"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
21 October 2022
Comparing alphabets
Even though this information will never be "useful" to me in any practical sense, I'm posting it because of the interesting method of display (a type of Venn diagram). Here's another method:
The canonical western alphabet Varies too. You don't find letters like K W and J in Italian. And over the years there have been fewer letters. And at one time there were 27 letters. That extra letter as &. Which has an interesting self referential name "ampersand" is a compression of "and, per se, and". So the letters name referee to itself!
1968 UNESCO Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which among other things ventured to regulate cross border vehicle traffic, means that Russian vehicle number plates use the sub-set of the full Cyrillic alphabet {B E X M K H T P I A C O} that look like Western letters. See youtube "Plain Text - Dylan Beattie - NDC Oslo 2021" [54m] or my 600 word exec summary: https://tinyurl.com/57nmmuzs
The Cherokee Syllabary has a letter for every sound in the Cherokee language. I have wondered why English doesn't do that. Apparently, there are only 44 distinct sounds in English. Maybe if we introduced a new letter to our alphabet every so often, we'd eventually have a language that would be far easier to learn (I would think--since letters make only a single, unique sound).
In Professor Paulos' book, "Beyond Numeracy," he tells of a mathematician's joke....
You're not the first, nor the last to suggest the idea. However, it poses many challenges, such as: - There exist many, many varieties of English, each of which have smaller or larger differences in pronunciation, and some of which have a higher number of distinct sounds than others, so it would be difficult to create a spelling system that suits all of them; - If you write words exactly the way you pronounce them, it becomes much harder to see where they came from historically, which can be of great help if you want to guess the meaning of a word that you have never seen before; - Also, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as their/there/they're) other then by context; - Languages slowly change over time, so in order to remain phonetically 100% accurate, the spelling system needs to be "updated" every once in a while. Which is indeed the usual practice for many languages, but spelling often tends to lag behind pronunciation - sometimes by centuries, as is the case for much of English. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For more info, there are many excellent Youtube channels that delve into subjects like these, so have a look around if you're interested. This one by LangFocus may be a nice one for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqLiRu34kWo.
Your Venn diagram shows languages using Cyrillic letters; your 'another method' diagram shows languages using Latin letters.
ReplyDeleteYes. It's another method of displaying overlaps and similarities without using the Venn diagram method.
DeleteThe canonical western alphabet Varies too. You don't find letters like K W and J in Italian. And over the years there have been fewer letters. And at one time there were 27 letters. That extra letter as &. Which has an interesting self referential name "ampersand" is a compression of "and, per se, and". So the letters name referee to itself!
ReplyDelete1968 UNESCO Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, which among other things ventured to regulate cross border vehicle traffic, means that Russian vehicle number plates use the sub-set of the full Cyrillic alphabet {B E X M K H T P I A C O} that look like Western letters. See youtube "Plain Text - Dylan Beattie - NDC Oslo 2021" [54m] or my 600 word exec summary: https://tinyurl.com/57nmmuzs
ReplyDeleteThe Cherokee Syllabary has a letter for every sound in the Cherokee language. I have wondered why English doesn't do that. Apparently, there are only 44 distinct sounds in English. Maybe if we introduced a new letter to our alphabet every so often, we'd eventually have a language that would be far easier to learn (I would think--since letters make only a single, unique sound).
ReplyDeleteIn Professor Paulos' book, "Beyond Numeracy," he tells of a mathematician's joke....
"You spell 'Henry" H-E-N-3-R-Y--the 3 is silent."
You're not the first, nor the last to suggest the idea. However, it poses many challenges, such as:
Delete- There exist many, many varieties of English, each of which have smaller or larger differences in pronunciation, and some of which have a higher number of distinct sounds than others, so it would be difficult to create a spelling system that suits all of them;
- If you write words exactly the way you pronounce them, it becomes much harder to see where they came from historically, which can be of great help if you want to guess the meaning of a word that you have never seen before;
- Also, it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently, such as their/there/they're) other then by context;
- Languages slowly change over time, so in order to remain phonetically 100% accurate, the spelling system needs to be "updated" every once in a while. Which is indeed the usual practice for many languages, but spelling often tends to lag behind pronunciation - sometimes by centuries, as is the case for much of English.
And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For more info, there are many excellent Youtube channels that delve into subjects like these, so have a look around if you're interested. This one by LangFocus may be a nice one for starters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqLiRu34kWo.
They might ne be of practical use to you, but they are great for us GeoGuessr players!
ReplyDelete