| True, and an interesting contrast in properties of Western alphabets vs. Eastern logosyllabic writing. Advantage West: a compact, typeset- and keyboard-friendly characterset with a writing style that generally allows sounding out of unknown words. Advantage East: a pronunciation-independent mapping of ideas allowing mutually unintelligible spoken language across either space (Japan, to some extent Korea, as well as modern Chinese provinces, particularly Mandarin vs. Cantonese) or time (modern vs. ancient) to at least largely understand one another. Much of the shift in written English parallels changes in spoken English. Chinese doens't have that problem. But it's far harder to learn and type or encode in modern computers, where it is not letterforms but encodings standing for letterforms which are stored and projected via fonts and Unicode codepoints. Chinese, as a tonal language is so dependent on inflection that my own primitive attempts to pronounce even simple phrases are not understood based on my incorrect tonality. Contrast with various Germanic languages (German, English, Dutch, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish), which vary greatly in pronunciation and orthography. German is spelled and spoken logically. Danish is spelled much like German but not pronounced the same. Norwegian pronunciation differs, but its spelling at least corresponds to that pronunciation. Swedish is pronounced very differently, and the spelling doesn't much conform. All share common linguistic roots. Each approach of writing and alphabet appears to be brittle in its own ways. |