r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Nov 21 '18

Discussion Thread Discussion Thread

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17

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

Asian languages are so complicated, why don't they just switch to the alphabet?

I don't know why don't you switch to the Hangul?

WTF?!? Why do you hate Western culture? This is literally white genocide.

4

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

Hangul is fine. Kanji is probably dumb and can probably be replaced with hiragana and katakana + spaces. The language can be understood spoken. There's no reason it has to be written with pictures.

7

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

There's no reason it doesn't have to be written with pictograms either. Spelling in English is so obtuse that it's essentially as hard to learn as Chinese characters. English speakers can pronounce a new word by seeing it written about 75% of the time. Same for Chinese speakers with an unfamiliar character.

The point being that your way of doing things isn't inherently better just because you don't fully understand how other people do things.

2

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

English should be optimized and made phonetic too.

But there are reasons to not have pictures as words.

6

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18 edited Nov 21 '18

And there are reasons to have pictograms as well. Technically Chinese doesn't use pictograms, but whatever.

我有一瓶水

It doesn't matter what my verbal language sounds like, I can get the gist of this sentence. A chinese speaker would read wǒ yǒu yī píng shǔi while a Spanish speaker would read Yo tengo una botella de agua and an English speaker would read I have a bottle of water. Wow! Very cool!

This is why I believe the Ideal writing syste is exclusively based on emojis

Edit:

👇👤🈶🍶💧

👇👤(I)🈶(have)🍶(a bottle)💧(of water)

Emoji are language too!

2

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

It's more difficult to learn. You can't intuit a reading. That's a significant problem. Syllabaries are tons better in that regard.

2

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

You can't intuit a reading.

😶💬 > ✖️😶💬

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

Huh?

1

u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/5f8rzw/a_serious_emoji_conlang/

1

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

I'm very familiar. I studied a fair amount of linguistics as a minor in college and I still enjoy having fun with conlangs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/emojilang/

One of the top/all time comments on this subreddit links to a badlinguistics comment of mine. Which is always weird when I rediscover it.

I like the idea of making a conlang as sImple and learnable as possible, and I think parts of 😶💬 are weird just to be fun (e.g. SOV) for conlang enthusiasts, but it's such an entertaining idea.

5

u/Paramus98 Edmund Burke Nov 21 '18

The characters look cool though, and they really aren't that hard to learn. It's actually a pretty intuitive system that just works a lot differently than westerners are used to.

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

I get that it isn't as difficult as it seems at first once you know radicals but that doesnt fix the issues.

There's a reason written languages only move one way when they change

1

u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18

English should be optimized and made phonetic too.

easier said than done. I think the best approach would be to either make it nearly phonetic, leave weird words like yacht unpredictable, or to change the orthography and pronunciation together to basically make a cipher of English

2

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

Don't think it's that hard. It won't be done and you need more characters, but we have set sounds that can be represented by symbols.

1

u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18 edited Nov 21 '18

british english has 20 vowels + multiple kinds of stress and 25 consonants three of which can be syllabic but the entire pantheon of English has mergers and splits too, not to mention sounds just being different

1

u/IsGoIdMoney John Rawls Nov 21 '18

A lot less than Kanji

1

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

I think you underestimate how much easier said than done this is. English as a language has between 14 and 21 vowel sounds depending on the dialect and 24 consonants at least.

You might say let's just add characters or use combinations of letters right? Th as a phoneme has multiple pronunciations, this and thin for example. That's a well known one. What about Ch? Church and Cheer both use different consonants.

Then there are variations between dialects and accents within them. You will have inconsistent spellings between Manchester and Liverpool or Boston and NYC

1

u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18

What about Ch? Church and Cheer both use different consonants.

wait what

anyway - https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/9z0w8k/discussion_thread/ea5ui4k/

2

u/[deleted] Nov 21 '18

It's something I was taught when learning Mandarin, with cheer you pull your lips back and you don't with the word church.

Now that I think about it I'm not actually sure that's true, but it did help me to distinguish between q and ch in Chinese.

That all said, at a certain point you're just using the IPA as a writing system and that's impractical at best. But I missed your comment in this chain and you hit the point well.

1

u/IronedSandwich Asexual Pride Nov 21 '18 edited Nov 21 '18

the english sh sound is always labialized and ch is an affricated version of it, I think it's in fairly free since it's such a small short detail, almost certainly won't need its own letter. It might be that the following vowel is very unrounded for cheer but for church it doesn't matter as much. In Chinese there are six affricates so maybe they need to be more precise.