|
 |
Most difficult alphabet | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| hjordis Senior Member United States snapshotsoftheworld. Joined 4967 days ago 209 posts - 264 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, German, Spanish, Japanese | Message 33 of 42 27 April 2014 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The Arabic script intimidates me, which is weird because I'm not intimidated by Japanese
kanji. As for most difficult, I don't know enough about the less common scripts. It's looking like Thai is a popular choice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4150 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 34 of 42 28 April 2014 at 4:39am | IP Logged | ||
|
I read a Wikipedia article about the Malayalam script and that one looked like it would take awhile to be comfortable!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 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 35 of 42 28 April 2014 at 11:05am | IP Logged | ||
|
I have not tried to learn any of the Sanskrit inspired alphabets in Asia, but in connection with my travels in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos I have always tried at least to get an impression of the local languages and the ways they are written. And my impression is that their alphabets may have many signs, but they are generally logically built on combinatorical elements, and that should make it feasible to learn them without much ado. The problem for me is whether you can guess the pronunciation of a written text, and so far I have never needed to find the answer to this question because I haven't tried to learn to speak those languages. I visited South Korea many years ago and bought a quick guide to their alphabet, and it was exceedingly easy to learn - but I have been told that it is very hard to learn how to pronounce the language for reasons that have little to do with the alphabet. Edited by Iversen on 28 April 2014 at 11:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 36 of 42 28 April 2014 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The pronunciation of Korean isn't that hard - but it contains three-way variants of the
general k,t,p consonants. Furthermore it assimilates sounds, but that happens in every language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5741 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 37 of 42 28 April 2014 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | ||
You're considerably understating the difficulty of it. And then there's those sounds in Korean that seemingly shape shift at certain spots in certain words. For example the first sound in 몰라요 sometimes sounds like an "m", sometimes like a "b", and sometimes somewhere in between. All those horror stories about Korean exist for a reason, as I'm sure you'll discover if you probe deeper into the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4488 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 38 of 42 29 April 2014 at 7:31am | IP Logged | ||
|
That actually makes sense from a phonological
point of view to do so. It isn't easy to pronounce, but it makes perfect sense. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 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 39 of 42 29 April 2014 at 9:42am | IP Logged | ||
|
That's exactly my point: I don't know the details, but on the basis of the things I have read or been told it seems to me that the alphabets in Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos have something of the same combinatorical character as Hangul, but I have not read much about the phonology of these languages. I just know that some say that there are several ways to write a number of sound in Thai when you use its own alphabet, and that's a bad omen (btw. the same thing applies to for instance Modern Greek, where the /i/ sound can be spelled in at least five different ways).
In contrast, the Korean alphabet (which consists of 'letters' which actually correspond to syllables, but constructed from standardized elements) is so easy that you can learn it in an hour or so, but the underlying phonology seems to add a number of complications which aren't reflected in the writing. In Korean I have so far had the impression that the correspondence was a given thing, but that the differences between sounds which form distinctive pairs were very difficult to hear (and mimic) for non-natives - and that would of course be a totally different problem than a lack of correspondence between sounds and letters (which English as on of the worst sinners). However if it now turns out that even the correspondence between sounds and letters IN KOREAN is shaky because of things like an unwritten alternance between m and b then things begin to look somewhat murky. As for the languages written with alphabets (or semi-abadhs) where vowels routinely are ignored this adds to the difficulty of learning those languages: you actually have to learn the language first (using your ear and pedagogical texts with all vowels) ... and then apply this knowledge of the language to normal writing. But actually this isn't too far from the situation in for instance Russian, where the sound of a written 'o' is totally dependent on the stress - which isn't indicated in normal texts. Or Romanian, where the special Romanian letters with diacritical markings routinely are replaced with other letters without these markings. Edited by Iversen on 29 April 2014 at 10:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6440 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 40 of 42 29 April 2014 at 11:02am | IP Logged | ||
|
Am I a party pooper if I suggest scripts that are no longer in use? The hardest ever must be the Tangut script. It's if
someone said "Hey, let's do like the chinese, except rid ourself of any logic innate in the script". http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tangut.htm How anyone ever managed to memorize those, albeit beautiful, hideously overcomplicated signs is above my understanding. Cuneiform is also a script that make a brain hurt. The earlier sumerian form, though containing more glyphs, at least makes sure they all have different shapes. But as time progresses we eventually end up with the Neo-Assyrian Cuneiform script: several signs have merged, a lot of new phonetic values were invented, and the educated elite took prestige in using obscure sumerian logograms whenever they could. Numerals had different forms depending on what was being counted, and also doubled as logograms for other things and phonograms. One of the simpler signs, just a simple horizontal wedge, had the readings: ash, rum; logographic meanings: 1, ANA, SHUMMA – and on top of that very often seem to merge with the next character thus being pretty hard to make out... 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
