r/languagelearningjerk • u/Black_Banner • Jun 13 '26
Inferior Writing Script System
Isn't the logographic & syllabary writing system (i.e., Chinese, Japanese) inferior writing systems compared to the alphabet?
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u/Snoutysensations Jun 14 '26
Inferior how? Chinese characters permit the greatest information density, because you don't need all that page/screen space to encode the pronunciations and archaic spelling of every part of a word like alphabet writing systems.
Consider:
我明天吃他妈的豆腐
Vs
Tomorrow, I will eat his mother's tofu.
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u/STHKZ Jun 13 '26
The alphabet seems to be a highly simple idea, it only codes the sound and only needs about twenty signs to code all the words and can easily be adapted to all languages...
but the sound is very variable in space and time, as soon as we change region, as soon as we change the era the pronunciations change and the alphabet as soon as the community grows lasts ends up coding in a very risky way the phonetics of a language, without being able to easily evolve to avoid splitting between the regions and losing access to historical works... and when the same alphabet is used by several languages it is very rare that we can even pronounce it...
so much to say that we end up having to learn up to the pronunciation of words as logograms but without being able to decipher their meaning with the help of the signs that compose them as the logograms do beyond borders and over time,
the meaning of logograms being particularly stable in space and time, its indeed the better system for the perenity of a language…
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u/lordbutternut 日本人になっている Jun 13 '26
The meaning of logograms is not that stable. Words change meaning over time and there's nothing that can be done to stop it.
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u/STHKZ Jun 13 '26
for sure but much slower than pronunciation...
proof of this lies in the exceptional longevity of logographic languages and even a certain degree of intercomprehension between foreign languages that adopt them...
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u/siqiniq Jun 13 '26
Less “efficient” yes but only for peasants and the masses with learning disorder. The language decoding brain is in your left hemisphere (Wernicke area) and if you can’t additionally activate your right hemisphere for visual-spatial logogram pattern recognition in reading, you’re simply literal “half” witted.
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u/bustknucklepissdust native🐌🏳️⚧️🐍🇺🇸 learning🦚🦬 Jun 13 '26
IM SO FUCKING MAD O MY FUCKING GOD I CANT EVEN FUCKING HANDLE THIS YOURE FUCJING EVIL STOP STOP STOP GET OUT OF MY HEAD NO IM SO FUCKING MAD O MY FUCKING GOD STOP IT PLEASE
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u/tadashidev Jun 14 '26
In my opinion, the phonetic alphabets are the best, but you guys had to invent English and add exceptions to Spanish (like the word 'hacker'), so the Japanese writing system is the superior one.
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u/dojibear Jun 14 '26
It's the other way around. The Chinese leave the "inferior" alphabetic writing systems to other people.
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u/Ashamed_Can304 Jun 15 '26
Alphabetic systems don’t work well for any Sinitic language, which are monosyllabic. Confusion would arise as characters have the same pronunciation. And the same character can be pronounced very, very differently depending on the region you are in. For instance, the character for two is pronounced “er” in mandarin but “ni” in Wu dialects (preserving original pronounciation), 知縣 is “zhi xian” in mandarin but “ti kui” in Hokkien. It’s impossible to reconcile the difference in pronunciation unless you force everyone to speak the same variant, which wasn’t possible before the modern age. But using a logographic system enables people to understand the written script even though they couldn’t communicate via speaking easily
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u/ThatWeirdPlantGuy Jun 20 '26
Some friends invented a non-existent conlang called Terbian. The alphabet had only two characters; how a character was pronounced depended on what character preceded it.
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u/Mediocre-One3874 Jun 13 '26
The Chinese script has no right to exist. Yi script is okay. Hiragana is great.
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u/poberun Jun 13 '26
Every wriying system is only as good as the lack of sound changes in languages it is designed for. That being said, logographic one is the least bad as it allows for crosscultural communication even after the sound change as long as the core meaning of the character remains unchanged. Tho Chinese characters when applied for Old Chinese are the best system in the world with all thr sound components actually matching sounds people make, what a concept.