How do other people perceive the Roman alphabet?

Its interesting to observe that there don’t seem to be quite as many different alphabets as there are languages. Its interesting how so many different languages use the roman alphabet (because they were similar in origin to English, perhaps?)

How would someone who uses an entirely different alphabet perceive our Roman alphabet/punctuation marks? How about the writte English language (which seems uncluttered by accent marks, although you do have apostrophies)

I’ve been trying to look at the alphabet objectively. Its hard though, because its something I’m *used * to seeing. Of course it looks normal to me. But there are some interesting observations.

The roman characters seem to be relatively simple in shape, with a cirlce for ‘o’ and a vertical line for ‘l’, then combinations of those two shapes in letters b,d,p,q. It seems a lot simpler of an alphabet than say, chinese, which has upwards of 30,000 characters (ideaographs?). Japanese hiragana appears very squiggly in nature, though appears about as simple as the roman alphabet to an extent.

In another thread about how English sounds to non-English speakers, somebody mentioned that the Roman alphabet is sometimes represented in Japanese cartoons as just a series of simple lines and circles (loOllolloOollo).

Depends how you define simple. We have to put a whole bunch of our “simple” characters together to experss a concept. The Chinese don’t have to so much. As far as actual strokes-per-idea goes, there might not be much difference. The Vietnamese might have the most efficient method. They use tones to be able to keep their roman alphabet words short, and each tone is a very simple pen stroke…

Because they’re of European origin. The Romans adopted their alphabet from the Etruscans, an ancient people living in waht is now Northern Italy. The Etruscans had adopted it from the Greeks, who had taken it from the Phoenicians, an ancient nation of navigators originally coming from what is now Lebanon. Of course all those nations added new characters and did some other changes to the alphabet to make it suit their language.
Via Roman political and cultural dominance in Europe, and the importance of Latin in post-Roman middle ages, the Roman alphabet was adopted by most other European languages as well (although those might add a few minor changes to make it suit their needs, again). The languages themselves did not necessarily have to be derived from Latin.
The Greeks, however, continued to use the ancient Greek alphabet, and the cyrillic alphabet used for Russian was derived from the Greek as well, although there were some reforms in the 18th century influenced by the Roman characters used in the West.

It’s important to remember that written characters are purely arbitrary ways of conveying the sounds of spoken languages or else it wouldn’t be possible to transliterate words from Cyrillic or Chinese or Arabic into English.

Languages are adapted more for cultural reasons than for philological ones. The Etruscan language is a non-Indo European language that appears to bear no resemblance to anything that survives today. Scholars can easily look at the few words that remain and make associations with Greek or Latin words but hardly anything of the Etruscan language itself is known.

Yiddish as a spoken language is closely derived from German, with an admixture of other European languages. But it was decided to write the language using Hebrew characters to emphasize the continuity of Jewish culture.

When the Austo-Hungarian Empire broke up after World War I, one of the countries formed from its pieces made a conscious decision whether to put its language into Cyrillic or Roman characters: it choose Roman because more of western Europe used it. (This is from Margaret Olwen Macmillan’s Paris 1919, which I just read, but I can’t remember which out of all the jumble of countries she talked about did this. Blasted memory.)

Japanese now has three separate scripts: kanji, for the old Chinese characters, hiragana, for grammatical elements, and katakana, mainly for foreign loan words. Presumably Japanese readers can go back and forth among them with ease, and shifting to Roman characters doesn’t appear to be much harder.

I’ve tried learning Hebrew and I found that once you become even slightly familiar with the characters they become the sounds and you don’t really think about their written form all that much.

Not all the languages which use a latinate alphabet have a common origin with English. There’s Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) in Asia and there’s Navaho (Diné Bizaad) in North America, neither of which has a genetic (<–that term’s used in the Linguistics sense, so don’t anyone start freaking out) relationship to English.

A very good place to start learning about scripts and their relationships to others is Omniglot.

Exapno Mapcase: Japanese makes use of four scripts:
[list=1][li]Hiragana[/li][li]Katakan[/li][li]Kanji[/li][li]Romaji[/list=1][/li]Now, some folks might tell you that Romaji is just the Latin alphabet; however, that’s incorrect. It is a standardized way of representing the sounds of Japanese with just some of the latinate letters.

The Cyrillic alphabet was created by two Slovenian missionaries, Saints Cyril and Method. They combined Greek, Roman, and newly created characters to form the alphabet. There are 5 vowel pairs.

I don’t know Paris 1919, but know that Serbian uses Cyrillic and Croatian uses Roman + a few letters such as one that looks like a combination dj (loop plus d back stroke continuing to form j hook). The basic difference between Serbian and Croatian is the alphabet they use.

From Omniglot:

Now who am I supposed to believe: you or your own cite? :slight_smile: :dubious:

A Japanese who spoke English well told me he writes English faster than he can draw Kanji (I am not sure draw is the right word, but it is closer to what he does than write is). I was a little surprised, but I guess he knows.

I think the umlauts in German (which denote an omitted e) and the extra letters in Scandinavian languages (which are similar, although A-ring denotes AA) were added in the 19th century and this would not be done today. Anyway, I assume that if you look at a completely exotic alphabet, such as Korean (Hangul) you will get an idea what roman looks like to someone else.

I’d go with believing me and the cite, Exp, because I put the same thing in more understandable terms. Go ahead and ask me bout Furigana!

Korean Hangul, though, combines several different letters into one mega-letter that denotes a syllable. Although it’s technically an alphabet, it really doesn’t look like anything like one at first glance.

If you look at Omniglot, you’ll see some seldom-used alphabets. Old Church Slavonic looks really spooky to my eyes, as does Devenagari and Thai. Georgian and Burmese look like Star Trek-ish alien alphabets.

I didn’t mean that Devenagari or Thai were seldom used. The sentence came out wrong. Sorry.

It is not common that alphabets are simply created by one person. Most scripts are taken from other cultures and adapted and evolved. Only the oldest scripts evolved out of ways to record something, but then become complex and eventually come to represent the languages of the people who created the writing. Most cultures find it easier to take and then adapt a script to their language(s) which then results in new writing systems.

For those that are created in whole by a single person, this is called “Stimulus diffusion”, where an idea inspires the creation of something similar, but that end result is not descended or taken from the original idea. More often than not it’s missionaries which inspire script creation (as bad as some of you may think Missionary work is, the cree syllabary wouldn’t exist had missionaries not visited the Cree).

There may be many scripts we don’t even know exist. But, of the scripts that are invented in whole, we have:

Sophisticated Grammatogenies

These are scripts created by people already literate in a writing system, but usually created for languages who have no writing system of their own:

The pollard Script
The Fraser Script
Fictional scripts (Klingon)

Unsophisticated Grammatogenies (usually syllabaries, consonant vowel syllables, and random order of syllables)

Bamum script
alaska script
Ndjuka script
Caroline islands script
Cherokee script

The more widely used invented scripts are:

Cherokee
N’ko
Vai
Cree (which spawned inuit, and sub-arctic athabaskan, as well as algonquin syllabaries)
Munda language scripts (Sorang Sompeng, Ol Cemet’, Ho)
Pahawh Hmong script
Korean
Lepcha
Phags Pa

I’m probably missing a few.

The oldest known invented script Old Persian Cuneiform, the best documented is Korean. The most celebrated is Cherokee. One school of thought even says that tibetan was created rather than evolved.

As for not adding in diacritics, as Hari said, don’t be so sure. It’s far easier to add in diacritics to keep form than it is to add in bunches of digraphs to indicate a single sound. Many of the slavic languages that use the Latin Alphabet do this (Polish uses a barred L for the “w” sound). Umlauts also have an important function, to indicate functional sound changes.

Take for instance Phajhauj Hmoob, where the extra letters indicate tones. Without tones it would be Pa Hau Hmong. Pinyin effectively uses diacritics to shorten word length (and Pinyin was created in the 20th century). Diacritics are extremely handy, which is why when alphabets for languages so distinct from the Western European Languages use them, they go for diacritics and not often digraphs (two letters for one sound). Vietnamese is similar (it would be extremely inefficient to indicate tones and vowel quality using other letters like Hmong in Latin Script does).

Not quite true. Cyrillic is based on Uncial Greek, with letters not from Greek, the origin unknown to fit sounds not found in Greek. There are no roman characters in Cyrillic (and the coincidence is simply because it is the Greek Alphabet essentially).

Cyril and Methodius actually created a second script to fit Slavic needs, Glagolitic, whose origin is undetermined, the popular view is it predates Cyrillic and is based on Greek cursive forms. The book i’m getting this from, “The World’s Writing Systems” states:

“The most likely scenario is as follows: Glagolitic was created by some Slavs during the couple of centuries preceeding the 860’s; it was formalized by Constantine (Cyril), who also added letters for the Non Greek Sounds; Constantine’s disciples in Bulgaria (in the 890’s) perceived Glagolitic as unsuitable for Church books and made up a new Slavic alphabet based on the “more Dignified” uncial Greek.”

For Cyrillic, the Non-Greek sounds are similar enough to Glagolitic sounds to show a derivation. Sounds “zh”, “ts”, and “ch” are examples.

Doobieous: Wouldn’t that be “Pa Hau Hmoo” without the tones? I’m very sure the “b” represents a high level tone.

What’s really spooky is that some geek has taken the time to decipher the language from The Legend of Zelda…