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I cannot understand why there is any need to reform alphabets, be it cryllic or Greek
or Japanese! Why change them? I know Russian and the alphabet is simple and much
more efficient than the English alphabet. So what is with romanization? What is the
reason for all this when those alphabets work perfectly well?
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One can argue that a single alphabet would be easier for everyone to learn than multiple
alphabets.
The Roman alphabet is favored by our computerized society because the people who
first developed and used a lot of computer technology were English speaking—and so
they designed computers to use the Roman alphabet, with support for other alphabets
being an afterthought. Today, things like multiple code pages and Unicode provide
much better support for other alphabets, but the Roman alphabet still is more widely
supported than anything else. It will take a very, very long time for this to change,
if it ever does.
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the latin alphabet exist since more than 2500 years (with some little changes). Since
renaissance, all the dominant languages were writed in latin alphabet : Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, French, and more recently english.
It is used in all western Europe, in all the American continents, in most parts of
Africa, in oceania, vietnam.
I understand that the peoples who use another system feel that their traditional
system could be in danger (especially due to computers).
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bernard : aren't there Arabic and Cyrillic keyboards ?
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Computers are just as capable of supporting Arabic or Cyrillic as Roman symbols.
But the traditions and history of computing have always strongly favored English
and the Roman alphabet. It's just habit; there's no technical reason behind it.
But habits are hard to break.
Unicode was supposed to fix this, but even many years after its development, it still
isn't that widely supported. And it's already running out of space, as it has been
carelessly allocated.
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Vladimir,
Cyrillic is better for writing all of the Slavic languages than the Roman alphabet.
Czech ,Polish and Kashubian have to resort to using a lot of diacritical marks as
a result of using the Roman (or Latin) alphabet.
The Roman alphabet is also inadequate for writing English and French and at least
a dozen new alternative alphabets have been proposed for English but none ever adopted.
One of the most interesting alternative scripts proposed for English is one with
spidery shaped letters called "Tempered Notation"; very phonetic but its critics
claim that the letters are too difficult for the average person to write.
Japanese and Burmese are both written in Chinese and Indian based scripts, respectively,
which are very inadequate for these languages. The Koreans have been more sensible
about it using their own phonetic scripts like Pumso and Hangul.
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Brennus
< One of the most interesting alternative scripts proposed for English is one with
spidery shaped letters called "Tempered Notation"; very phonetic but its critics
claim that the letters are too difficult for the average person to write. >
Do you any website Brennus about what are you talking about??
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"The Koreans have been more sensible about it using their own phonetic scripts like
Pumso and Hangul."
I love Korean writing. It's so incredibly simple to learn and ingenius in its design.
In my first Korean class last year we spent less than an hour on the vowels and less
than an hour on the consonants, and by then everyone pretty much had them down and
we could go on to more important things like grammar. Compare this with the endless
work of learning kanji for Japanese learners. I can pronounce any Korean text given
to me, even if I don't understand exactly what I'm saying. This also makes vocab
learning easy.
The most amazing part is that Hangeul's /haNg1l/ devotion to phonetic accuracy was
built into the writing system from the beginning, in the 1400s. With no technical
knowledge of the sounds of the mouth or phonetics, Koreans developed a system that
has symbols that accurately correspond to place of articulation, with variations
on certain themes (such as a basic alveolar shape, for example) for specific sounds
(/t/ and /n/ have similar shapes, following the basic shell expected for alveolar
sounds). That this highly accurate and beautifully simple system has been around
for nearly 600 years is pretty astounding, and unique in the development of writing
systems in the world.
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Kirk, when I was studying Japanese in middle and high school, I often wished that
the Japanese would just ditch kanji altogether for kana alone. The only thing though
is that Japanese has tone-stress, which isn't shown in kana, but could still possibly
be distinguished in cases by the use of different kanji, and different kanji can
distinguish different meanings for two words that would be homophonic in speech,
and written identically with kana. This is similar to how one can have different
spellings for different words that sound the same in speech in modern English, but
which have different meanings in writing, except that homophones are far more common
in modern Japanese than in modern English. Due to such, the likelihood of kanji
being replaced with, say, kana with diacritics added to mark tone-stress, is rather
low.
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Dean,
Fortunately, the internet does have some information on "Tempered Notation" and its
inventor Stanley Hess of Drake University. Below is one web site about it. It takes
about 30 seconds for all the pictures to appear. "Tempered Notation" is featured
at the bottom of the page.
http://www.drizzle.com/~slmndr/salamandir/calli.html
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Brennus, I myself though just favor, with respect to creating new orthographies,
using Latin script, with or without diacritics, simply because it's the most practical
way of doing things, just due to how prevalent it is in computers and printing today,
and how more people are likely to already be familiar with Latin script than any
other script, especially a completely new script for that matter.
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How are Chinese characters inadequate for Japanese? Ideographic writing is not necessarily
worse nor even necessarily harder than phonemic writing. Also, as Travis mentions,
it overcomes the problem of homophones.
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Re: How are Chinese characters inadequate for Japanese?
The main reason is that Japanese is not a tonal language or and isolating language
like Chinese but an agglutinative type like Korean, Mongolian, Turkic, and Finnish.
Chinese characters are no more adequate for writing these types of languages than
they are for writing Indo-European languages like Latin, Russian, German and English
which are also non-tonal and either synthetic or partially synthetic. Japanese would
be better off written in a phonetic script of some kind whether it be a syllabry
like Tibetan and Inuktitut (Eskimo) or an alphabet like Georgian, Armenian and Cyrillic.
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I should add that very simplified Chinese characters like bopomofo (which has 37
characters) might work for Japanese but I think that the Japanese would do best by
starting from scratch and totally inventing their own writing system.
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