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Is this like the Chinese version of Mark Twain's spelling reform? "For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or
by Dwedit 3y ago
Is this like the Chinese version of Mark Twain's spelling reform?
"For example, in Year 1 that useless letter c would be dropped to be replased either by k or s, and likewise x would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which c would be retained would be the ch formation, which will be dealt with later.
Year 2 might reform w spelling, so that which and one would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish y replasing it with i and Iear 4 might fiks the g/j anomali wonse and for all.
Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants.
Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez c, y and x — bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez — tu riplais ch, sh, and th rispektivli.
Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld."
- Mark Twain
- Dalewyn 3y agoYou jest, but Simplified Chinese came into existence because Traditional Chinese is (and derivatives like Japanese Kanji are) generally regarded as too complicated. Of course, the degree to which the complexity is disdained varies depending on who you ask: Japanese saw fit to reuse mostly as-is, Hangul chose to replace it wholesale, and so on. Simplfied Chinese is somewhere in-between, not replacing wholesale but simplifying characters often to the point of bastardization.
- nneonneo 3y agoJapanese do have shinjitai characters which are also simplified, but differently, although there are definitely fewer such characters than in Simplified Chinese. My favorite is the simplification of 龍 (dragon) - in Simplified Chinese, they took the right hand side and derived 龙; in Japanese Shinjitai, they took the left hand side and obtained 竜.
- karmasimida 3y agoChinese speakers would probably think it is 龟 instead loll
- SuperNinKenDo 3y agoI learned Japanese first, and 龟 still regularly trips me up when reading simplified characters.
- throwaway2990 3y agoIt wasn’t too complicated. 95% of the country couldn’t read it write. And printing was impossible.
- yorwba 3y agoYou may want to read up on the history of printing in East Asia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_As...
- a1o 3y agoHad a good laugh reading this as it transformed along, that's great and could make interesting storytelling that would show the passing of time through a changing writing.
- __s 3y agoYou may like the novel Ella Minnow Pea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ella_Minnow_Pea
- TheRealPomax 3y agoYear 15 seems particularly grating: English had letters for ch, th, and sh. Should have just started using those again. The kicker being that the single consonant for "ch" was <drumroll> just c.
- zeckalpha 3y agoNot too far off from IPA
- satiric 3y agoWorth mentioning that a spelling reform like Twain's would mean that every accent would need to be spelled differently, or the sounds wouldn't match for most speakers. It's quite possible that some British dialects would be very hard to read for some Americans and vice versa, even if they were used to the system for their own dialect. For instance, Twain spells "after" like "aafte", but in my accent I would probably spell it "afdr". Twain has also run in to the problem that spoken English has far more vowels then written English does. He uses "ai" in both "minds"/"maindz" and "replace"/"riplais", but presumably they represent different sounds. Presumably OP's system has the same problems with the dialects of Chinese, now that I think about it. Although I know very little about Chinese unfortunately (only what I know now from a few seconds of googling).
- livueta 3y agoAn amusing example of this is the character Bascule in Banks' Feersum Endjinn, who narrates like so: > Woak up. Got dresd. Had brekfast. Spoke wif Egrates the ant who sed itz juss been wurk wurk wurk 4 u lately master Bascule, Y dont u 1/2 a holiday? & I agreed & that woz how we decided we otter go 2 c Mr Zoliparia in thi I-ball ov thi gargoyle Rosbrith. I personally enjoyed it and never had much trouble figuring it out, but know people who found it unpleasant and incomprehensible.
- Hasnep 3y agoMy Chinese knowledge is limited, but I believe that words in Chinese would not be affected by accent in the same way. This is because even though, for example, in the Taiwanese accent sh is pronounced like s, "shi" and "si" are still "spelt" differently and consistently when using a phonetic writing system like pinyin or zhuyin. There are still individual words that are pronounced differently in different regions, but that's not related to accent.