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COMMON SCRIPT FOR ALL LANGUAGES | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6447 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 25 of 40 25 August 2008 at 5:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Ok. I've started a new thread for people who want to continue the discussion of what it means to learn a script.
I think you grossly underestimate the range of sounds made in the world's languages. IPA is almost never written out fully (with all of its diacritics) because this would make it much more ornate and difficult to read than Vietnamese. Wikipedia begins to show the problem. I'll go so far as to say that it's impossible to have an aesthetic, easy-to-write system that even roughly approximates all of the sounds in the world. Your definition of 'aesthetic' and 'easy-to-write' may be different from mine, of course. There's also the significant problem of regional variation. If everyone started writing even English, a largely-mutually-intelligible language between different regions, phonetically, it would be terrible. One would have to recognize a multitude of spellings for the same word, and the same spelling for different words in different regions. Even for native speakers, it would also absolutely kill any ability to read quickly, as this depends on not having to sound everything out letter by letter.
I recommend reading about the International Phonetic Alphabet and about phonetic transcription. I don't really see how there can be a meaningful discussion if you don't. And, finally, here's a concrete example of the kind of problem I mean, quoting from Wikipedia again:
The first transcription is long, uses superscripts and a ton of diacritics, is unwieldy to write, is region-specific, and notes features than native speakers aren't consciously aware of - and this is for a language without tones, and noting nothing about the intonation or stress patterns! The third transcription is superficially appealing, but only useful if you already know something about English phonetics, which would negate the whole point of your proposed system, unless I'm missing something. Mastering a system like this is a significant amount of work. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't be able to handle it in a semester. It's not merely a matter of learning a script; it requires gaining an extremely thorough grounding in applied and theoretical phonetics as well. Even if I wanted to pronounce dozens of languages 'recognizably', ad-hoc transcriptions in phrasebooks or dictionaries and/or a rough approximation of IPA, and actual auditory sources strike me as a much faster way to learn to do so. For smaller numbers of languages, the overhead is even larger in comparison. Or, to put it another way: I think it's significant that even professional linguists, even those who study dozens of languages, use 'fully written out' IPA very rarely. Given the choice between learning to read traditional Chinese characters, and learning to be absolutely fluid in reading and writing full IPA, I'd choose the former. Aside from not being able to pronounce some rare characters, which is a minor disadvantage, and leaving aside the advantages (such as being able to read actual Chinese as it is usually written), I'm not at all convinced that it's less work. 1 person has 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 26 of 40 24 September 2008 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If an exhaustive common script to write all languages of the world,is not possible, I think it is still possible to evolve a common script for writing a group of languages, say all Indian languages of which at least 18 are categorized as recognized National Languages of India.
Similarly, Japanese can be written in Roman script fairly well to acquire Spoken Japanese. I would seek the experience of others who have managed Spoken Japanese with Roman script alone. 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 27 of 40 25 September 2008 at 5:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'd say that writing Japanese with Romaji is a bad idea. There are different romanizations, but they tend to make things ambiguous, such as where syllable boundaries are. There are also two tradeoffs here: roman script vs the kana, and roman script vs normal Japanese writing (kana and Kanji), with different benefits and disadvantages. Another thing perhaps worth noting is that any widely used method of writing Japanese (kana, kanji, or roman script) doesn't mark important things such as the pitch accent - which admittedly also varies regionally. A common script (or a few common scripts) for Indic languages might make sense (I don't know enough to say); it seems to me that there are a lot of different-but-similar scripts for related languages. Writing systems in general are 'lossy' - they don't record a lot of relevant information. Native speakers can deal with this, generally, as they know (a large chunk of) the spoken language, and can fill in more gaps. I think a common system could be used for this, although at a heavy cost. A universal script tailored for learning - or acquiring the most useful tourist phrases - has different requirements. There's simply so much that you need to be able to mark that it's prohibitive to learn, and entirely unsuited for casual use. 1 person has 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 28 of 40 25 September 2008 at 6:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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O.K. If romaaji [roman script] alone is not sufficient, can it be possible to do away with Kanji? Will Hiragana and Katakana suffice for acquiring Spoken Japanese?
Please suggest some simpler way to acquire Spoken Japanese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 6117 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 30 of 40 10 October 2008 at 8:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
About Cyrillic, Volte is right, about those other languages I have no idea. But for sure I consider Volte - and some other users of these forums too - "smarter than the average person". ;-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gilgamesh Tetraglot Senior Member England Joined 6250 days ago 452 posts - 468 votes 14 sounds Speaks: Dutch, English, German, French Studies: Polish | Message 31 of 40 10 October 2008 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I don't think that's such an exaggeration, either.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Gray Newbie United States Joined 6044 days ago 32 posts - 48 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 32 of 40 21 October 2008 at 8:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The problem with the idea of a universal script based on phonetics is that writing systems are generally not used to convey sound to a reader, but meaning. A truly phonetic system would vary not just with every dialect, but with every individual writer. This does nothing to help convey meaning to other people. In fact, in order for a script to serve multiple dialects and languages it has to divorce itself from phonetics. This is why Chinese characters are universally applicable across mutually unintelligible dialects. It's also why people from India, Scotland, and Arkansas can all understand each others web posts even if they'd likely have difficulty comprehending each other in person.
The IPA serves a purpose for learning how to pronounce a word that you already know the meaning of (if you are, for instance, looking it up in the dictionary and happen to know how to interpret IPA). But it's not meant to convey meaning, and trying to adapt it for that purpose would be useless and futile. The idea of an international script (like an unspoken Esperanto) has been discussed before, and many people tend to think that an ideogram based system would be the simplest. But it would have limited utility mostly confined to basic necessities, since beyond the bare basics you'd have to also come up with an international grammar, which is pretty much impossible without inventing a whole other language, and created languages are already a known failure in the grand scheme of things. Basically you'd only be able to have a handful (maybe up to a couple hundred) of symbols that are mostly used one or two at a time to convey ideas like "hospital", "food", "money", and similar things. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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