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COMMON SCRIPT FOR ALL LANGUAGES | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| obara Newbie India subramanian-obula.blRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 21 posts - 22 votes Studies: Gujarati | Message 1 of 40 22 August 2008 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to know whether there has been made any attempt to evolve a common script to write all the language in the world so that the burden of learning a new script for each language can be overcome.
For instance Japanese can be written in Romaji. But the natives stick to Hiragana, Katakana and yet they can not do away with Kanji borrowed from Chinese Language. Linguists can throw light on this topic. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 40 22 August 2008 at 9:37am | IP Logged | ||
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There is the International Phonetic Alphabet; this is the closest that I am aware of to what you are looking for.
Frankly, I think there is absolutely no point in having a common script for all of the world's languages. The script is one of the most minor hurdles to overcome, assuming that it's an alphabet or syllabary. For someone who knows the Roman alphabet, learning Cyrillic or the Japanese Kana is the work of less than a day. The important Kanji can be learned in a month, and the Hanzi in 2-4 months; this is a heavier burden, but still far from the largest one in learning a new language. By changing the script of a language, a number of problems are introduced: a) Most people are cut off from the history of their own languages; less of them are able to read old writings. This has already been a problem with Chinese simplified characters, and with Turkish switching to use the Roman alphabet. b) The new script may match the language extremely poorly. It can suddenly take a lot more letters to write the same words. Worse, unless the script has an unfeasibly high number of letters or diacritics, there is also the problem that the same letter will represent extremely different sounds in different languages. Some languages may even need to use the same letter for different sounds. c) The amount of ambiguity can become impossibly high. This is clearly illustrated in the Classical Chinese poem "Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den". Using a historical pronunciation, the romanization is as follows:
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| Ponape Pentaglot Groupie Spain Joined 5970 days ago 42 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Greek, Basque, Swahili, Tagalog, Arabic (classical), Quechua, Vietnamese, Turkish, Korean, Serbo-Croatian, Hindi | Message 3 of 40 22 August 2008 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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If only one writing system was used, probably a lot of the world culture would be lost.
In any case, probably, the alphabet which is closer to a universal standard is the one created by the International Phonetics Association, although it is mostly based on Latin and Greek. I even think it would be a good idea to make a wider international use of this alphabet, for example as a help for news broadcasters to pronounce foreign people's names more correctly :-) We could even have the IPA transcriptions of our names in our ID cards or passports! I am happy that many Wikipedia articles have these transcriptions provided, for examples. Ian Thorpe /'Iën 8O:p/ Javier Hermosilla /xa'Bjér ermo'sija/ ... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| obara Newbie India subramanian-obula.blRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5974 days ago 21 posts - 22 votes Studies: Gujarati | Message 4 of 40 22 August 2008 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would like to know whether IPA is enough to represent all sounds in all languages.
I saw in an English Dictionary that there are 46 symbols in IPA [14 vowels, 8 dipthongs and 24 consonants] At least, it should satisfy the requirements of major world languages. Is it possible to reduce the graphemes/symbols? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6444 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 40 22 August 2008 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||
No, IPA can't record all the sounds if I remember correctly. I still don't know how one goes about recording Korean "double" consonants in IPA. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| autodidactic Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States tinyurl.com/cunningl Joined 6631 days ago 100 posts - 110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Japanese, Kazakh | Message 6 of 40 22 August 2008 at 3:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've learned the Arabic Script, the Russian alphabet, the hiragana, and am currently working my way through kanji. Maybe I'm biased but that's a horrible idea. Take away the script and you take away one of the greatest appeals for these languages. Besides, any phonetic/syllabic based script only takes a few hours to learn, and a few days to master if you're dedicated. Maybe japanese and chinese COULD do without characters, japanese sticking only to hiragana, but where's the fun in that?
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7164 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 40 22 August 2008 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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It'd be a non-starter. Rightly or wrongly there's a lot of symbolism attached to script and choice of script can express a way of identifying with a certain religion, ideology or group of speakers - racially kindred or not.
Changing to a common script also ignores how morphophonemic the script of a given language is ("non-phonetic" spelling but emphasizes etymology and the language's history). In addition, a symbol in one language would be pronounced differently in another. It'd be a nice mental exercise to be able to devise a way to express all languages with a common script, but I reckon that that would be as far as it goes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chas Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5946 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Indonesian | Message 8 of 40 22 August 2008 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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IPA might not cover every possible sound in the world, but it comes pretty close! It even has a theoretical symbol for a sound that arguably doesn't exist in ANY language (the retroflex implosive sound)!
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