A printer admin error is causing all our documents to default print in capitals/uppercase, which is surprisingly hard to read - compared to lowercase.
It’s led me to wonder if some writing systems are easier to read than others (irrespective of the fluency and literacy of their native speakers). For example, I’ve noticed bilingual colleagues often reading Arabic more slowly - sometimes tracing word by word with their finger. Now this may be because they’ve got so used to using English everyday that their eyes prefer that, or it may be that they aren’t 100% bilingual.
Or it may be because Arabic doesn’t use capital letters, doesn’t put in short vowels (except in the dictionary) and thrfr looks mr lk ths whn you r rdng it.
So is that a possiblity, and if so what about other writing systems? How much does the shape and structure of a writing system affect the “instant recognition” factor of a language? Is it easier and quicker to glance at a page of Chinese and get the gist of it than glancing at a page of Roman alphabet? How do the Greek and Russian alphabets compare?
For three, it doesn’t have modifying characters (demonstrated by my lack of being able to show them).
For four, the letters are fairly distinct. The closest you get to similarity are i /j, p/q and m/n.
Then there are things that may be an advantage or may be a disadvantage, depending on if you speak English natively. There are lots of small words crammed in between the larger ones in English. As a native reader, I usually interpret them as a single character and skip over them. Some languages (like Russian) drop some of these words entirely, which can be confusing to an English speaker. But then, other languages use cases, which can make words confusing to an English speaker… but this is getting into grammar, not characters.
Using Russian Cyrillic for an example, you have 2 characters that are the backwards “N” Americans love so much, and 4 characters similar to “b” with various tails and hooks…
It is difficult to tell whether one alphabet is better than another especially as a separate issue from spelling. The English alphabet does have some disadvantages which IMHO must make it more difficult to learn:
c, k and x are almost mutually redundant
Some letters are used to represent more than one sound as ‘c’ in “city” and “cat”
Some capital letters look nothing like there lower case equivalents e.g. ‘d’ and ‘D’
There are no accent marks, instead you just have to know what the right sound for a word is.
If you’re looking for a really easy to read language (when it comes to turning the letters into sounds I mean) you can’t go wrong with Turkish. It uses basically the same alphabet as English (i.e. the Roman alphabet) with a few diacritic marks (e.g. ´, `, and ^), but each letter-diacritic combination stands for one, and only one, sound. This makes reading and writing very easy, since the writing is a literal transcription of the sounds made. Modern Turkish spelling was actually devised by European linguists, when the country wanted to get rid of the old Arabic alphabet.
Most languages in the Arabic alphabet, by the way, are a lot harder to read, since the Arabic alphabet normally doesn’t contain letters for vowel sounds. For example, the word ‘anti-disestablishmentarianism’ would spell ‘ntdsstblshmntrnsm’ (in the Arabic alphabet, of course which uses different symbols). This is the reason why the ancient king referred to as ‘nbkdnsr’ is sometimes referred to as nebukadnesar and at other times as nabukodonosor: no one really knows how the name was pronounced.
The only exception to the “no vowel” rule in Arabic languages is the Koran or Qu’ran. The Koran does use special vowel markings, as it text may, under no circumstances, be misread. IMHO, that hasn’t stopped anyone from doing so anyway, however.
The hardest languages to read and write, by the way, are the so-called logographic languages, in which every letter stands for an entire word. People who speak a language that has a logographic alphabet literally spend their entire life learning how to read and write.
The ‘recognition’ factor of an alphabet does not depend on the shape of the letters, unless a lot of the letters look very much alike. You simply recognize the shapes you’ve learned as a child, which would work equally well with any kind of shapes.
Books are a highly evolved mature technology. The fonts, the spacing, the margins, and the overall look have been tweaked continually for over a century to make the most readable product.
The use of capitals and lower-case letters in books is no accident. Studies have shown that this combination is easier to read than all caps or all lower-case. The same is true for the other values. (In print. People are still arguing about what is best on computer screens, especially as screen technology keeps evolving.)
Yes - our presenters hate autocue in upper case (used in some studios) and insist on lower case.
To me, upper case looks like shouting. I think that’s from so many years of internet communication. But it’s not as clear - it’s too square and blocky, all the letters occupy the same space unlike lower case, which goes above and below the line.
I agree that fonts obviously play a big role. I find it odd how Arabic uses really cursive looking fonts for street signs (when blockier ones do exist). Because when you look at a street sign from a distance - even if you can’t read either alphabet - you can see the shapes of the English letters long before the Arabic ones. IMO they should at least make the Arabic fonts bigger, if they want to keep them cursive.
Sampiro, that sounds suspiciously like one of those email forwarding things that’s almost invariably false. Do you have a cite?
In fact, I know one of them is false: Chinese and Japanese can be written in almost any direction, horizontal or vertical. It’s up to the reader to figure it out. And scribes can do strange things with Arabic as well (like printing the Confession of Faith in a circle), but I don’t know how common that is now.
Anyone who would write about a “pictographic alphabet” obviously knows nothing about either pictographs or alphabets.
If you look at the Omniglot site (a truly wonderful site for alphabet phreaks), you will see cogent explanations of what distinguishes alphabets from abjads* from logographic scripts from “pictographs.”
By the way, the only pictographic script still in use anywhere in the world, if it hasn’t died out yet, is the Moso script of Yunnan. FYI, Chinese logograms are not “pictographic” at all.
Hebrew, Arabic, and Arabic are written left to right, but that does not mean the orthography has no vowels. They all use letters of the alphabet (called matres lectioni) to write out the long vowels. Only the short vowels are omitted from the alphabet (one exception: the Hebrew long â vowel doesn’t use a letter).
However, the Ethiopic syllabary does not include vowel characters at all. The vowels are shown by modifications to the consonant characters. It is written from left to right.
*abjad: Alphabetic script, e.g. Arabic, that doesn’t have letters for the (short) vowels. Named for the nonsense word formed by writing the Arabic alphabet in the order of the Hebrew alphabet.
Spanish is kind of similar. It uses the same 26 letters of the English alphabet, with accents on the vowels, and a tilde on the n (the ñ is actually considered to be a separate letter). With few exceptions, every letter stands for exactly one sound. The exceptions are:
[ul]
[li]ch is just like in English (chaqueta, hecho)[/li][li]ll is like y[/li][li]rr is rolled more than r[/li][li]c and g are soft or hard (cero, cuerpo, gimnasio)[/li][li]x has three different possible sounds (like the English ks, h, ch)[/li][/ul]
and I probably missed a few, but in general, Spanish is easy to pronounce.
Wow, thanks for the Omniglot links! I wish I had known about that site years ago, rather than spending much time hunting for various sites for each language.
I’m a bit of a written language freak, I love to find out about and make up my own written languages. I’ve made up my own that has exactly one character for each sound in English, personally I think it is easier to read than english written with the Latin aphabet.
Then there is boustrophedon, in which lines are read alternately right to left, left to right (some Greek was written like that, I think-- means ‘ox-plow’ or somesuch).
The easiest alphabet to read? Well, from a phonetic standpoint, my money’s on the Hawaiian alphabet, which is to say the twelve Roman letters used to write the Hawaiian language. Eleven have only one sound. The twelfth has two, and a reader can easily tell its pronunciation by its position in the word. Accent of a word is always on the penultimate syllable. What could be simpler?
I’d have to go with Korean… once you learn how the alphabet works, it makes more sense than most anything else I’ve had to learn. Syllables are built out of specific sounds and those are combined symbolically to produce a character as a word.
