Thank you for patiently sharing your knowledge with me.
You're welcome, but that's why I took the Moderator job.
Traditionally speaking, language has always been my weakest subject and so I feel a little out of place in this sub-forum.
I'm hardly an expert. I can't answer all of the questions people ask.
And yes, the "rules" of written English are anything but logical. But there is a structure behind it (i.e., language of origin, drop the -e and -ing).
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.
Other than Noah Webster, has anyone tried to standardize the many exceptions to the rule.
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.
Over the past few months I've memorized most of the first year Kana characters though don't ask me what the On and Kun readings are just yet.
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.
Is Linguistics the only study of the structure of language?
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.
Writing is a visual medium just as speech is an auditory medium. Wouldn't you agree that we are capable of assimilating so much more information then our current writing system allows?
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.
It suprises me that there is not a separate field of study dedicated to the structure of the written word. I thought someone would be out there trying to improve on this cognitive ability. Let's say that someone figured out a way to write the same amount of phonic information using a fewer amount of strokes. Would that be considered a better writing system? Maybe that system could be phonically translated by different languages (words written the same). Would that be a better form of writing? Don't tell me that nobody has tried to improve upon the alphabet in all these years.
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.

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.
Just out of curiousity, that guy who invented Garamond, what was his major field of study?
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.
BTW: I'm in my early thirties and I still have a hard time understanding the Brits (or any other heavy accent). I like Monty Pythons shtick and all but when they start talking like women, fogitaboudit. I can't understand a bloody word.
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.