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Writing systems by number of users | ||
Tags: Writing System | Writing | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 22 13 May 2011 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As far as I know both Greeks and Cypriots adhere to the same orthography with just one accent sign and a trema. But until the latest big ortography reform there were three accent and two aspiration signs and the trema, and if you go back to older forms of Greek like koiné every text was brimming with diacritics. This cumbersome system arose when the Ancient Greek system based on wowel length developed into a system based on stress. Because nobody in this messy situation actually spoke the way the purists wanted they introduced the diacritics to guide people, and the result was a system where there almost were more diacritics than letters. Edited by Iversen on 13 May 2011 at 12:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Delodephius Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 5407 days ago 342 posts - 501 votes Speaks: Slovak*, Serbo-Croatian*, EnglishC1, Czech Studies: Russian, Japanese | Message 10 of 22 13 May 2011 at 1:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, but I was thinking of the original Latin alphabet, the one that the Romans used. This original set is used for some languages that use the Latin alphabet, like English. I was thinking of languages that use just this set. There is no language written in the Cyrillic alphabet today that uses the same set of characters as Old Church Slavonic did. Edited by Delodephius on 13 May 2011 at 1:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5457 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 11 of 22 13 May 2011 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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English actually uses a late version of the Latin alphabet with innovations such as J and W, not to mention lower
case. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6918 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 22 07 June 2011 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think you could count Japanese and Chinese as having the same writing system. If you learned Japanese kanji you could not go and read a Chinese text and understand it fully. Sure, Japanese kanji was borrowed from Chinese, but this was a long time ago and both languages and their scripts have changed a lot since then. The issue is also complicated by the fact that each Chinese language uses a different set of characters. Mandarin Chinese uses simplified Chinese characters, Cantonese uses traditional characters with Cantonese grammar and Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan uses traditional characters with Mandarin grammar. Japanese kanji is somwhere in the middle of traditional and simplified Chinese characters, and of course it's written using Japanese grammar, which is completely different to Chinese grammar. And Japanese doesn't just use kanji characters, it also has two syllabic scripts, hiragana and katakana, which have about 50 letters each. Hiragana is used for native Japanese words, grammatical endinngs, particles etc. Katakana is used for writing foreign words, emphasising words etc. You won't see a Japanese sentence that uses just kanji. You need to know all 3 scripts to be able to read Japanese. So, in conclusion, while knowing the Japanese script will help in learning written Chinese and vice versa, you could not say that they both use the same script. If you know just Chinese there will be plenty of characters you won't understand when reading Japanese and vice versa. You could not even read the text out loud (as the pronunciation also differs). The best you could do was get a general gist of the topic of the text and be able to recognise several words that are the same (due to Japanese borrowing from Chinese). Edited by unzum on 07 June 2011 at 3:04pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 13 of 22 07 June 2011 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
With that kind of reasoning, there aren't any two languages that use the same writing system. Thus, the question of arranging scripts by number of users becomes much easier, but much less interesting. The kanji and the kana are all derived from the Chinese character set, as are the simplified characters used in China and Singapore. The question is where to draw the line. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Greek alphabet. If we draw a line between them, it might make sense to draw a line between Japanese and Chinese. But do we then also draw a line between simplified and traditional Chinese? Also, the Indian scripts will be a mess to decide which are the same and which are not. In the end, this will all become very arbitrary. Does English and Vietnamese use the same writing system? Greek and Russian? What about Greek and Hebrew, both systems being related to Phonecian? Cantonese uses Latin characters to write a fair number of words, English uses Arabian numerals, etc. In the end, I suspect the only thing a list of writing systems by number of users will reflect is the assumptions behind determining what counts as a "writing system". 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5230 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 14 of 22 07 June 2011 at 7:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
I couldn't agree more. Which was exactly my initial point: the easier the calculation is, the less interesting the problem, and vice-versa. I'm afraid I have no time for the detailed calculations a sufficiently interesting version of the problem requires. Edited by mrwarper on 07 June 2011 at 7:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6918 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 15 of 22 08 June 2011 at 1:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, this is kind of the point I was trying to make. Although knowing say, the Latin alphabet of English will help you in reading Spanish, you don't know the pronounciation of ñ. So perhaps you could say that knowing the English Latin alphabet gives you a 96% knowledge of the Spanish alphabet. And looking at the Vietnamese alphabet there are 22 recognisable English letters out of 29 in total, so 76%. But then you have the accent marks, 5 to indicate the tone of the word and 4 to create additional sounds. Knowing the English Latin alphabet will not help you in reading words using these accent marks. And apparently the letter g is pronounced like z or y, and the English Latin alphabet doesn't give us any clues to its pronunciation so maybe we should take that letter out of the recognisable letters? I think the most you could do is count the languages whose alphabet/script is derived from the same source. So Spanish and Vietnamese would both count towards the total for the Latin alphabet. Oh, and by the way, there's some good diagrams on the Wikipedia page for writing systems. Just from glancing at it it appears the Latin alphabet is the most widespread, followed by Cyrillic and Arabic. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5557 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 16 of 22 08 June 2011 at 5:06am | IP Logged | |||||
Not exactly numbered data but this is a neat image I found ages ago online :O
Bigger pic here 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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