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When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it
by chvid 2y ago
When I compare my handwriting to my father's I can see nearly 100% computer / phone use for writing has had its effect. With a gigantic number of characters, it would obviously be worse.
It always struck me that a phonetic alphabet for writing rather was much simpler and easier to learn than a system based on pictograms. So much that a society could achieve the same level of literacy with much lower cost if they adapted a phonetic system.
But I wonder if that is actually true? Has there been comparative studies of what mainland China did compared to Taiwan (which kept the traditional system) or Vietnam (which adopted latin letters) and its effect on literacy. Obviously hard to do ...
- layer8 2y agoIt certainly doesn’t help literacy in general, but one advantage of a writing system divorced from phonetics is that you can still read old written material even after the phonetics have changed over time.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y agoAnother advantage of using pictograms is that people who speak completely different versions of Chinese can still communicate in writing. They may pronounce the characters completely differently, but the characters still mean the same thing.
- numpad0 2y agoI think "complicated" is one way to describe pictogrammic(ideogrammic) languages, and "offloading OCR to geometric sub-systems" is another. Formal Hanzi writings are grid aligned so it's probably more suited for batched processing too.
- int_19h 2y agoI don't think you can truly do a proper comparative study for something like this - there's just too many other factors. That said, you can look at Korean for a historical example of how a well-designed alphabet can fare when replacing a historical Chinese-based system. It actually spawned whole new literary genres by making writing more accessible to large segments of the populace that were effectively excluded before.