8 ms·

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes f

by Cushman 15y ago

This seems like it could actually be a real improvement on written Latin if it adopted a real phonetic alphabet. Just transposing all of my existing graphemes for new, smaller ones seems a little silly. (And since what you're really asking is not for people to learn a new alphabet, but to learn a new symbol for every word in their lexicon, it wouldn't be that much more of a leap. Think about it.) Thinking about it-- you increase your bandwidth immediately. You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Use the extra bits to add in the more confusing vowels sounds, and appropriate current digraphs where they aren't confusing. Chording becomes your standard input device; just press every sound that's in the word at once and move on. Anyone would be able to type as fast as they could talk, at least, and read far faster. Text to speech and vice versa would be much easier. Machine translation would make you perfectly legible to the non-phonetically-literate, and the vastly improved typing speed would more than make up for any minor hiccups. It would be much, much easier to teach English to children and non-natives, so much so that we'd stop using letters for everyday writing. Alphabetic English would be bizarrely unintelligible within a couple generations, but again, thanks to machine translation, perfectly readable. Of course you get all of this just from having a phonetic alphabet; a concise binary representation is just icing on the cake. If your goal is to get people to read different, why not go for the grand prize?

trogdoro 15y ago
> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the word Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm. > Chording becomes your standard input device Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html.
- Cushman 15y ago
  Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.) I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system. > Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html. I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?
  - trogdoro 15y ago
    > The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word That's not typically the case - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard. > this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm Stenography is very fast, but can't replace a normal keyboard (i.e. you wouldn't want to use MS Word with it or code with it). Also it has a large learning curve and can vary from person to person. > using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back On the other hand, you don't have to move your fingers around - they stay in one place. And it makes possible a very large number of key combinations (when using both hands) that can be used as optional shortcuts for typing common words.
    - Cushman 15y ago
      You got me there, I was using "chording" when I really meant stenotype. Just being careless, I guess...
  - sgentle 15y ago
    I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fluent speakers of Klingon is closer to a few dozen. Here are some sources, including a particularly cool 2009 Salon article on Klingon, Esperanto and conlangs in general: http://www.salon.com/2009/06/03/invented_languages/ http://www.salon.com/2009/06/03/invented_languages/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228012811AANf6H2 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228012811AA...
nosignal 15y ago
Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation. A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the symbol 1 for "vowel base" and +1 for "high", +2 for "high front", +3 for "high back"… You could eventually have each byte represent a syllable. It'd be like chmod commands + phonetics. There goes my evening…
- Cushman 15y ago
  Thanks for the link! I've never studied Korean before, looks quite interesting. I'd also be curious to see if there were a way to merge the phonetically featural traits of Hangul with the narrowly mathematical nature of dotsies. Do update us with where you get to thinking about Chmodish :)
- noonat 15y ago
  I've been learning Hangul recently, and now every language that doesn't encode syllables into the writing system just seems immensely flawed to me. Hangul seems like a very intuitive, logical writing system. There are relatively few exceptions to the rules it sets out, though I think that's likely because it's such a young language -- more and more seem to be creeping in over time as dialects evolve.
  - meepmorp 15y ago
    > I think that's likely because it's such a young language Do you mean language or writing system? Hangul is ~500 years old, comparatively new for a somewhat widely used writing system, though it's an odd case given that it's not really adapted from another system. The Korean language itself is much older.
    - noonat 15y ago
      Yes, sorry, I meant the writing system.
ricardobeat 15y ago
> Chording becomes your standard input device That's exactly what steganographers do, and they go further along by condensing syllabes, words or even phrases in a single chord. Pretty amazing, although it seems a lot harder than this, and not as good for reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype
- oskarth 15y ago
  In case it wasn't just a mind-typo: stenographer and steganographer are two different things. (Although I guess one could argue that they are quite similar)
  - ricardobeat 15y ago
    Well played, brain.
baddox 15y ago
Unless you're a geek interested in language, computer science, or programming who doesn't want to sink a lot of time into a mostly useless hobby, you should read about Lojban. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- devrim 15y ago
  i'm sure right after this carefully thought, polite and welcoming comment, he'll most definitely stop what he's doing, and do what you suggest. (disclaimer: i'm just generally against comments like these, my apologies to other readers that didn't have to read this)
suby 15y ago
I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard (http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20diamante%20pink%20g.jpg http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20...) where you're not so much typing letters as much as you're typing sounds. So the word "talk", for example would be written "tauk", with each letter of the word pressed at the same time (if possible. Some words you need to come back for a second, third, or god forbid forth stroke). You have to write at 225 words a minute in order to graduate, but some people are able to write at speeds of 300+ words a minute. If you look at the keyboard, the machine is separated into two halves. On the left half there are only 9 keys, but each letter of the alphabet can be written with those 9 keys because it's context sensitive. The letter "t" by itself would be the letter t, but if it's next to a "k", it might become the letter d. You mentioned that we can knock out certain letters such as c, and that's indeed what is done with stenography. The word "car" is written "kar". There are sometimes conflicts, like "sell" and "cell", so you still need a way to write a c, but that's the gist of it. Worth mentioning is that there are only 4 vowel keys on the machine (the vowels are the keys that are on the bottom), but you can write a lot of different sounds with these four keys. A, O, E, and U are the vowels that are on there, and if you press one of those keys individually, you'd write a short vowel of that key. If you wanted to write a short I, you'd press E and U together. You would write long vowel sounds by combining different vowels together. So for example, if you wanted to write a long e sound, you'd write aoe, long U sound would be aou, long a sound would be ai (or aeu depending on how you look at it), long o is oe, and long i is all the vowels together at once. It can be hard to read what you've written if you're not extremely good at it. The word dime, for example, you would see as "TKAOEUPL". There are a few different theories out there, and even if everyone learns the same theory, everyone puts their own little spin on it, so if you wanted to read what someone else wrote, it might be tough. This is the layout of the keyboard if anyone is interested (http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyboard_chart_jpg.jpg http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyb...)
- Groxx 15y ago
  As an outsider, I don't see why reading "TKAOEUPL" instead of "dime" would be an improvement (except for checking precisely what you wrote) for even professionals. Is there a reason why these machines don't convert the roughly-phonetic words into English words? I would think it wouldn't even be too hard to program, even with those 'little spin's, considering how far we've come with grammar checkers and gestural keyboards like Swype.
andreasvc 15y ago
The idea that redundancy in language is a sign of inefficiency is wrong. In fact it increases efficiency because it makes it less likely to misread or misinterpret something. I don't think you'd actually be increasing your bandwidth, if you remove superfluous letters your eyes won't have to look over them but you won't process the actual information any faster, you've just eliminated additional cues. While it is possible to make a phonemic alphabet (phonetic would capture people's accents as well, which is probably not what you want), this removes the connection words have with their foreign origins. Plus pronunciation might change and you don't want to rewrite all books whenever that happens. You have to learn reading & writing anyway, so it might as well be a separate language to some extent, so that it can be more stable.
oskarth 15y ago
There's simpel-fonetik, which is extremely intuitive. It's basically a mapping from IPA to latin letters. Example: When you read Simpel-Fonetik words, you must pay attention to each letter. Remember: each letter has always the same sound, the sound given in the Simpel-Fonetik alphabet, regardless what letter is next to it. And here it is re-written in Simpel-Fonetik: Wen ju riid Simpel-Fonetik wörds, ju mast pei ätenshon tu iitsh leter. Rimember: iitsh leter häs olweis the seim saund, the saund given in the Simpel-Fonetik alfabet, rigaardles wat leter is nekst tu it. http://www.simpelfonetik.com/ http://www.simpelfonetik.com/
- slowpoke 15y ago
  Funnily enough, this looks like a German person with no actual knowledge of English trying to write down what someone speaking English is saying.
- twfarland 15y ago
  I love this kind of thing. I tried something similar a few years ago, after visiting Turkey and seeing their language. I'd had a single character for each sound, though (i.e. 'å' instead of 'ei' for the 'a' sound in 'late').
- gurkendoktor 15y ago
  In case anyone else was wondering why it is still "is" and not "iz" in Simpel Fonetik, and how they justify "sh" as being composed of "s" and "h", the FAQ actually answers that. I disagree about the 's', but otherwise I like it. German's most newbie-ish computer magazine, Computer Bild, actually uses a pretty system to explain the pronunciation of IT terms to the layman.
dbaupp 15y ago
There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American. When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very confusing.) Obviously, with more practice it'd be easier to read, and if the alphabet were in use around the world, pronunciations and accents would converge.
- StavrosK 15y ago
  Not really. Greek has a phonetic alphabet, and we're doing fine with accents. You just standardize words and spell them in one way, and the people speaking the dialect just spell them the same, even knowing they sound different. It's not a problem, and you can even emulate the accent in writing for whatever purpose.
  - dbaupp 15y ago
    Cool, I didn't realise that Greek was a phonetic alphabet! I think there is a difference between an alphabet that one uses from birth, and one that you try to teach to adults. In the former case, you're starting from scratch. In the latter case, you've got your old alphabet confusing things. Evidently, phonetic alphabets are possible; but for an adult to learn to use one it would take practice and effort, and many people would probably be fairly resistant to that ("our old one is perfectly good", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" etc.).
    - StavrosK 15y ago
      That's true, but everyone is resistant to everything. A problem with English is that there are more homophones than there are in Greek. When you see a Greek word, you can pronounce it and, in the vast majority of times, you know what it means. Not so in English, where there are many more homophones. Context helps, though.
Kutta 15y ago
Phonetic alphabet seems to be a beast greatly different to what this Dotsie font tries to achieve. Dotsie appears to be about compression, reading speed and more utilization of word-picture association. Phonetic alphabets are not that great a leap, I think. Hungarian has a mostly phonetic 44-word alphabet, and if there is an advantage in reading/writing speed compared to English, it's rather small. I agree with the "easier teaching" part though.

by Cushman 15y ago

trogdoro 15y ago

> You can knock out /c/, /q/ and /x/ right off-- maybe a couple other consonants (/j/?) with creative digraphs (/gi/?). Sounds a bit like omniglot.com/writing/franklin.htm. Franklin scrapped c, j, q, w, x, and y. The idea sounds reasonable to me. He gave up on it after a while though. I'm guessing the more differences you have, the bigger the barrier to adoption tends to be. > just press every sound that's in the word Sounds reminiscent of omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm. > Chording becomes your standard input device Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html.

Cushman 15y ago
Yeah, it's been proposed before... It's pretty hard to convince everyone they should start using a new language nobody else can read. (More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto. Ouch.) I think computers change the equation, though. Machine translation would be almost impeccable. Using phonetics visually would make chording intuitive in a way it hasn't been until now... You can do a soft launch where you start out teaching people to type phonetically, but showing them alphabetic English. Gradually work into the idea that the buttons you press could be their own writing system. And the benefits would greatly reward anyone who decided to work in the system. > Check out http://dotsies.org/typing.html http://dotsies.org/typing.html. I hate to say it, but that's kinda the opposite of a chording keyboard. The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word with a single keystroke (this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm). That looks like using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back from a conventional keyboard, yeah?
- trogdoro 15y ago
  > The idea with chording is you press symbols simultaneously to write an entire word That's not typically the case - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chording_keyboard. > this is how stenographers are able to type >300wpm Stenography is very fast, but can't replace a normal keyboard (i.e. you wouldn't want to use MS Word with it or code with it). Also it has a large learning curve and can vary from person to person. > using multiple keys to type a single character, which is an interesting hack, but ergonomically a step back On the other hand, you don't have to move your fingers around - they stay in one place. And it makes possible a very large number of key combinations (when using both hands) that can be used as optional shortcuts for typing common words.
  - Cushman 15y ago
    You got me there, I was using "chording" when I really meant stenotype. Just being careless, I guess...
- sgentle 15y ago
  I was curious about the "More people now speak Klingon than Esperanto" thing, but from what I can tell it's emphatically not true. The number of fluent Esperantists is somewhere in the tens or hundreds of thousands, whereas the number of fluent speakers of Klingon is closer to a few dozen. Here are some sources, including a particularly cool 2009 Salon article on Klingon, Esperanto and conlangs in general: http://www.salon.com/2009/06/03/invented_languages/ http://www.salon.com/2009/06/03/invented_languages/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klingon_language http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228012811AANf6H2 http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080228012811AA...

nosignal 15y ago

Hangul, the Korean writing system, is at once phonetic and syllabic. Each "symbol" represents a syllable, but each sub-symbol represents a particular sound in the syllable; and each sub-sub-symbol encodes phonetic information about how it should be pronounced. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Letter_design for a better explanation. A binary representation of the Hangul system could be very interesting. Use the symbol 1 for "vowel base" and +1 for "high", +2 for "high front", +3 for "high back"… You could eventually have each byte represent a syllable. It'd be like chmod commands + phonetics. There goes my evening…

Cushman 15y ago
Thanks for the link! I've never studied Korean before, looks quite interesting. I'd also be curious to see if there were a way to merge the phonetically featural traits of Hangul with the narrowly mathematical nature of dotsies. Do update us with where you get to thinking about Chmodish :)
noonat 15y ago
I've been learning Hangul recently, and now every language that doesn't encode syllables into the writing system just seems immensely flawed to me. Hangul seems like a very intuitive, logical writing system. There are relatively few exceptions to the rules it sets out, though I think that's likely because it's such a young language -- more and more seem to be creeping in over time as dialects evolve.
- meepmorp 15y ago
  > I think that's likely because it's such a young language Do you mean language or writing system? Hangul is ~500 years old, comparatively new for a somewhat widely used writing system, though it's an odd case given that it's not really adapted from another system. The Korean language itself is much older.
  - noonat 15y ago
    Yes, sorry, I meant the writing system.

ricardobeat 15y ago

> Chording becomes your standard input device That's exactly what steganographers do, and they go further along by condensing syllabes, words or even phrases in a single chord. Pretty amazing, although it seems a lot harder than this, and not as good for reading. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stenotype

oskarth 15y ago
In case it wasn't just a mind-typo: stenographer and steganographer are two different things. (Although I guess one could argue that they are quite similar)
- ricardobeat 15y ago
  Well played, brain.

baddox 15y ago

Unless you're a geek interested in language, computer science, or programming who doesn't want to sink a lot of time into a mostly useless hobby, you should read about Lojban. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

devrim 15y ago
i'm sure right after this carefully thought, polite and welcoming comment, he'll most definitely stop what he's doing, and do what you suggest. (disclaimer: i'm just generally against comments like these, my apologies to other readers that didn't have to read this)

suby 15y ago

I'm going to school right now to become a court reporter / stenographer. Basically, I type on a funny looking keyboard (http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20diamante%20pink%20g.jpg http://www.acculaw.com/images/products/display/stenograph%20...) where you're not so much typing letters as much as you're typing sounds. So the word "talk", for example would be written "tauk", with each letter of the word pressed at the same time (if possible. Some words you need to come back for a second, third, or god forbid forth stroke). You have to write at 225 words a minute in order to graduate, but some people are able to write at speeds of 300+ words a minute. If you look at the keyboard, the machine is separated into two halves. On the left half there are only 9 keys, but each letter of the alphabet can be written with those 9 keys because it's context sensitive. The letter "t" by itself would be the letter t, but if it's next to a "k", it might become the letter d. You mentioned that we can knock out certain letters such as c, and that's indeed what is done with stenography. The word "car" is written "kar". There are sometimes conflicts, like "sell" and "cell", so you still need a way to write a c, but that's the gist of it. Worth mentioning is that there are only 4 vowel keys on the machine (the vowels are the keys that are on the bottom), but you can write a lot of different sounds with these four keys. A, O, E, and U are the vowels that are on there, and if you press one of those keys individually, you'd write a short vowel of that key. If you wanted to write a short I, you'd press E and U together. You would write long vowel sounds by combining different vowels together. So for example, if you wanted to write a long e sound, you'd write aoe, long U sound would be aou, long a sound would be ai (or aeu depending on how you look at it), long o is oe, and long i is all the vowels together at once. It can be hard to read what you've written if you're not extremely good at it. The word dime, for example, you would see as "TKAOEUPL". There are a few different theories out there, and even if everyone learns the same theory, everyone puts their own little spin on it, so if you wanted to read what someone else wrote, it might be tough. This is the layout of the keyboard if anyone is interested (http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyboard_chart_jpg.jpg http://dmc122011.delmar.edu/ba/crtrgallery/images/steno_keyb...)

Groxx 15y ago
As an outsider, I don't see why reading "TKAOEUPL" instead of "dime" would be an improvement (except for checking precisely what you wrote) for even professionals. Is there a reason why these machines don't convert the roughly-phonetic words into English words? I would think it wouldn't even be too hard to program, even with those 'little spin's, considering how far we've come with grammar checkers and gestural keyboards like Swype.

andreasvc 15y ago

The idea that redundancy in language is a sign of inefficiency is wrong. In fact it increases efficiency because it makes it less likely to misread or misinterpret something. I don't think you'd actually be increasing your bandwidth, if you remove superfluous letters your eyes won't have to look over them but you won't process the actual information any faster, you've just eliminated additional cues. While it is possible to make a phonemic alphabet (phonetic would capture people's accents as well, which is probably not what you want), this removes the connection words have with their foreign origins. Plus pronunciation might change and you don't want to rewrite all books whenever that happens. You have to learn reading & writing anyway, so it might as well be a separate language to some extent, so that it can be more stable.

oskarth 15y ago

There's simpel-fonetik, which is extremely intuitive. It's basically a mapping from IPA to latin letters. Example: When you read Simpel-Fonetik words, you must pay attention to each letter. Remember: each letter has always the same sound, the sound given in the Simpel-Fonetik alphabet, regardless what letter is next to it. And here it is re-written in Simpel-Fonetik: Wen ju riid Simpel-Fonetik wörds, ju mast pei ätenshon tu iitsh leter. Rimember: iitsh leter häs olweis the seim saund, the saund given in the Simpel-Fonetik alfabet, rigaardles wat leter is nekst tu it. http://www.simpelfonetik.com/ http://www.simpelfonetik.com/

slowpoke 15y ago
Funnily enough, this looks like a German person with no actual knowledge of English trying to write down what someone speaking English is saying.
twfarland 15y ago
I love this kind of thing. I tried something similar a few years ago, after visiting Turkey and seeing their language. I'd had a single character for each sound, though (i.e. 'å' instead of 'ei' for the 'a' sound in 'late').
gurkendoktor 15y ago
In case anyone else was wondering why it is still "is" and not "iz" in Simpel Fonetik, and how they justify "sh" as being composed of "s" and "h", the FAQ actually answers that. I disagree about the 's', but otherwise I like it. German's most newbie-ish computer magazine, Computer Bild, actually uses a pretty system to explain the pronunciation of IT terms to the layman.

dbaupp 15y ago

There is problem with phonetic alphabets: people have different accents, and so something that is obvious for an Englishman is confusing for an Australian, or an American. When I was (briefly) doing some linguistics, there were several times when I spent minutes trying to work out what a certain set of IPA symbols were. (I was pretty good normally, but words with multiple/varying/regional pronunciations are very confusing.) Obviously, with more practice it'd be easier to read, and if the alphabet were in use around the world, pronunciations and accents would converge.

StavrosK 15y ago
Not really. Greek has a phonetic alphabet, and we're doing fine with accents. You just standardize words and spell them in one way, and the people speaking the dialect just spell them the same, even knowing they sound different. It's not a problem, and you can even emulate the accent in writing for whatever purpose.
- dbaupp 15y ago
  Cool, I didn't realise that Greek was a phonetic alphabet! I think there is a difference between an alphabet that one uses from birth, and one that you try to teach to adults. In the former case, you're starting from scratch. In the latter case, you've got your old alphabet confusing things. Evidently, phonetic alphabets are possible; but for an adult to learn to use one it would take practice and effort, and many people would probably be fairly resistant to that ("our old one is perfectly good", "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" etc.).
  - StavrosK 15y ago
    That's true, but everyone is resistant to everything. A problem with English is that there are more homophones than there are in Greek. When you see a Greek word, you can pronounce it and, in the vast majority of times, you know what it means. Not so in English, where there are many more homophones. Context helps, though.

Kutta 15y ago

Phonetic alphabet seems to be a beast greatly different to what this Dotsie font tries to achieve. Dotsie appears to be about compression, reading speed and more utilization of word-picture association. Phonetic alphabets are not that great a leap, I think. Hungarian has a mostly phonetic 44-word alphabet, and if there is an advantage in reading/writing speed compared to English, it's rather small. I agree with the "easier teaching" part though.