3 ms·

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own or

by culi 4y ago

It's important to distinguish a language from it's most popular orthography. English is not the Latin Alphabet and Japanese is not Kanji. I've created my own orthography before. It kinda looks like the Arabic script superficially and it's made to be featural and phonemic. People have often seen my writing in it and asked "What languages is that" to which I always annoyingly reply "English". The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. Alphabetic orthographies may seem more extendible, but ultimately teaching kids to read is still a matter of teaching them to memorize a vocabulary. There's a benefit to alphabetic orthographies that sometimes shines when you encounter new words, but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher and generally not actually any harder for kids to learn than alphabets

glomgril 4y ago
linguistics FTW!
de_nied 4y ago
>The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. This is pretty cool
- djhn 4y ago
  It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general. For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word"). In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).
ickoonite 4y ago
> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.
- smsm42 4y ago
  Practically, the difference is not that big. There are many sounds English letters can't encode, and for others it cheats by saying "let's pretend th sounds like this, despite it having little to do with t or h, and then zh sounds like that, and ae like this, and so on". You could do the same with a syllabary - and to some measure Japanese does, aided with special marks and other tricks, but as English inevitably misses some sounds, so does Japanese. It's inevitable - look at IPA symbol set to see how many there are needed, and I'm sure even that doesn't cover all the possibilities. What you lose with syllabary is to be able to encode some patterns - like Czech "strč prst skrz krk" - pretty much no way to encode it in Japanese I think, unless you resort to a lot of cheating like inserting "u" everywhere and then declaring "u is silent" (which is pretty normal for Japanese in general but in this case kinda looks like cheating). But tbh English encoding wouldn't adequately describe how it's pronounced either.
- ksenzee 4y ago
  I think they meant the encoding is more efficient, so you can encode more information with fewer characters.
  - smsm42 4y ago
    But since you need more bits to encode a single character, at least in most common encodings without inventing a custom one, it's not really much more efficient.
  - Tor3 4y ago
    If you think of Japanese writing as a whole (kanji, hiragana, katakana where needed) then indeed you can encode more information in less space. Which is easy to see if you compare the Japanese sections with the English sections of dual-language user manuals (those who actually include exactly the same amount of information of course). The Japanese sections are about 30% shorter than their English (or any other language written with Latin letters). One manual I looked at was 60 pages in Japanese, 90 in English, including illustrations (same on both).

by culi 4y ago

glomgril 4y ago

linguistics FTW!

de_nied 4y ago

>The thing is though, humans don't actually read alphabetic orthographies by the individual letters, but rather by the overall shape of the word. THAT'S WHY ALL CAPS TEXT TAKES YOU SO MUCH LONGER TO READ (letters lose their unique shapes). And taht's why yuo are gnaelrely stlil albe to udnersnatd tihs txet dispete me scrambling the central letters. This is pretty cool

djhn 4y ago
It's cool, although it is primarily a feature of English, not languages, languages Latin alphabets or even Germanic languages in general. For the party trick to work the words of the language in question must have relatively short words, and suitably small but syntactically heterogenous paradigms for any given lexeme, with changes expressed mainly by the end of the word. (Paradigm: for example conjugations are paradigms of verbs, declension are paradigms of nouns; lexeme: "fundamental base word"). In some languages individual letters in the middle of the word morph as the meaning of the word changes (different tenses of verbs, different number or gender of people/objects, whether an action is ongoing/finished/planned, whether a statement is a question or a command).

ickoonite 4y ago

> but the level of information you can encode with a syllabary is much higher [citation needed] It’s not clear how you can encode any more information with hiragana/katakana - the Japanese syllabaries - than you can with an alphabet. Indeed, it’s fairly clear the reverse is true - you can only really encode sounds for which the syllabary has symbols; conversely, as English demonstrates, you can encode a vast array of sounds while only having 26 distinct letters.

smsm42 4y ago
Practically, the difference is not that big. There are many sounds English letters can't encode, and for others it cheats by saying "let's pretend th sounds like this, despite it having little to do with t or h, and then zh sounds like that, and ae like this, and so on". You could do the same with a syllabary - and to some measure Japanese does, aided with special marks and other tricks, but as English inevitably misses some sounds, so does Japanese. It's inevitable - look at IPA symbol set to see how many there are needed, and I'm sure even that doesn't cover all the possibilities. What you lose with syllabary is to be able to encode some patterns - like Czech "strč prst skrz krk" - pretty much no way to encode it in Japanese I think, unless you resort to a lot of cheating like inserting "u" everywhere and then declaring "u is silent" (which is pretty normal for Japanese in general but in this case kinda looks like cheating). But tbh English encoding wouldn't adequately describe how it's pronounced either.
ksenzee 4y ago
I think they meant the encoding is more efficient, so you can encode more information with fewer characters.
- smsm42 4y ago
  But since you need more bits to encode a single character, at least in most common encodings without inventing a custom one, it's not really much more efficient.
- Tor3 4y ago
  If you think of Japanese writing as a whole (kanji, hiragana, katakana where needed) then indeed you can encode more information in less space. Which is easy to see if you compare the Japanese sections with the English sections of dual-language user manuals (those who actually include exactly the same amount of information of course). The Japanese sections are about 30% shorter than their English (or any other language written with Latin letters). One manual I looked at was 60 pages in Japanese, 90 in English, including illustrations (same on both).