A new writing system or cryptology?

A written language is nothing more or less than the written form of a spoken language. It's not a separate or distinct language.

I'm not sure I understand the question. Recognized by whom? Every adoption is unique.

• The Korean phonetic writing system was formally accepted by the Emperor.
• The demise of German Fraktur was announced in a government edict during WWII.
• Chief Sequoia invented the Cherokee syllabary and the entire tribe adopted it as a symbol of their determination to hang onto their culture.
• The origin of Japanese kana is part legend and only part history.

Well yeah. Written English is written; you can see a whole page at once. A decoder ring shows you only one letter at a time and it's up to you whether you want to write it down or keep it in your head as you decode in real time and speak the words as they are decoded.

Even if you become proficient and can read and write as fast as you do in the Roman alphabet, you'll still be the only person who knows what those symbols mean. That's a code, not a language.

The difference is in the purpose, not the details. The purpose of writing is to make the words understandable to the maximum number of people. The purpose of encryption is just the opposite.

As for creating a better form of writing, that has happened on a large or small scale many times.

• On the small scale, many European languages underwent spelling reform in the 19th century, removing a lot of irregularity and making it easier to learn to write them. Even American English was standardized by Noah Webster with several deliberate differences from British English, such as color/colour theater/theatre traveler traveller.
• On a larger scale, when the modern nation of Turkey was formed, the new president decreed that the language would be written in the Roman alphabet rather than the Arabic.
• On a still larger scale, the Japanese decided to invent a phonetic writing system, a syllabary, for writing native Japanese words instead of using Chinese characters. However, about 2,000 characters remain, so since they have two syllabaries with about fifty symbols each, Japanese is still pretty cumbersome to read and write. Some symbols are phonetic, others are logograms.
• At the largest scale, the Koreans completely purged their written language of Chinese characters and use a true phonetic alphabet. Except for the traditional use of Chinese for names and a few other formalities, written Korean is completely phonetic. (In North Korea Chinese symbols are not used at all, or at least they're not supposed to be.)

 

What you're referring to are variants of one language. There are several types of variants, categorized by the extent of the variance and its effect on intercomprehensibility. At one end of the scale you have an accent, which differs from the standard language only in pronunciation. For example, the non-rhotic speech of Boston is an accent, a variant of Standard American English. They use the same words with the same meanings as the rest of us; the main difference is failure to pronounce R at the end of a syllable and occasionally adding one where it doesn't belong, although it has other minor differences that mimic Standard British English.

A dialect is a language variant in which the differences are more than phonetic, such as in grammar or vocabulary, but speakers can understand each other fairly easy, perhaps with only a bit of practice. Southern American was originally a dialect but migration and the influence of TV have nearly reduced it to an accent. The only well-known difference in vocabulary is the invention of a second person plural pronoun, y'all, with a possessive case, y'all's. AAVE (African-American Vernacular English), however, is a dialect. There are substantial differences in grammar (mostly simplification) and some in vocabulary.

Regarding your question about American English and British English: they are dialects. Standard American is the language of TV newscasters, an informal merging of the (only slightly different) accents of Hollywood and New York, where the network studios were located. Standard British English is technically known as Received Pronunciation or RP, but Americans usually call it either Oxford English or BBC English. It was originally a made-up variant, instituted in the private schools (or public schools as they're called over there) as a way for the upper class to make sure their children would be recognized as upper class after schooling, in an age of greater mobility and anonymity.

It's not correct that words are pronounced the same way in both dialects. In fact the differences are tremendous, particularly in the vowels. Listen to each of these words--cat cot caught coat cut--spoken separately, and see if you can guess which one it is without a sentence to show you the meaning. In addition, most British dialects are non-rhotic like Boston: "Whe-ah is the poo-ah buggah?" They also don't flap the intervocalic D and T like we do: liter and leader are homonyms in the USA, but not in Britain.

Spelling is the least of the differences between British and American English. Our spelling was invented by Noah Webster, who wanted it to be obviously different, so he changed colour to color, theatre to theater, traveller to traveler, etc. The main difference is in vocabulary. Lorry for truck, lift for elevator, torch for flashlight, bonnet for (car) hood, windscreen for windshield, pram for stroller, earth for (electrical) ground, spanner for wrench, etc. Oh yeah, and "knock you up" for "pick you up."

After decades of the Beatles, Monty Python, Masterpiece Theater and "Mystery," you younger people have become accustomed to British dialect so you understand it and regard the differences as minor. But 40-50 years ago when British shows first popped up on American TV and British movies first came to our family theaters, we were all scratching our heads and struggling to understand the dialect. British English and American English are dialects because they pass the test of intercomprehensibility, but only barely. Czech and Slovak are almost as similar as British and American, and after being shoved together as a single country for most of a century the people can more-or-less understand each other, yet no one calls them dialects. The people of Estonia regard Estonian and Finnish as dialects, because under the communist government there were no TV stations broadcasting in Estonian, so they had to watch Finnish TV and learn to understand it. The Finns of course can't understand Estonian.

A cant is another type of language variant, and in this case intercomprehensibility is made impossible deliberately, for secrecy. Criminals often have their own cant so we can't tell what they're planning. Pig Latin was invented by children to thwart their parents' eavesdropping, although those children became parents long ago so now everybody understands it. Shelta, the speech of the Irish Travellers, is probably the most elaborate cant every constructed. It's a combination of English and Gaelic words, many with transposed letters, and even though it uses English syntax a speaker of Standard English cannot understand it. "Moniker," the Shelta word for "name," entered our language as slang.

English and French have the most illogical spelling of all languages with phonetic writing systems. The "rules" you mention have so many exceptions that they're almost useless. "Bade" has a short A. Vowel clusters must be guessed: laugh and caught have two different vowels. In order to spell an English word correctly on the first try, you have to know which language it came from. Latin, Greek, French and Anglo-Saxon words have different rules, and they all are broken frequently.

But not all writing systems have such elegant rules. Chinese for example. Each character contains a root or radical, with other strokes added to it. The radicals are assigned a sequence number, starting with one-stroke shapes and moving up, and dictionaries are sorted first by radical number and second by the number of additional strokes. But the radicals typically give only a slight clue to the meaning of the word and in general there's no way to guess the pronunciation of a word from its written form, and vice versa.

Yes but I haven't seen a name for it. Several new fonts have been invented recently, for the purpose of displaying clearly on a computer screen. I read a story about the guy who invented Garamond, which looks much better in pixels than on paper, but he didn't give his occupation a name.

AFAIK, the last totally new writing system was invented about two hundred years ago, Chief Sequoya's Cherokee syllabary.

 

You're welcome, but that's why I took the Moderator job.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I'm hardly an expert. I can't answer all of the questions people ask.

The structure is loose, vague and irregular. The Eastern and British pronunciation of "rodeo" sounds like it should be written "rodio." It's only when you come to the Southwest and hear people say ro-DAY-o, that you realize it's a Spanish word.

American and British spelling have been standardized in their respective dictionaries, so that every word (usually!) has one proper spelling. But the spelling of our language has never been normalized, i.e., made to conform to phonetic rules, so that one can usually guess pronunciation from spelling and vice versa. Most other European languages underwent this process in the 19th century, and if you've studied any of them you can see how far short they fell from their goal even after all that effort, although I think the Finns came very close. So did the Turks, but they had the advantage of starting fresh because they had been using the Arabic alphabet.

English orthography got off to a bad start because after the Norman Invasion French became the official language so there was no cultural center for English. When it began to replace French, words were taken from local dialects where they happened to be heavily used because of the commerce, climate, topography, demographics or culture of the place. If the combination AU was pronounced one way in East Anglia, it was another way in Sussex and yet a third way in London.

By the time England became a major power with a strong central government and influential institutions, its capital had moved to London and the relative importance of the various dialects was realigned. Anyone who wanted to reform English spelling had to find a way to write words so that they would be pronounced correctly in every major dialect. And guess what? The only way to do that was to leave them alone because people were familiar with those spellings!

And there was yet another complication: The evolution of Middle English into Modern English in the 14th-15th centuries was marked by phonetic shifts of forehead-slapping magnitude. Long A changed from the AH sound it has in every other language to the A in "gate." Long I changed from the I in French petite to the I in "climb." The long E of Spanish peso changed to the E in "me." Written English suddenly had an even less logical relationship to spoken English, yet there was still no simple way to reform it because every dialect pronounced at least a few sounds differently, and everybody still recognized the old spellings.

There has been some convergence of dialects in England, but now they have other major English-speaking countries to contend with. How can we spell "writer" and "rider" to let Americans know they're pronounced the same way, while telling the Britons that they're different? How can we spell "law" and "lore" so that we will pronounce them differently and the Brits will treat them as homonyms?

You can see why everyone has given up. It's easier to put our children through the anguish of learning the capricious spelling of each individual word, than to grapple with these problems of divergent pronunciations. And after all, it's still easier than what Chinese children have to go through.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

When the Chinese monks came to Japan bringing Buddhism and their advanced Iron Age civilization, written language came with it. (Every civilization eventually develops writing after it discovers metallurgy because life just gets too dadgum complicated to not write it all down.) At first the Japanese ruling class simply learned Chinese and wrote in Chinese. But eventually their own (now hybrid) culture asserted its supremacy and they adapted the Chinese han dz to their own language. They'd translate a Chinese word into Japanese and then use the corresponding Chinese character to write it down. Unfortunately by this time Japanese had assimilated thousands of Chinese words, and they were using the same characters to write them. You had to figure out from context whether to read a word in Chinese pronunciation (the on reading) or in Japanese (the kun reading). This is made even more confusing by the fact that both Japanese and Chinese have undergone their own phonetic shifts over the centuries, so today the "Chinese" on reading of a character in Japan is not the same as the way a Chinese would read it. The word han dz itself is pronounced kanji in Japanese. R ben is Nihon and Dung jing is Tokyo. (For all of you Chinese readers, yes I'm using Yale romanization instead of Pin-Yin because it's more accurate for this purpose.)

Today standard written Japanese uses only about 2000 kanji. Grammatical endings, particles, foreign words, etc. are written in kana. And the kanji still have two readings which you have to guess from context.

As I said, I'm not enough of a scholar to answer all of your questions. But obviously psychologists can't avoid getting into the subject too.

If you mean the representation of spoken words in symbols, 200 words per minute is about the fastest most of us can process verbal information in any medium. Doesn't matter whether it's kanji, a phonetic alphabet, or a speeded-up tape recording. If you mean other ways of transferring information... Let's see. A really fast piece of music will have more than 200 notes in a minute. So if a musician is reading the score and playing in real time, he's processing the written symbols faster than 200wpm. But I can't sight-read so I can't tell you if a career musician can actually sight-read that fast, or if he has to learn it first, either slowly or a few bars at a time.

You're taking too much of an academic perspective and ignoring the practical implications. How do you get an entire population to learn a new writing system? What do you do with the libraries full of material in the old system? Do the children have to learn both systems during the transition?

The spelling reforms of Italian and Spanish took place at a time when literacy was not universal. The people who could read and write considered themselves upper class and had the time and motivation to participate in this great cultural advance. And oh yeah, the changes weren't so vast that the old way became unreadable.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I think literacy was more common in Germany, but the scope of the reform was even less there. In Turkey the changeover to the Roman alphabet happened after they just lost WWI and saw their Ottoman Empire collapse, so changing the way they wrote was just one more minor nuisance. And it served the very practical purpose of making themselves look a little more similar to the Europeans, who suddenly dominated the region.

Robert Slimbach (b. 1956) has always been interested in graphic design and type faces, although I can't find a reference to his college major. He has worked as a type designer since 1985, for Adobe since 1987. The Garamond typeface was invented by Claude Garamond in the 16th century, but it fell out of vogue although never into complete disuse. Slimbach recognized its potential as a computer typeface and revived it by basing a digital font on it.

Do you speak a second language? That usually stretches your language processing skill to make accents and dialects easier to comprehend. I assume you're studying spoken Japanese and not just the written language, and I hope you have a native speaker because a lot of American foreign language teachers just don't get the sounds quite right. My high school Spanish teacher was so bad that the Latino kids almost couldn't understand her.

 

Glad to hear that. I know that Brits generally pronounce French words fairly accurately, so perhaps you're just as good with Spanish. But that would surprise all the American university students who had to read Byron's "Don JOO-an." We retaliated by calling him bee-RONE.

 

My wife would probably have slapped her. She did her thesis on magic realism.

Borges is revered by American science fiction writers and their fans. I don't think anyone here would dare classify it as "foreign" unless it was the original Spanish.

*Disclaimer: I lack the enzyme to digest "serious literature" so I have no idea what all those great books are about. The House at Pooh Corner is still one of my favorites.

 

That's especially true of German heritage since the end of the 19th century. You had to change Battenberg to Mountbatten.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

I didn't discover the books until I was 30. I was very moved by the ending. Little boys have to grow up, but somewhere in the attic is a beloved old toy who will always miss you. If you want to be a healthy, well-adjusted adult, don't ever let yourself forget that toy... or that little boy. Even if it got moldy and was thrown out. I don't know what it's like in your country, but Americans have a schizophrenic love-hate relationship with their inner child, which explains a lot of our problems.

Not sure I understand the question, sorry.

We're still faithfully using the mechanism for building compound words that goes all the way back to the Greeks. It's a cornerstone of Western culture. The Romans expanded on it by allowing Latin and Greek roots to be mixed and by using Latin grammatical endings as well as Greek. (E.g., Greek tele- with Latin vis- and -ion.) Latin was the universal language of scholarship in Western culture until just a few generations ago, and scholars in both French and English continue to use the venerable old system to coin new words. The other Romance languages easily assimilate the new French Greco-Latin words with minor phonetic, lexicographic and grammatical adjustments, e.g. Spanish psiquiatrista. Since German has just as good a word-building facility as Latin and Greek, in a fit of nationalism the Germans threw out the old vocabulary of scholarship and replaced it with native constructions, some of which are fairly faithful translations such as Fernsprecher for "telephone" and others which strike us as cute and whimsical such as Kraftwagen for "automobile." Nonetheless there are a few universally standardized roots that they just couldn't get along without, such as motor- and elektro-.

Chinese has a more powerful word-building facility than any Indo-European language, which is fortunate since its phonetics make it virtually impossible to borrow foreign words. Its invariably monosyllablic morphemes make for some very compact and occasionally amusing scientific and technical terms, such as shi-you, "stone oil," a literal translation of "petroleum," and dian nao, "electric brain," their cute little word for "computer."

Back on topic, words like pictograph, logogram, hieroglyph and ideogram simply follow our venerable 2500-year-old traditional way of inventing new words.

• Pictographs: Pictorial, representational symbols for ideas or concepts, intended to be easily understood across cultures. For example, the symbols for poison, restroom, airport, fire alarm, gasoline pump, no animals allowed, and pedestrians' turn to cross the street are rapidly become international standards, instantly recognizable by anyone from any modern civilization. Your internet screen is plastered with pictograms, although not all of them are as perfected and easily grasped as the "Don't Walk!" symbol.
• Logograms: Symbols for morphemes or words (the smallest units of meaning in a language, depending on its structure). A logogram may give no hint to pronunciation, so it is more useful for understanding written language than for rendering it into speech. Many Chinese logograms are comprised of one radical that hints at the pronunciation and another that hints at the meaning, but I'd estimate that you'd need a vocabulary of at least 3,000 morphemes (functionally literate by PRC government standards) before that would be even slightly helpful upon first encounter with a new han zi..
• Ideograms: Representations of ideas or concepts. Pictographs are a type of ideograph, but not all ideographs are designed to be intuitively recognizable. Numerals, mathematical operators and the symbols of electrical engineering are examples of ideographs that must be learned, but are nearly universal and not peculiar to any one language community.
• Hieroglyphs: In linguistics, the word is used for any non-phonetic writing system, such as the Egyptian, Chinese and Mayan. In general use it is a less precise term, often for a transitional phase in the evolution of writing. Hieroglyphs originate as pictograms, but become so stylized and conventionalized that they become unrecognizable outside their language community. In Egyptian, the symbols ultimately came to stand for the sounds of the words they represented. When they were first discovered by Western scholars these obviously pictorial symbols were assumed to be pictograms or logograms, and therefore were named hieroglyphics. As they were deciphered they were discovered to in fact be an abjad, a phonetic writing system for consonants only, as is common throughout the Afro-Asiatic language family in which vowels are not phonemic, e.g., the Hebrew and Ancient Arabic abjads. However, the name "hieroglyphic" has stuck in popular parlance, and "abjad" is in fact a fairly new word unknown to laymen--most people refer to the Hebrew writing system as an alphabet. Speaking of Hebrew, the proto-Canaanite abjad from which it descended was based on Egyptian "hieroglyphics," which are in fact probably the ancestor of all modern alphabets (but not syllabaries like kana or Cherokee).

Japanese is like Italian, with a high ratio of syllables to ideas, so like Italian it must be spoken very quickly. It's much easier to understand Chinese, which is at the opposite end of that scale.

Be careful. Like the French, the Japanese do not all appreciate the attempts of foreigners to learn their language. Foreign accents grate upon their ears and grammatical errors make them cringe. Until recently they assumed that no foreigner could come close to mastering their language. I have a friend who lived in Japan for many years as a visiting professor, has exceptional linguistic skills, and speaks the language like a native. Yet if he walked up to a Japanese and began speaking, they assumed he was speaking English and did not interpret the sounds as Japanese words. They just politely said, "I'm sorry, I don't speak English." He learned to walk up behind them and start speaking before they could see his face.

I would suggest that you not just walk up to a Japanese and start speaking his language. Instead, explain that you are a student, and very politely ask if he would mind helping you with your conversational skills. Then let him take charge of the lesson. He is the master, you are the pupil, and you must treat him with great deference. On the other hand he will be required to treat you with considerable respect because you are a foreign guest in a place of Japanese culture like a restaurant, so to a certain degree this will balance out. You will not be reduced to groveling like in a martial arts dojo.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!

 

This is not a proper definition of the word "code."

• A code is merely a system for transcribing language from one medium (usually speech but not always) into another.
• A code need not be written. Morse code and the semaphore code were developed specifically for instances when neither speech nor writing would be effective.
• A code need not be human-readable. The primary purpose of many computer coding systems is to be read by devices, and may be transmitted in a medium imperceptible to humans.
• Codes designed to be read by people are not all intended for a limited audience. Both Morse and semaphore are open to anyone.

I have never seen this question asked and answered academically, but my answer is: A code that specifically transcribes speech into written symbols becomes a written language when

• It is formalized, so that the rules are reasonably standard and constant,
• It is found useful beyond the community of its creators and advocates,
• It is universal within the spoken language community (or in the past, the literate segment thereof), or well on its way to that status, perhaps with the advocacy of a government, church, or other powerful institution behind it.

This can lead to situations that require analysis on a case-by-case basis. Serbo-Croation is a spoken language. (We'll ignore the political and religious issues; linguists define Serbian and Croatian as easily intercomprehensible dialects of a single tongue.) But Serbian is a distinct written language, using the Cyrillic alphabet, while Croatian is another distinct written language, using the Roman alphabet. A similar case can be made for Hindustani as one spoken language (with similar political and religious objections) while Hindi (Devanagari script) and Urdu (Perso-Arabic script) are distinct written languages.

Fortunately I'm not a real linguist, certainly not one deserving a capital L. My credentials as a philosopher are--how shall I put this?--no weaker than my credentials as a linguist. My career has been in software development, management, training, writing and editing, and my formal education was in mathematics, science and business, with just a few language classes thrown in, which I greatly enjoyed and continued informally.

I don't find that sad. The internet makes all of this text more readily available to more people, as translation software will one day make it available in any language. But more importantly, the evolving database/data-warehouse/business-intelligence/whatever-the-next-generation-will-be-called structure of digital storage has far more advanced organization, making it not only easier to find what you want, but easier to discover that you might want something you didn't even know existed. This is a tremendous improvement over hard-copy libraries with the Dickensian Era user-hostile ergonomics of the Dewey Decimal System.

Obviously digitization comes with risks, since it could make the dystopia of 1984 easier to implement with only a few copies of each text to edit. As a former data security officer I'm a little more worried about that than most IT professionals, and that fact worries me even more. But assuming we find a way around that problem--hundreds of backup hard copies uncatalogued in collectors' attics scattered all over the world is a good start--I am convinced that written language that is not merely digitally stored but digitally organized will be a boon to civilization. Just in the last five years I've been able to find answers to questions that had been puzzling me for decades.

Why? One of the many advantages of digitization is the ease of format translation for the convenience of the end user. I fully expect that the computer revolution will enhance the status of minority languages rather than hasten their extinction. There's a thriving transnational Aramaic community on the web. People in their late teens and early twenties often develop nostalgia for an ancestral culture they never actually knew very well personally (e.g., ¡Viva la Raza!), and I'm sure somewhere in the Great Plains a young scholar with too much education and not enough work is recording Cherokee legends in Greek and translating Plato into Cherokee.

I don't think it's been done recently. The relationship between governments, academia and churches was different in the 19th century. The most recent orthography reform I know of was Turkish switching from the Arabic to the Roman alphabet almost a century ago. That was one of the many reforms spearheaded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the larger-than-life figure who created the modern, relatively secular nation of Turkey out of the ruins of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Let's hope we don't get a replay of that type of opportunity any time soon.

The only language I know of whose writing system might be scheduled for reform is Chinese. In this case it clearly will be the government that promotes the change, hires the scholars to develop the new writing system, and oversees the colossal task of the transition. Still, even this need, which has been brewing for decades, might be obviated by next-generation information technology. Every han zi has a serial number and can be instantly translated into any romanization or native phonetic script. Traditional Chinese can continue to read han zi (and a persuasive case has been made that it is faster to read than the Roman alphabet), and renegade Chinese and foreigners can read their choice of alphabet or syllabary. I guarantee that if the PRC goes phonetic, the RoC will retain han zi for the next thousand years, and brag about it.

Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!