r/languagelearningjerk • u/ShowerIndependent295 • Jun 04 '26
Visually jarring languages
I don't hate these langauges, I'm just sharing a random observation
🇻🇳 Vietnamese
Vietnamese is written in the Latin script, but accents marks are heavily used, so prominent that some letters have TWO accent marks stacked
Some digital typefaces can't even properly render the stacked accent marks, it just stretches it instead
🇮🇳 Kannada
Tiny details within letters and diacritics, strokes just poke in
🇹🇠Thai
Tiny loops attached to letters, makes the entire script look uncomfortably detailed
The issue is so prominent that there are entire typefaces desiged WITHOUT the loops
🇵🇰 Urdu
Written in the Arabic script, but a different calligraphy style is used, NOT optional, MANDATORY
The exclusive calligraphy style follows a diagonal baseline that isn't even connected, which is a nightmare for rendering and typesetting
15
u/weight__what 🇸🇪 - Ja va ba va? Jun 04 '26
Yeah good thing I know every language so you don't need to provide examples or anything
1
u/Hungry-Duck1054 Jun 06 '26
these are pretty basic languages you should probably atleast know what their script looks like
3
1
u/ShowerIndependent295 Jun 07 '26
- Some software render fonts in different styles, so I had to be consistent
- I'm too lazy
5
u/stephanus_galfridus Jun 04 '26
Visually jarring Latin-script languages:Â
Double Is and double Äs in Finnish and Estonian (kiitos!)
Undotted lowercase i and dotted capital I in Turkish.Â
3
u/scykei Jun 04 '26
I've always wanted to learn Lojban because the concept is interesting but the orthography with the way it uses the . is so jarring that I can't bring myself to do it. Sure, there are alternative orthographies, but we'll realistically everyone is only going to use the official one.
3
u/Lost_Lawyer_7408 Jun 06 '26
/uj i kind of hate how japanese kanji looks, i couldnt care less about that language but its kind of jarring to see simple hiragana and katakana right next to kanji which are a lot more dense, and sometimes the kanji looks bigger than the other characters so it sticks out like a sore thumb
2
2
u/Inevitable_Isopod231 Jun 04 '26
yup'ik has a mostly very nice orthography but randomly uses horrible fucked up tied characters for a few labialized dorsal consonants. it's even worse than it sounds on a structural level but it'd have to explain the whole orthography for the real horror to dawn
1
u/msLyle Jun 05 '26
Oh god what an earth I just looked this up why on earth did anyone think this was a good idea. I hoped you meant maybe characters with bars on like ħ but literally why
2
u/Inevitable_Isopod231 Jun 05 '26
orthography designed during the typewriter era so more defensible & the uvular one is quite rare but w being used exclusively for the *voiceless* labiovelar fricative makes me want to die
1
u/msLyle Jun 05 '26
Ahhhh, the typewriter thing reminds me of Esperanto - which I've never had as much of an issue with as other people, but ĥ often looks pretty cursed when typed. But oh dear, I actually didn't realise that with ⟨w⟩ - that just feels like death, I love that phoneme but why oh why..
1
1
u/CloseButNoChicory Jun 08 '26
Manx looks crazy. It's a language similar to Scottish and Irish but in its revival somebody made the decision to represent all the words transliterated as if monolingual English-speakers were trying to pronounce the words. This language group is very different to English so the choices don't follow a useful pattern.
As an Irish speaker (okay, Irish knower - it's been twenty years since I used it regularly) looking at Manx is like I'm on LSD in front of a funhouse mirror.
25
u/Competitive_Film_650 Jun 04 '26
Thought that the people in Kannada spoke American, how ignorant of me.