square box) so as to be compatible with the Latin alphabet. This is also how telegrams were sent, starting from when Japan began modernizing in 1868.
- devijvers 15y agoBe careful who you call a dictator. While Ataturk has been President of Turkey for 15 years (until his death in 1938) he encouraged a multi-party system. However, during his lifetime several parties were formed and again self-dissolved or dissolved after an uncovered assassination attempt on Ataturk. It's only in 1945 - after Ataturk's death - that the multi-party system in Turkey took off for real.
- eru 15y agoFrom what I can tell Ataturk was mostly a benevolent dictator. (And like a good wine, he gets better with every passing year since his dead. When I was in Ankarka in 2008, they had pictures / flags of him on the high rise buildings covering five storeys.)
- vacri 15y agoOn the simplification of roman script, I've just travelled through Vietnam, and learned that Ho Chi Minh did a similar thing to Ataturk - he mandated that Vietnamese be written in Roman script (as set down by a Portuguese bloke several centuries ago) and not in the traditional Chinese script. His reasoning was that the easier it is to learn, the better for the general population. I can't say what Vietnam looked like before the change, but certainly today there's writing blazed over everything in the cities - and there's very little in the way of images or pictographs to indicate what a shop might sell to an illiterate (I may have been unaware of other indicators). They do make prodigious use of diacritics to adapt Roman script to Vietnamese, though. It was while puzzling over these diacritics that I finally realised that English uses (needs?) these as well, we just don't write them down - wind (moving air) and wind (make a coil) are pronounced differently, but without diacritics, someone has to tell you how to do so.