3 ms·

Then again, if we could start from scratch we'd probably just have a single global phonetic language without case and with a limited number of total chars.

saalweachter 4y ago
Honestly non-phonetic glyphs are probably an easier lift. Fun fact: the reason we pronounce "ph" like "f" is because the Greek letter was originally pronounced like p-h, at the time Romans began stealing words, but then the Greeks started pronouncing it like "f" and the Romans followed suit, but kept the old Latinization of "ph", because they'd already carved it into stone. English spelling is largely phonetic... but it captures the phonetic spelling across dozens or hundreds of shifts in the spoken language. Unless you can stop people from changing how they speak, any phonetic spelling reboot is either going to suffer from the same problem, or words will constantly change how they are spelled to keep up with the spoken word.
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  China has the proper idea for a writing system this entire time.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    if you view meme culture as a trend towards increased symbol density in linguistic communication due to their ability to convey emotions, overtones, implications, and other nuance ("shaka, when the walls fell") then the increased symbol space of chinese/japanese/korean characters looks interesting. conversely it's certainly been an obvious disadvantage (posed a lot of problems and imposed a lot of awkward workarounds) for mechanical/electronic communication - now you have to enter the characters too, and you have to express that larger number of characters efficiently. In practice, a lot of electronic communication is just simplified to ASCII because that's the set that works universally. Someone used the example of ess-tset being transliterated as "ss" in german, dunno if chinese uses anything similar, but it wouldn't surprise me, obviously Japanese has romaji too. but at a human-interface level, fundamentally there is a limit to how many symbols people can absorb. Even with latin characters, people at best will sight-read whole words to increase symbol rate, but, the natural evolution is to use 1 character to represent 1 symbol/word, that's the highest possible rate at which humans can absorb symbols for a written system. And in turn you could in principle absorb a "word of symbols", which is a sentence, similar to how western readers can sight-read a word of our 1-character glyphs. by "increasing the dimensionality" of the symbol, you increase the effective symbol rate, similar to how memes use subtext/etc to convey more nuance than a pure text can by itself.
- koheripbal 4y ago
  Kids learn phonetic writing much quicker than glyph writing. It's much more intuitive for a child. It also helps to limit the fragmentation of pronunciation of words.

saalweachter 4y ago

Honestly non-phonetic glyphs are probably an easier lift. Fun fact: the reason we pronounce "ph" like "f" is because the Greek letter was originally pronounced like p-h, at the time Romans began stealing words, but then the Greeks started pronouncing it like "f" and the Romans followed suit, but kept the old Latinization of "ph", because they'd already carved it into stone. English spelling is largely phonetic... but it captures the phonetic spelling across dozens or hundreds of shifts in the spoken language. Unless you can stop people from changing how they speak, any phonetic spelling reboot is either going to suffer from the same problem, or words will constantly change how they are spelled to keep up with the spoken word.

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
China has the proper idea for a writing system this entire time.
- paulmd 4y ago
  if you view meme culture as a trend towards increased symbol density in linguistic communication due to their ability to convey emotions, overtones, implications, and other nuance ("shaka, when the walls fell") then the increased symbol space of chinese/japanese/korean characters looks interesting. conversely it's certainly been an obvious disadvantage (posed a lot of problems and imposed a lot of awkward workarounds) for mechanical/electronic communication - now you have to enter the characters too, and you have to express that larger number of characters efficiently. In practice, a lot of electronic communication is just simplified to ASCII because that's the set that works universally. Someone used the example of ess-tset being transliterated as "ss" in german, dunno if chinese uses anything similar, but it wouldn't surprise me, obviously Japanese has romaji too. but at a human-interface level, fundamentally there is a limit to how many symbols people can absorb. Even with latin characters, people at best will sight-read whole words to increase symbol rate, but, the natural evolution is to use 1 character to represent 1 symbol/word, that's the highest possible rate at which humans can absorb symbols for a written system. And in turn you could in principle absorb a "word of symbols", which is a sentence, similar to how western readers can sight-read a word of our 1-character glyphs. by "increasing the dimensionality" of the symbol, you increase the effective symbol rate, similar to how memes use subtext/etc to convey more nuance than a pure text can by itself.
koheripbal 4y ago
Kids learn phonetic writing much quicker than glyph writing. It's much more intuitive for a child. It also helps to limit the fragmentation of pronunciation of words.