Why reform alphabets?

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?

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.

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).

bernard : aren't there Arabic and Cyrillic keyboards ?

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.

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.

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??

"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.

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.

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

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.

Brennus thanks

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.

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.

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.