Alphabetic writing really is incredible.
Despite the fact that I personally prefer syllabaries. I can't discount the fact that alphabets have done an incredible job of being adopted by other languages that didn't previously have any sort of writing system. Alphabets are really flexible like that.
The latin alphabet alone is used in all sorts of languages from English to Tukish, Indonesian and Swahili. Having this many diverse languages follow a single writing system is only really possible with alphabets. You couldn't do this with Chinese characters or Korean hangul, for example.
Curious: why do you prefer syllabaries? I think about Chinese writing systems, which additionally don't have clear word boundaries. Now you can argue that this is an independent issue (which is true) but why does this complication seemingly show up in such writing systems?
Anyway, alphabets have been profoundly successful. You bring up Turkish. It's a good example. I'm sure most here know that prior to 1929 or so Turkish used the Arabic writing system. This is also an alphabet but a more complicated one (eg vowels aren't typically written) and didn't necessarily fit the Turkish language.
So they designed a Latin writing system that is entirely phonetic it was was profoundly successful at increasing literacy rates. A completely illiterate person could be taught to read and write Turksih in a matter of months.
I compare this to Taiwan that has high school competitions to see who can find a word the fastest in a dictionary because knowledge is required of the roots and symbols. There are thousands of characters to learn in Chinese languages. As a foreigner, this will often take a decade or more. I've seen accounts of people who have spent a decade learning Chinese that still struggle to read books intended for 12 year olds.
Literacy is so transformative to one's life that I'm so on board with anything that makes that easier.
The Arabic writing system is an abjad, not an alphabet. The two kinds of system are closely related (the Phoenician script was the origin of both the Greek alphabet and the various Semitic abjads and was itself an abjad) but are not the same thing. Abjads are well-suited to Semitic languages where the vowels are less important for morphological reasons, but in Indo-European languages (like Greek) and Turkic languages (like Turkish) vowels are important in writing for comprehension. It's no surprise that switching to an alphabet aided literacy in Turkey.
Abjads are no more or less complicated than alphabets though. They're just a bad fit for Turkish.
It really depends on the language, but the main reason why syllabaries can be simpler in terms of mental load is because syllables (or moras, or something similar) is how humans naturally break down words in most languages. Consider that even in languages like English with a well-established alphabetic orthography, words are still routinely spelled out syllable by syllable.
However, phonotactics place some practical limits on that. If your language only has (C)V syllables with a fairly limited phonemic inventory - e.g. Japanese - a syllabary is small enough, and even if letter shapes for related syllables aren't consistent, is easy enough to learn. OTOH if you routinely have, say, 3-consonant clusters (as in e.g. the word SCRipt), you quickly get combinatorial explosion.
To some extent this can be mitigated by alphasyllabaries like Hangul, where syllables are clearly marked in writing but still composed of some more fundamental units. Still, you can only cram so many tiny elements into a single glyph that is still distinct. Hangul actually used to have standard syllable blocks for all combinations of three consonants in the onset, and those are already very hard to read.
Hangul is a 'syllabic alphabet'- it is a combination of alphabetic and syllabic and as such probably the clearest/simplest writing system invented.
Although it has some weirdnesses of its own, such as having jamo that change their sound based on context (e.g., ᄋ is silent if it’s an initial consonant but has the sound ng at the end of a syllable). Nearly every consonant has a different sound between initial and final position, although many of these are inaudible to English ears. On the other hand, having been a consciously designed writing system, it does have a rationality that most traditional writing systems lack, such as the fact that all vowels are based on either ㅡ or ㅣ with additional strokes added as appropriate to modify the base vowel (the fact that a double stroke, e.g., ㅑ or ㅛ represents the single stroke vowel with a y- sound prefixed seems just brilliant to me).
Hangul made more sense the way it was originally designed - for example, ᄋ [∅] was distinct from ㆁ [ng]. It was also much more phonetic originally, but subsequent reforms have turned it into more of a morphophonemic orthography, while at the same time not updating it wrt evolution of the language other than dropping obsolete jamo (which is why vowels can't be organized quite so neatly as they used to be).
Consonants changing their sound based on position is not such an abnormality — that's just basic phonology. This phenomenon (allophony [1]) is found in virtually every language, but it remains a bit obscure to laymen, since it is mostly undetectable to the language's own speaker.
For instance, the phoneme /t/ is always rendered by the English letter /t/, but that phoneme can be rendered in so many different ways. In an initial position it would be rendered as an aspirated voiceless alveolar plosive [tʰ], equivalent to the Korean Jamo ㅌ in initial or intervocalic positions. An English /t/ in other positions is generally not aspirated, but besides that the rendition is highly dependent on the speaker's accent. MRP ("BBC English") speakers render a "final" /t/ (i.e. after a vowel or consonant, but not before another vowel) as as [ʔt] ([t] sound preceded by a glottal stopped) or even just as a pure glottal stop [ʔ]. In intervocalic position RP speakers would keep /t/ as a simple [t] sound, but most Americans would change this sound into a voiced alveolar flap [ɾ]. Cockney speakers famously change an intervocalic /t/ into a glottal stop (so you'd get something that sounds like "woh-ah" for "water") and I didn't even get into how /t/ behaves when it follows other consonants such as the elided /t/ in "listen" or the way some American speakers pronounce "winter".
In all honesty, this is probably just as messy as what happens in Korean, it's just that the Korean allophones are more foreign to us. Besides ᄋ, all the variations are regular allophones. As far as I understand ᄋ was indeed just reused for two different purposes (there is no /ŋ/ phoneme that transforms to an empty sound in initial position).
I'd say that one thing that still makes Hangul hard, is that a lot of consonant clusters sounds sound the same when they come in final position. It makes pronunciation regular, but it's a bit hard to know how to transcribe many words. The vowels ㅐ and ㅔ are also pronounced the same in most (perhaps all?) modern Korean dialects, but that's a small irregularity compared to the redundancies of many other alphabetic writing systems.
In short, Hangul is much more regular than most alphabets. I wouldn't say it is the most regular though — it's hard to beat new writing systems designed by professional linguists for small language that didn't have an alphabet before. Hangul is still an relatively older system that had to go through writing reforms, but still retrains some spelling complexities. And if you compare Korean to Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, with their extremely simple phonology and phonotactics (they have very few vowels and consonants and generally don't allow consonant clusters and final consonants at all) - then the writing system of these languages is much simpler — and almost all of them use the Latin alphabet with a highly regular orthography.
I think there is a more impressive trait of Hangul, that is highly underappreciated. It's an alphabetic writing system that blends very well with traditional Chinese characters. Chinese characters are all monosyllabic (i.e. they represent a single syllable) and while that property is not maintained in Japanese (due to its vastly different phonology), it has been maintained in Korean and Vietnamese. Hangul lets you write each syllable with a single graphic block (even if that block contains multiple "Jamo" letters). All other alphabet systems that have been developed in languages that used Chinese characters (Such as Pinyin, Zhuyin or the Vietnamese alphabet) do not share this property. This means that when you try to add some alphabet letters into a document written Chinese characters, the result is extremely unpleasant typographically. It is not only harder to typeset nicely, but it's also quite painful to read.
Although Modern Korean doesn't blend Hangul and Hanja (Chinese characters) very often, I think this property made Hangul quite a lot more palatable as a replacement for Chinese characters in Korea compared to Pinyin or Zhuyin. Koreans didn't have to throw your entire typographic and calligraphic tradition in order to adopt Hangul: A block is fixed-size (not proportional), the writing is easier to read both vertically and horizontally and you can keep writing it with brush strokes using traditional Chinese calligraphic methods and practices. It can even be mixed nicely with Chinese characters like Japanese Kana (and it would be more compact than Japanese Kana). Eventually Korean language reformers have chosen to mostly drop Hanja altogether, but when you still do need to mix Hanja in a Korean text, you can do it seamlessly.
Hangeul is an 24 character alphabet, with 14 consonants and 10 vowels. Each little square is a syllable made up of consonants and vowel combinations.
Alphabet writing is probably the most important invention perhaps even more so than the invention of wheel. It's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Syllable based writing are not intuitive for human, Korean found it the hard way by relatively recently by inventing Hangul alphabets despite had been using the Chinese characters for several thousands of years previously with majority of the people remained illiterate.
The low literacy rates in pre-Hangul Korea had less to do with phonological vs. logographic writing systems and more to do with the fact that in Korea at the time Chinese played the role Latin played in medieval Europe: it was the language of scholars and officials, but most ordinary people couldn't read it because, well, they didn't speak Latin. The same thing happened with Hanja in Korea. When you're trying to get people literate in a writing system designed for a language they don't use in daily life, you're fighting an uphill battle from the start.
What is true that unlike the Latin alphabet, which European languages could adopt/adapt for their own use (or think the way Cyrillic was adapted for Mongolian), Chinese characters, being logographic, couldn't simply be repurposed to represent sounds of the Korean tongue — that's why Hangul had to be invented from scratch. That's one important difference between phonological and logographic writing systems, but it has little do with the question which system is better at spreading literacy.
This is anectotal but I've a friend who's well educated senior chip design engineer who's mother tongue Chinese but cannot read the written words since he has no background in Chinese vernacular education where people properly learn the multitudes of Chinese characters.
I know of at least one other instance. But note that the same is true of English speakers. Becoming literate in English isn't just a matter of learning the alphabet (otherwise a Frenchman automatically qualifies as literate in English simply because he knows the English alphabet). The way literacy is typically assessed is by asking you to read a typical paragraph from say a newspaper and then testing you for reading comprehension. Someone whose native tongue is English, but who for whatever reason has never had the primary/secondary education experience typical in an English speaking country is going to encounter the same sort of difficulty becoming literate in English as you friend in becoming literate in Chinese.
By his own account, it took this man [1] 7 years (during his late 40s/early 50s) achieving English literacy, and that happened in a English speaking country where he encounters English texts on a daily basis (I assume your friend lives & works in the West).
When some form of phonetic writing is developed, it's almost invariably syllabic. If anything, the very intuitiveness of syllabaries is why all alphabets, abjads, and abugida originate from a single source while there are many syllabaries that have developed independently.
Further, Hangul is not "syllabic". It's an alphabet. It happens to organise its letters into syllable blocks, but that's it.
That's what I'm saying, after several thousands years of using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet, and voila the literacy increased considerably. Actually as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them is another story. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Not intuitive? Why would that be?
From https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
"Around 1809, impressed by the "talking leaves" of European written languages, Sequoyah began work to create a writing system for the Cherokee language. After attempting to create a character for each word, Sequoyah realized this would be too difficult and eventually created characters to represent syllables. He worked on the syllabary for twelve years before completion and dropped or modified most of the characters he originally created."
"After the syllabary was completed in the early 1820s, it achieved almost instantaneous popularity and spread rapidly throughout Cherokee society. By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography."
They literally achieved higher literacy than the european settlers
> They literally achieved higher literacy than the european settlers
Is there any hard evidence behind that claim? (Not necessarily questioning it, it would just be very fascinating to read it)
Remembered reading it a while ago here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
Second paragraph, with a citation actually (but as always with WP, who knows how much of it is actually in the book)
Syllabaries are more intuitive for humans if anything, because syllables are phonemic units that can be pronounced easily in isolation, which is not the case with standalone consonants.
The genius of Hangul is that it is an alphasyllabary, so it provides the benefits of both - regularity and human friendliness.
Logographic seems fine for the mind? Thinking in speech is the default and most people talk before they read.
Speech is far more like alphabetic writing than it is like logographic writing. Spoken words are not single units, rather they're made up of phonemes.
I am talking about literacy. For reading Chinese newspaper headlines you probably need around 50,000 basic character recognition.
My understanding is that the average Chinese dictionary has 20,000 characters. The full set is somewhere around 50,000. The average educated adult knows about 8000. The number of characters to read a Chinese newspaper is about 2500 to 3500.
This is based on multiple sources online. Here is one example source (BBC): https://www.bbc.co.uk/languages/chinese/real_chinese/mini_gu...
Regardless the number of characters required for understanding the headlines, I think my points are still valid. After several thousands years of using Chinese characters Korean found that it's not intuitive for literacy hence they invented their very own alphabet namely Hangul, and voila the literacy increased considerably.
Fun facts, as a foreigner, you can learn to read Hangul in one single day, and then you can read the Korean written words for names, sign boards, etc but to understand them you need to learn the Korean language. However, if your mother tongue is Korean, you can understand them intuitively. That's the reason I considered alphabet is more important than invention of the wheels and it's truly the original "bicycle of the mind".
Sadly, we are unwinding thousands of years of progress by reverting to picture writing.
That seems only partly true. We did already have punctuation marks (like !?) that are a form of picture writing to modulate the underlying alphabetic meaning.
The smiley was invented because a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions, especially in short isolated sentences.
Emojis are overused in some current contexts (smartphone/messaging addiction) but some sort of standardization along with "emoji" literacy is, in principle, an evolution of the alphabet towards more sophistication and nuance.
Emojis are not quite the same thing as picture writing (icons).
I used emojis for a while, then got kinda sick of them.
> a pure alphabetic script does not do a good job expressing emotions
Instead of a smiley emoji, I'll write "haha". Instead of a barf emoji, I write "barf". English has a million words in it. I'm sure you can find a variety of words that express emotions just fine.
?! being a form of picture writing? I don't see it.
What makes "?!" different from emoji in your eyes, exactly? It literally encodes emotional delivery of the sentence to which it is applied.
Case in point: Susan Kare's trash can icon is slowly being replaced by [delete] as people discover that words for actions are better than pictures.
Not convincing to me. The world of UI design is too agitated with copycat and fads to be a solid reference.
Many years ago I had a designer friend do some interface for me and I pointed out we should be using a couple icons for actions like "post", "delete", etc.
He replied something like "I don't believe in the thaumaturgical power of icons" and that has stayed with me forever since. Words may he worth 1/1000th of a picture but at least you understand them.
you hover your mouse over the icon and a tooltip appears with words. Also the menu item shows the icon next to the word.
> the menu item shows the icon next to the word
Proof that icons don't work.
The icon next to the word builds the association between the icon and the word. Users aren't all drooling morons with the memory of a goldfish. The first couple of times, yeah, you have to hunt for the right icon but after you know what you're looking for, the improved density of icons puts more tools within immediate reach. If tooltip shows the keyboard shortcut, even better!
The idea that everything should be immediately intuitive is ridiculous. Babies have to learn how to properly suck a nipple and how to chew food in order to eat. Why should we expect mastery of a much more complex tool to be immediate?
I blame Microsoft for that--in particular, the Ribbon (and before that, toolbars).
They're simple enough to learn and reproduce, yet powerful enough to capture the nuances of different languages
Correction to my comment: Korean Hangul is actually an alphabetic writing system.
Thank you to the commenters who pointed this out!
Hangul is a very new alphabet. The Koreans didn’t have their own script until something like a century ago. Swahili has its own alphabet too.
A bit less recent than that. More like the 15th century for Hangul.
Swahili uses either modified Latin or modified Arabic for writing. Are you perhaps thinking of one of the invented scripts for indigenous American languages, e.g., Cree syllabics or Inuktitut?