So if you had an animal looking letter you could place it in a aesthetically pleasing way looking left or right e.g. on each side of a door
Thanks!
The whole page: https://web.mnstate.edu/houtsli/tesl551/Writing/page4.htm
Mongolian script, from the link presented here, has actually switched from being horizontal to being vertical (under influence of Chinese).
Alphabetic, non pictographic languages are an order of magnitude easier to learn and express than pictographic languages, which require rote memorization of hundreds to thousands of pictographs and their modifiers. In contrast, the language you're reading this post in allows you to guess the sound of the words by the spelling, which is simply impossible in, say, Mandarin.
Radical–phonetic compounds, in which one component (the radical) indicates the general meaning of the character, and the other (the phonetic) hints at the pronunciation. An example is 樑 (liáng), where the phonetic 梁 liáng indicates the pronunciation of the character and the radical 木 ('wood') indicates its meaning of 'supporting beam'. Characters of this type constitute around 90% of Chinese logograms.
1) 输: pronounced "shū"
2) 偷: pronounced "tōu"
(There are even worse examples which I can't think of in the moment)
The "pure groups" are the ones where the presence of a specific radical guarantee you a specific pronunciation (within the list of character/pronunciation pairs you're trying to learn). Of the 4800 characters I used for the volume, only 290 are in the chapter on pure groups. The rest are either in semi-regular groups with varying numbers of exceptions, or in completely irregular groups with no discernible patterns.
The characters were designed continuously over a period of time starting thousands of years ago, and the phonetic parts were sometimes exact and sometimes just clues, similar sounds or rhymes to give the reader a hint. Ancient Chinese pronunciation has changed beyond recognition, so it makes perfect sense that the pronunciations wouldn't be regular anymore.
Mainland China uses a "simplified" character set, which did not affect literacy but in my opinion is a bit more difficult to read; they reduced the number of lines so that more characters look samey and they combined many (Mandarin) homonyms (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters#...), removing the meaning portion of characters that would have distinguished them. The simplification did not apply to all characters, so to achieve a high level of literacy you need to know traditional forms, anyway.
It would be interesting to see someone try to actually remodel hanzi from scratch for a specific dialect of Chinese, using 100% regular phonetic components and no variants; multiple pronunciations of a character in the current system would be required to be written differently. An interesting example of this would be certain Korean gukja, where they've combined a Chinese character with a phonetic hangeul (example: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%AB%87). This would be a truly simplified Chinese character set... but all of the culture's history that gets built into spelling over time would be completely lost, which is why I always prefer conservative spelling systems.
It is "a guess" at best, and that guess won't be correct most of the time, unless you know the word already. Otherwise you'ld be dealing with all kinds of Cansas/Arcansas and although/drought/through/bought/cough/enough most of the time.
In e.g. Russian or German, you can read the word from the way it is written and maybe miss the accent. In e.g. Spanish you can read the word correctly with the right accent most of the time. Even Korean is more phonetic than English - in English the best you've got is a guess.
Not unlike Mandarin, by the way.
Source: non-native speaker of English, also speaker of some other languages.
This is a common and incredibly stupid argument. Note that it immediately implies that oral communication in English and Japanese is impossible.
Early video games didn't have the memory available to render text in kanji and used kana exclusively. This caused zero problems.
There's a lot more context in speech and video games and long-form writing than in random writing and signs. It's virtually impossible to convey a meaning to a product or company name without using kanji.
For example, let's take a company named "Bandai". Now look up "ban" (https://jisho.org/search/ban) and look up "dai" (https://jisho.org/search/dai) and "da" (https://jisho.org/search/da) and "i" (https://jisho.org/search/i), each of which has 3-5 meanings, and tell me which combination of possible words is the company's name derived from? There's literally no way to tell.
What combination of words was "Xerox" derived from? Does that affect the meaning of "Xerox"?
How about "Samuel"?
"Rachel"?
"Ted"?
Only if people communicate without context. A large amount of ambiguity can be removed by understanding the context of the conversation.
1. How it is pronounced.
2. Its etymology and what it means.
Because pronunciation has changed over time and changes across regions, these two features are in conflict. If we made spelling uniformly reflect (current, in some given place) pronunciation, then we would lose clues as to etymology and meaning.
For example, an English speaker can reasonably guess that "native", "nation" have related meanings because of the shared "nat". If we made the spelling follow pronunciation and did "naytiv" and "nayshun", some of that is lost.
Ideally, pronunciation would be fixed across time and place so that a language's spelling reliably reflected both meaning and sound. But that ain't how humans work.
In written languages that do this "better", it's mainly through some combination of:
1. The written language is simply younger than written English and thus has had less time for pronunciation to diverge.
2. The language is used by a smaller, more homogeneous community.
3. Elites exert political force to prevent pronunciation or meaning from changing and to reject loanwords at the loss of expressivity.
English does none of those things. It's been around a long time, has spread throughout the world across widely disparate communities, and is happy to absorb any good idea it finds in any other language. It is the Perl of written languages, for better or worse.
This is what some people advocate for English - entirely misguidedly in my view.
You can start by undoing misguided spelling reforms of the past. "Debt" used to be spelled "det" but due to incorrectly inferred etymology it was changed to be non-phonetic. There are many words like these.
Then look for major inconsistencies where a cluster of letters is pronounced more than one way, and simplify one of them. For example, "ough" is pronounced as in "tough" more often than as in "though". Change "tough" to be spelled as "tuff" and "rough" as "ruff".
Going further, embrace text/informal writing and use tho, altho, nite, tonite, etc. Although the last two are not necessary since "ight" is pretty consistent. Keep common clusters of letters so that it still looks like English. Do it in in stages over a 100 years , making changes every 15 years or so. I'm mostly aiming at ease of reading vs ease of writing.
England could have done it perhaps in Shakespeare's time or shortly thereafter, but once English spread across the globe in its modern (lack of) form with no recognized central authority with the power to force the change, it's not going to happen.
You couldn't get three states in the United States to agree on a universal spelling/pronunciation let alone the three countries in the United Kingdom. You think you'll have any more success over continents and across oceans?
Good luck!
There is no central authority over the Spanish language since the days of Bolivar and San Martin (1810s or so). Modern e.g. Argentinians would laugh at the idea that Real Academia Española has any say on how they should use their language. And indeed, there are differences not just in vocabulary and pronunciation, but also in grammar: "vos hablás" instead of "tú hablas".
Nevertheless, I can pick pretty much any written Spanish word and know how it sounds both in European and Argentinian Spanish.
It is specifically English which failed at the task of not being like Chinese.
Me, and millions of other speakers of English as a second language, will vehemently disagree with that point.
The rest of your comment reads like a detailed attempt at rationalization of this untrue affirmation.
As a counterargument, take Spanish. Spanish is not younger than English, pronunciation has diverged and for example someone from Cuba and someone from Argentina pronounce many words differently.
The Spanish-speaking world is by no means small, or homogeneous.
And we absorb loanwords like madmen. Mostly from English, but also French, Japanese, Italian, etc.
The point is: Spanish is a much more phonetic language in its written form than English, so much that we have no spelling bees.
English simply fucked up itself with the great vowel shift, that's all.
By comparison, the rules and structures of English (such as they are) were not altered significantly following the great vowel shift in Chaucer's time. Mostly minor spelling changes and word choice.
All languages adopt foreign words unless there is an active body attempting to prevent it, such as the French Language Academy.
French words are not however just loaned to English. It was thoroughly baked in following the Battle of Hastings in 1066, when the nobility all spoke French for hundreds of years. Basically every "fancy" word in English came directly from French while "plain" words came from Anglo Saxon (Germanic) or other related sources. Incarcerated vs jailed. Debris vs trash. Magnificent vs great. "The player regarded his opponent." vs. "The player looked at his opponent." (French for "He looks" is "Il regarde".
The great vowel shift didn't mess up English; the lack of concerted normalization of English is what did it in. English is the greatest pragmatist without design of all world languages.
Well, that’s a strange statement. Hangul is not just better by accident, it’s designed to be an advanced phonetic system making it possible to write many languages. You can learn in a few evenings, no need to know Korean, and you will be able to read Korean perfectly out loud without understanding what you are saying.
"Most of the time" is an exaggeration. English is (sadly) less strictly phonetic than many other languages, but still highly phonetic. Nearly every word in your own comment can be pronounced phonetically.
Same as "sch" and "tsch" are pronounced differently in German but are still considered phonetic.
Although/through/ebough is a problem tho. I wish the general public cared enuff to push a spelling reform thru.
"Most" like "cost", or like "ghost?" Also, only now I checked the transcription for "exaggeration", and "gg" is not "g", like in "blogger", but ʤ like in "Jason". TIL.
If this is not "most of the time", than I don't know what is.
English is not learned; it's memorized.
OK, but... the position of the word stress in Russian radically alters the pronunciation of all the vowels in the word. Missing the stress means mangling the whole word. That's not something to just dismiss.
Chinese is written the way it is for roughly the same reasons why English doesn't use phonetic spelling.
Do I have to learn a new language altogether? How ? Will it fit on a keyboard? How many ideas can there be? What if I have to say something longer? What if I have to say a difficult concept?
This was "before" emoji came out on iOS.
Rest is history
This is also why its hard to do magic tricks with young kids. They will tend to be looking at all the wrong spots. Their brain doesn't pick up on attempted misdirection, it just decide to make a new test happen from a different vantage point.
It's the same in Chinese and Japanese. It helps a lot that the letters are designed fit into individual square blocks. The blocks can be arranged any way you want. There have been internet memes, for example, written to mean one thing when you read left to right and a completely different thing top to bottom.
But yes, Chinese was written top down, right to left. The PRC basically switched over to left-right, top-bottom right away (it kind of went hand in hand with the simplification project). Taiwan for example kept the traditional format for a lot longer.
When I was learning Mandarin in the late 90s, all our imported material from Taiwan was still top-down, right to left.
Here's an example Taiwanese newpaper from 1993 (yes, that's Michael Jackson) https://www.taipeitimes.com/images/2021/08/29/p08-210829-fro...
You can see the body text is arranged top-bottom, right to left, and the headlines employ a mixture of approaches.
There's not really a distinction. Chinese was written in columns from right to left. When the columns were one character long, they were still columns.
To distinguish horizontal writing from vertical writing, you'd need a writing sample that had multiple columns and also multiple rows. (Because, as noted above, there's no way to tell the difference between 1 row of 5 characters vs 5 columns of 1 character each.) As far as I'm aware, traditional Chinese writing is fully accounted for by the theory that it was always written in columns and never in rows.
On the other hand, the Taiwanese newspaper isn't making a great case: the "mixture of approaches" used in the headlines are a couple vertical headlines going top down, and several horizontal headings, including the primary headline "Michael Jackson、arrives!", which all go left-to-right. The body text in the infoboxes in the top left and right corners of the page also goes from left to right, though it appears to be true that the article text is in columns. The name of the newspaper (top center) is also printed left-to-right.
Reminds me of dot matrix printers... some could write lines from right to left without needing to go back to start of line, thus alternating directions.
(Except Leonardo didn’t write in English.)
That is a very expensive expense, though. And the result might still be worse.
I can quickread a page in a couple of seconds, because my brain memorized the shape of the words and even sentences. It took me years of lots of reading to achieve that. I am not sure if my brain could handle the double amount of shapes, because this is in effect what would be needed. And eye movement is very quick. But feel free to give the experiment a shot and share results.
(it should be trivial to write a script that rearranges text that way)
That's entirely possible but it is hard to tell without going through the entire learning process. There might be a lot of redundancy (as we can quickly recognize mirror shapes) which if tapped at an early age might make it actually a trivial "add-on".
Anecdotally you can learn within minutes to slowly parse script in reverse order. Whether you can ever get to the same speed is not clear. We do know that some cultures did use alternating script (so its clearly not impossible) but we also know that they abandoned it in the end - so there might be some disadvantages.
Maybe the reason for eventually adopting uniform LR or RL instead or alternating is not the difficulty of mastering mirror versions, but being able to quickly start reading from any line on a page. For example finding the spot where you left reading, or scanning to find a relevant part. For this task the alternating form is actually less efficient as you need to jump back and forth as you go down (or up :-) the page.
Elon's cosmic sound (⇒)
⇐ Spacetime symphony thrives
Starward notes resound (⇒)
We tend to assume that left-to-right script is a law of nature but it is just one of many variations that have been invented and used across space and time. Right-to-left (Arab / Hebrew) [2] is well known but a most intriguing one used in antiquity by Greeks and others is Boustrophedon (alternating from left-to-right / right-to-left).[3]
Boustrophedon mode is in one sense the optimal script form. At the one-time expense of having to learn to recognize letters and words both ways one can then (in principle) speed up reading as the eyeballs don't need to jump across the page to start a new line :-)
[1] https://www.w3.org/International/mlreq/
[2] https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-scripts
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon