How often do you think about alphabets and the complexity of writing words on paper (or screens)? In one of my previous blog posts I wrote about the under-appreciation of the written word. Some of you may erroneously make a connection between my frequent themes of under-appreciation and my own numerous inadequacies. While my short-comings are many any connection between them and my posts is purely incidental, accidental, and/or unintentional. To be perfectly blunt, I’m simply not that good.
Now back to alphabets and writing. Have you ever found yourself reading the label on your jeans with wonderment over how many different ways there are to present the message? Okay, maybe that’s not something normal people do. I also doubt many of you receive frequent solicitations from the Armenian Benevolent Union (or similar groups), so I’ll try something a little more common. Occasionally, while I’m doing some research, i.e., delaying real work while roaming about the web, I run across articles that are not only in a foreign language, but also a non-Latin alphabet. Given that my mind wanders, I wanted to know how many different alphabets exist. That of course led to who uses them. The latter seemed to be a perfect Map Monday topic and as expected there’s a map to answer the question.
Today’s Map
This Wikipedia map shows 33 different alphabets, or more correctly writing systems (several including Chinese and Japanese are not phonetic alphabets). The Latin alphabet dominates the western world, but by my crude counting roughly half of the population uses something else. Unlike Latin, some written alphabets (abjad systems) don’t include vowels, e.g., Arabic. The abugida systems of India and southeast Asia include vowels, but not as separate characters. Rather they’re indicated as secondary aspects of consonants. Other writing systems, like the aforementioned Chinese, use ideograms where each symbol represents an idea.
Not only do the letters/words look different, but they also use different rules. Arabic is written from right to left, while Chinese and Japanese are written in columns from top to bottom and right to left. Mongolian is also written in columns, but from left to right. Even the familiar Latin alphabet comes with variations to fit the many languages it serves. For example the umlaut common in German (ä, ö, ü) or the numerous accents in the romance languages. I began this post in amazement at how many writing systems we use. However, I’m more amazed that so few systems visually represent most of the 6,000+ languages spoken on our planet.
As always thanks for reading.
Armen
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PS for the curious or observant reader, the background of this site features the earliest known writing systems – cuneiform.
PPS for those interested in efficiency of the spoken language here’s an interesting post from Real Clear Science link.
The Japanese characters on the map are “katakana” phonetic letters (24 in total) used for foreign words, onomatopoeia, etc. They have a matching “lowercase” set called hiragana for Japanese words. Sophia is learning those now as well as some basic “kanji” (pictograms adapted from Chinese characters).
At the end of high school students have mastered reading and writing about 2000 characters (joyo kanji) needed for everyday reading and writing, and a thousand or two or three more by the end of college. It takes one, two (compounding), or in rare cases three kanji to represent one word in Japanese
From my limited understanding of Chinese, they also have a set of standard phonetic starter characters, but kids need about 6000 characters for basic high school level comprehension.
The characters are built from smaller building blocks, so it’s not like you have to start from scratch each time.
Big difference between chinese and japanese written language: each chinese character has a single pronunciation/meaning, but japanese kanji can have as many as 20 different pronunciations depending on the context. Japanese writing uses a combination of kanji, hiragana, and katakana, so its pretty easy to distinguish Japanese from Chinese. Japanese “force fit” the Chinese written language tofor their own use about 1500 years ago, so its not as streamlined as the Chinese use of the characters.
Japanese is also sometimes written left to right working down the page, but pages care always numbered in opposite direction relative to English.
One annoyance is that they do not put spaces between words, which can be frustrating for a non-native adult student (me).
So one might wonder: why waste thousands of hours memorizing thousands of chinese/japanese ideograms rather than a a single weekend of hard study (which I did as an adult) to learn the phonetic alphabet which would be much more accessible to all socioeconomic groups? I don’t know what the literacy rate is in either country, but the complexity of the written language certainly can’t help those numbers. Also it is difficult to retain those characters if you are not immersed (just ask my wife when she tries to write the characters from memory after 20 years in the US).
I did find that, after learning the first 1000 joyo kanji, that I could read much faster than with phonetic characters. Had I studied to fluency, the imagery built into the ideograms certainly would have become evident as well, I assume.
As always, I knew I could count on Don to keep me on my toes and provide more useful information – Thanks!
I’ve often wondered how other languages–especially the Asian ones–keep their books sorted in a library. Certainly can’t be “alphabetical” order.
That’s a great question, Kay. I always thought they’d use something like the Dewey Decimal System. Here’s a quick wiki on the subject – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Classification_Scheme_for_Chinese_Libraries