What is the impact of writing systems on history? Not the existence of writing, but the merits of one system versus another.
Is it possible the part of the reason the West came to dominate the world is that it's (latin alphabetic) writing system was superior?
For one, I'd imagine it's massively faster to learn to read and write with an alphabet vs. something logographic like Chinese in particular. Back in the day where people mostly would have just had a few years of schooling (if any) that would have given the West a big leg up (having a literate population).
It's also difficult (to the point of impossibility?) to print using movable type in many writing systems. How many hundreds/thousands of different 'blocks' would you need to print a Japanese book? Is it even possible to print something like Arabic? Even something as 'simple' as Korean I can't imagine being possible to implement in a typewriter. Hell, even older computers wouldn't be able to display or deal with any of these languages.
>>276486
>Is it possible the part of the reason the West came to dominate the world is that it's (latin alphabetic) writing system was superior?
1) What makes a writing system superior? I can flat out state that Chinese Characters are superior because they are logographic as opposed to a phonetic representation of a word. Meaning two foreigners who can not speak the same language but when they write in Chinese characters, they'd understand each other.
So what is superiority then?
2) False analogy, the Latin Alphabetic writing system came to dominate because of the West not the other way around
The Latin alphabet is just a script. In English, it has mixed advantages and disadvantages. For one, English spelling is horribly irregular due to mixed linguistic influences, but this also allows the history of a word to be easily traced to its linguistic roots. Logograms like Chinese Hanzi seem really perplexing to a Latin alphabet writer, but children seem to learn it by rote quite easily, however, for a country like China with many dialects it makes communication much easier between them than a phonetic script would, and also makes written language slower to change over time. I would also argue it's aesthetically much more beautiful, and adds subtle nuances to meaning when you can examine a logogram and see it's composed of smaller logograms squished together. It also enables their language to express tones, which adds semantic depth. In English tones can be ignored for the most part, although when it comes to stress, nouns are stressed on the first syllable and verbs at the end, usually.
Interesting little thought experiment on if English wrote with Chinese-style characters:
http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
>>276526
>What makes a writing system superior?
It's better at communicating ideas in a practical sense.
If it takes longer to learn Chinese, it's more expensive to print Chinese books/newspapers, you can't transmit it over telegraph/teletype, you can't computerize it... then it's clearly putting the Chinese at a huge disadvantage.
Now obviously all but the harder-to-learn-pard has been taken care of by modern computers, but historically it seems like a real drag.
>>276539
I'm not asking about if it's better in some abstract aesthetic sense, I'm asking if the simplicity of the latin alphabet has given the West a historical advantage.
When Turkey switched from the arabic to the latin alphabet literacy shot way up because it was so much easier.
>>276566
https://www.quora.com/Why-did-Ataturk-change-the-language-and-the-alphabet-of-modern-day-Turkey
>"Because I was 12 years old at the time I remember the adaptation to the Latin script very well. Despite being a kid at a normal level of intelligence who could learned two languages, I couldn't read my native language properly. Due to the Arabic letters falling completely opposite to the Turkish language, I was getting totally confused by a Turkish text written in Arabic (letters.) For example, the vowels that are commonly used in Turkish, u, ö, ü didn't exist in Arabic. Instead of them there were "vav" and that "vav" could be read in five different ways. My mom and step father laughed at me reading "perveşkütür" despite knowing the word "projektör."
>"Not just me who didn't have elementary school diploma at the time, but also the elderly Turks who have studied for years also couldn't read their own language without a mistake. Literacy level was pathetic."
>>276566
>When Turkey switched from the arabic to the latin alphabet literacy shot way up because it was so much easier.
More like due to the emergence of public schooling for the first time in Turkey.
>>276572
AFAIK the arabic alphabet doesn't, or doesn't necessarily, indicate vowels. Apparently that works well enough for Semitic languages (I think hebrew is the same way).
Looking through the comments at the page linked >>276568 even people who speak Arabic doesn't have anything good to say about the writing system.
>>276486
Japanese is not a good example if you want to talk about historical literacy.
Today in China children actually learn the latin alphabet first. Then they use that knowledge to learn the Chinese characters. Otherwise they'd lag their Western counterparts by years.
Although this really begs the question, why bother with the Chinese characters at all?
>>276613
Culture?
Also linguistics. China doesn't have one language. But they do have one writing system. A written language that can be understood by all is a bonus. Specially if you think bureaucratically.
Outside the Simplified VS. Traditional debates that is. But even then Chinks have told me its still recognizable.
>>276613
Here in Korea, after Chinese have learned their own (very simple) writing system (hangul) they will start on learning Chinese characters (hanja), although I guess whether to teach hanja at all is politically contentious. I really have no idea why they bother with it at all, and I doubt it'll persist much longer.
>>276636
*Chinese=children
>>276486
Not only do Japanese children have to learn kanji, katakana, and hiragana in school, but they also learn the Japanese romanization (romanji) *AND* IPA (since they need that I guess to learn all this fucking nonsense). You can apparently see IPA symbols used in Japan pretty commonly because everyone knows them.
That must be torture on kids.
Even latin based languages that use diacritics presented a pretty big obstacle/complication when you go back to telegraph and early computer days. Hell, for a long time it was common for computers not to have separate upper and lower case since it required more memory.
More evidence that God speaks English.
>>276551
I mentioned other factors you cocksucker. The aesthetics were a tangential part of my post and I acknowledged that.
>>276652
Could the complexity of asian writing systems be part of the reason they score higher on IQ, especially visuo-spatial IQ?
>>276717
Having lived in various asian countries, when I see these claims are test scores I credit one thing: cheating.
Even if they're not outright doctoring the scores, then they're teaching to the test. Education in Asia is uniformly terribly, and consists mostly of rote memorization.
If there's a connection between the writing system and education, it's that they get used to half-memorizing reams of arbitrary contextless shit.
Apparently most adult Chinese, while able to read their language pretty fully, are unable to write at an 'adult' level since they can't re-create the characters (it's easier to recognize a character, then to remember from scratch how to draw it).
If you're part of the literate elite in a mostly non-literate society, it's in your interest to make reading/writing as difficult as possible in order to preserve your status.
In most places this was done by making the writing system itself needlessly complex. In the West the same was accomplished by doing all writing in a language nobody actually spoke (latin).
But once vernacular literature took off in the West (as a result of the reformation and the translation of the bible) there wasn't anything standing in the way of mass literacy.
In most other societies you'd have to scrap the complex native writing system, and that's pretty hard to do, although it'd been done many places (mostly by adopting the latin or cyrillic alphabet, but Korea did it with a system of its own invention, although the elites did their best to suppress it).
>>276737
>White damage control
Yeah, whatever you say, faggot.
>>276823
>butthurt chink detected
Asia is well known for its emphasis on rote learning, even in India and the middle east.
Shame cultures which value conformity don't tend to teach people to think for themselves.
>b-but muh iq
rote learning is great for IQ tests, as is gaming the system. Until they can measure creativity reliably, I'll treat asian scores with the appropriate degree of scepticism.
>>276869
I'll interject to say that the reason asian iq is higher is because european iq swings more ie more very stupid people and very smart people than asians have, that is all
>>276975
And I would argue that that is a clear sign of a culture of conformity which educates through rote learning.
Retards will recognise shit that's beaten into them over and over but people at the top end don't stick their necks out.
The idea that complex writing system being difficult, therefore forcing people to study harder, thereby making them smarting... I don't think it adds. 'Mental exercise' really just isn't transferable like that, as evidenced by 'brain training' games being BEFO by actual scientific studies (you don't get better at anything besides the particular game itself).
If anything the time they're devoting to mastering / memorizing writing is time they're not learning something useful.
>>276691
>replace it with slovene
>1 letter less
>?????
>god speaks slovene
:^)
>>276869
I'm white, just not a race-realist, so I have no reason to deny the IQ results in the first place, as correlative data doesn't imply causation.
In any case, the fact that white nationalists like you LATCH onto IQ scores when blacks score lower, but shy away and mumble about "muh creativity" when Asians and Jews exceed you in IQ is hilarious. Of course you can call yourself superior when you replace a quantifiable variable like IQ with some vague, immeasurable notion of creativity. It's like a black person saying they have more "soul" than whitey. Even then, you'd have to be so historically ignorant as to only consider the last 500 years of history if you want to portray Europeans as "more creative".
>>276975
I'll interject and say that you don't understand the Gaussian distribution at all.
As you can see from pic, varying sigma values (everyone in the middle / stupid and smart people), can very easily have an equivalent average value.
>>277175
>In any case, the fact that white nationalists like you LATCH onto IQ scores when blacks score lower, but shy away and mumble about "muh creativity" when Asians and Jews exceed you in IQ is hilarious.
I've always wondered about this aswell. Kind of self-defeating to argue that whites are the master race and try to proove it by sharing the same studies by Richard Lynn and Arthur Jensen over and over, completely forgetting that the "subhuman Jew" scores higher than whites on average.
>>277175
I don't latch on to iq scores at all, my jaundiced friend.
I know that they are pointless for the purpose for which they have been devised. They are interesting only in what they reveal, wittingly or unwittingly, about the cultures that use them.
In order to measure intelligence, you need to actually define it. I don't believe that there is a current, uncontroversial, measurable definition at this time.
No doubt if such a definition exists, you'll draw my attention to it, in your inscrutable, epicanthic way.
>>276975
No, asians actually have an absolutely higher ratio of people at the very smart end. Considering SAT scores, which correlate with IQ, they actually have a wider distribution than whites.
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-By-Gender-Ethnicity-2013.pdf
https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_general_test_score_information_by_ethnicity_2009_2010.pdf
https://robertlindsay.wordpress.com/2010/05/29/do-asians-have-a-short-bell-curve/
>>277199
Learning something useful or interesting can surely be fun.
But learning thousands of totally arbitrary symbols for no productive reason whatsoever? There's absolutely no 'fun' in that. It's memorization for memorization's sake.
>>276566
Are the ü and ö the same as the germanic ones?
>>277230
I believe so, at least the ö is.
>>277214
Kinda like how those untermensch Jews apparently control the poor, oppressed little aryan master race. Top kek.
Honestly, caring about the average IQ of your race is fucking stupid. It has nothing to do with your individual life, and is only indirectly related to what cultures/nations dominate the world at a particular time. Japan has an IQ 5 points higher than America. Whoop de do. The USA is militarily and economically in a far better spot than they are.
At least as of a few years ago, only ~300 books a year were being translated into Arabic (with almost 300 million native speakers). This is apparently about 1/5 of the number translated into Greek (with about 13 million speakers).
Not sure what if any part the writing system plays in that.
>>277263
mah anime
"IQ" needs to be a banned/subbed word on /his/
>>277218
I don't put a whole lot of value into them, either, they're just hardly an argument for white supremacy, and neither is creativity. Saying "asians cheat" is a vague insinuation I've heard a lot of butthurt stormfags propose to cope with the insecurity and cognitive dissonance over this, though. Like they have a grand conspiracy involving billions of people who all manage to keep it secret from IQ testers. As if having an educational system based on rote memorization is "cheating".
From what South Koreans and Nips tell me, they're actually moving towards a more Westernized education system. Not due to any crap about creativity, their industries are quite innovative, but because they have a terrible work life balance and kill themselves all the time.
Does anyone know how right-to-left scripts ever managed to persist (or develop in the first place) given that most people are right handed?
Maybe a leftie could shed light on how annoying it is in practice.
>>277270
Japan is trying to win a cultural victory after its spectacular failure in the Atomic Era.
>>276542
If you can't computerize Chinese characters, then 我現在幹什麼? And there is actually a Chinese telegraph code, see here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code
Of course, you need a codebook to encode and decode it, but still, you can telegraph it. (Although I heard that military telegrams often just used pinyin)
>>276486
Some anthropologists (my college professor anyway) will say that a language structure is a reflection of a societies genetic intelligence
Language is basically the organization of thought, and neurological genetic frameworks shaped the way languages developed
So I think the causal relationship is actually backwards there
>>277310
It requires much more data to transmit and much more memory to store the glyphs. That hasn't been a problem for a while, but in the first few decade of the computer age it was.
That Chinese telegraph code looks like it'd be a MASSIVE pain to use and super super slow to encode and decode vs. latin morse code which anyone can quickly learn and tap out / read my memory.
It's not as if you can't do xyz using whatever overcomplicated writing system. But the extra time / expense / difficulty clearly comes at some cost.
>>277313
>language structure is a reflection of a societies genetic intelligence
WTF?
>>277310
not him, but the guy was talking about early technology, where thousands of bits that would have been needed for chinese characters were a lot of memory and relatively unfeasible.
Just look at your telegraph example, with a Latin alphabet, you can easily memorise the combinations and translation is pretty much simultaneous, whereas you need an actual codebook for chinese.
In the past, it was all doable, but not simple, that's the point.
>>277313
Wow, I have never heard a current anthropologist say societies have varying genetic intelligence, how did he get away with that? Not that I necessarily agree with his theory. Are you in Eastern Europe or something?
>>277356
So how did chingers invent the printing press before whitey?
>>276486
imo yes actually
china's inferior writing system made it impossible to use the printing press so they essentially missed out completely on the revolution that comes with accesable books
>>277381
check that: made it much harder to use the printing press
>>277224
They're not totally arbitrary, the radical usually gives some sort of semantic hint (e.g. characters with the 木 radical usually relate to trees or wooden things) and the phonetic usually gives some sort of pronunciation hint (e.g. 敵, 嫡, 適, 滴, 摘, and 鏑 all have an on'yomi of 'teki' in Japanese and all are read 'jeog' in Korean, both deriving from their approximations of the words in Middle Chinese)
>>277362
yeah, that's just the point...
Even though printing press existed in chinkland, nothing really happened beyond a few printed books.
Whereas in Europe, it caused the growth of literacy, scientific publications and was very influential for both the enlightenment and reformation movements.
Remember, there were countless "heresies" before Luther, but only with the printing press did it go viral and changed the face of Europe.
Remember Hus and Wycliffe? Mere footnotes, simply because they couldn't spread their ideas effectively.
English really is fucking brilliant.
People will bitch that it isn't purely phonetic, but writing systems that are quickly fall apart because on homonyms. That's why pinyin hasn't replaced Chinese characters, and Koreans still learn Hanja and Japanese Kanji.
Instead of having flew, flu, flue; whine, wine; praise, prays, preys all spelled the same - which would lead to confusion - or using totally unique characters for each - which would get out of control - we simply agree on slight variations in spelling to denote the difference. I dare you to come up with a simpler way to solve the homonym problem all written languages face.
>>277397
>muh english
lel what, in this context, most of the european branch od indo-european languages fit your post
>>277351
Well, if you don't wanna deal with the telegraph code, send your Chinese telegrams in pinyin. Like I said, that's what the military did if I recall correctly.
>>277362
Movable type was invented in Korea (but for Chinese writing), but it didn't go anywhere. Probably because you'd need sooooooo many character blocks to print all the Chinese characters.
When movable type was adopted in the west, individual character blocks were still quite expensive, to the point that they'd do tricks like inverting them to do double-duty wherever possible.
>>277296
"My civilization is already wearing your Blue Jeans and watching your little boy porn!"
>>277411
>what's wrong with chinese script
>if you have difficulties, just use latin script
yeah...
Printing Chinese with moveable type is impossible.
Japanese often printed in kana only, telegrams were in katakana only for example.
>>277397
They sound exactly the same, and yet we can tell what each other mean speaking out loud. That seems to me like enough evidence to suppose that if we wrote them the same we would understand each other fine.
>>277388
>Even though printing press existed in chinkland, nothing really happened beyond a few printed books.
now that is just untrue:
"Printing from wood blocks, as in the Diamond Sutra, is a laborious process. Yet the Chinese printers work wonders. In the 10th and 11th centuries all the Confucian classics are published for the use of scholar officials, together with huge numbers of Buddhist and Daoist works (amounting to around 5000 scrolls of each) and the complete Standard Histories since the time of Sima Qian."
the last part is the most interesting.
>>277424
Chinese script works okay in print, and on the Internet. The difficulty is with telegraphing it.
>>276652
Romaji (not romanji) are NEVER used in Japan for teaching, only by shitty western Japanese classes. IPA is also not taught to them.
>>277410
Not a linguist, but I don't think that's true. Most alphabetic languages are spelled very phonetically (excluding things like loan words).
I'm not aware of a Western language at least that's anywhere close to as aggressively non-phonetic as English. AFAIK all the romance languages are very phonetic (French spelling is complicated as fuck, but it's still phonetic once you learn the rules of how to pronounce and not pronounce things), as are the slavic languages. Basically any language that attained widespread literacy in the past century is by default.
I suspect English is the exception since it has such a large written history, yet the spoken form is so divergent (given how widespread English is). Spelling is extremely conservative since there's no 'correct' pronunciation and no national governing body to regulate anything.
>>277438
now we're just going in circles...
>>277434
well yeah, of course a lot of books were printed, Standard Histories being a pretty sick thing in and of itself.
But look at it comparatively, the chinese printed a few thousand scholarly/bureaucratic books, laboriously so and over the course of a few centuries.
In Europe, mere decades after the invention of the printing press, tens of thousands of leaflets, translated bibles, dictionaries and grammatical books were being distributed.
>>277430
Whether they're 'true' homonyms would depend on your accent/dialect.
E.g. many people (like me) say "cot" and "caught" exactly the same, but many say them differently. If you're in the differently group, then spelling them the same makes no sense.
>>277219
Hasn't the SAT become more gameable with time though and less a straight IQ test?
>https://educationrealist.wordpress.com/2014/04/07/sats-competitive-advantage/
>>277438
In Asia nobody seems to trust unicode. The amount of bitmapped text on web-pages is really ridiculous.
Input methods also vary depending on device/OS/software which confuses things (vs. the standard qwerty keyboard in English). It often requires prediction on the part of the software, so if the software isn't exactly the same you'll get frustratingly unpredictable results.
p.s. Apple lets you draw Chinese characters on your trackpad. Not sure if that's useful for Chinese people or not, but pretty neat regardless... but also something that couldn't have existed until the last few years.
>>277456
The thing is, european languages that are more phonetic usually avoid having problems with homonyms simply through the virtue of not really having a lot of them.
Especially slavic ones, in slovene for example, there's literally only 1 homonym that could be problematic (eat/be, 3rd person singular) and even in the few examples there might be a confusion on meaning and context (mostly poetry), there's a contingency diacritic (not an elegant solution I admit)..
>>277468
I never said it was a straight IQ test, but it till correlates with it.
>>277490
I figured the number of homonyms would have been a function of the number of phonemes (hence possible sounds) in a language. The fewer sounds the more homonyms.
>>277532
Speaking Lithuanian must be pretty intense.
>>277532
well, that goes beyond my knowledge...
It would seem somewhat logical, although on the other hand, there's no theoretical limit on phoneme chains, so it wouldn't be a simple correlation.
also,
>lithuanian
>59 phonemes
holy fuck
>>277467
My point isn't dependent on which words exactly are homophones. My point is just that some words are homophones (which ones exactly depends on the dialect) and that we can tell by context which homophone is meant in speech, which proves that we don't NEED separate spellings for them.
>>277532
This doesn't account for tones. Important to Chinese.
>>277484
I was under the impression that all the bitmapped text was because the number of fonts most browsers can render is limited and they do it for the sake of displaying odd fonts. Even so, though, most webpages I see seem to have most of the body text in text rather than bitmap.
>>276486
There's something called information density in linguistics. Though it's not a perfect indicator of a languages usefulness, it generally correlates with how much that language is used.
Japanese and Chinese and a few meme langusges spoken by small ethnic groups in the past and present, have low information density on average. These languages can vary based upon the species of text, but the average remains.
Meanwhile most indo-european languages, especially English and Dutch, have a high information density. They are also easier to learn by being simpler and having connections to all latin script.
I believe that's the overall answer.
>>277559
Growing up in Canada, and seeing/hearing English and French side-by-side a lot, it's obvious that English is much more 'dense'.
>>277496
Yes, but it has become less so over time due to changes and more subject to rote memorisation
>>277576
Well, I suspect part of that is because English is a Germanic language that allows you to just stick one noun after another, like 'leaf blower', 'tent cover', whereas French grammar, being mainly Latin-based, doesn't allow thatー you have to say things like 'blower of leaves', 'cover for tent', etc. Also, the Germanic languages seem to have more monosyllables for whatever reason.
>>277434
>>277388
To add to this, the Chinese didn't just invent a printing press, they continued to innovate throughout since the creation of printing blocks, the later stages reached Europe and somehow miraculously "invented printing". independently. Not only the Chinese, but the Koreans also innovated quite a bunch to the technology.
>>277919
Seems like a pretty clear case of the writing system holding Asia back: they couldn't fully exploit what they invented, while the West could.
>>277647
>Also, the Germanic languages seem to have more monosyllables for whatever reason.
No shit, the Spanish word for "then" is "entonces". Three. Fucking. Syllables.
I'm really glad that psychometrics exist, purely for the sheer volume of butthurt that its experimental results engender from seemingly every ethnic and ideological demographic. Has there ever before been a better way to spark controversy than the phrase "intelligence quotient"?
>>276514
...You realize that printing appeared first in China, right? Both woodblock and movable type. They even printed paper money with metal movable type.
>>277388
>Even though printing press existed in chinkland, nothing really happened beyond a few printed books.
Dude, it was fuck important to state bureaucracy
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dibao_(ancient_Chinese_gazette)
>literally "reports from the [official] residences", were a type of publications issued by central and local governments in imperial China. While closest in form and function to gazettes in the Western world, they have also been called "palace reports" or "imperial bulletins". Different sources place their first publication as early as the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) or as late as the Tang Dynasty (June 18, 618–June 4, 907).[1] They contained official announcements and news,[2] and were intended to be seen only by bureaucrats (and a given Dibao might only be intended for a certain subset of bureaucrats). Selected items from a gazette might then be conveyed to local citizenry by word of mouth and/or posted announcements. Frequency of publication varied widely over time and place. Before the invention of moveable type printing they were hand-written or printed with engraved wooden blocks
Just imagine how printing saved the state a lot of time. State bureaucracy pretty much is the purported reason why the Chinese got into printing earlier than everyone. They pretty much looked into the traditional stamps, woodblocks & paper money they printed and asked themselves "What if we just made copies of official reports this way?"
Furthermore a lot of encyclopedias, novels, and plays in China were printed, not just silly Buddhist Sutras.
>>277968
But they never managed to exploit it, likely because their writing system made it impractical.
>>277989
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press
>A single Renaissance printing press could produce 3,600 pages per workday,[4] compared to about 2,000 by typographic block-printing prevalent in East Asia,[5] and a few by hand-copying.[6]
>Within several decades, the printing press spread to over two hundred cities in a dozen European countries.[8] By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had produced more than twenty million volumes.[8] In the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.[8]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_printing_in_East_Asia
>It is unknown whether metal movable types used from the late 15th century in China were cast from moulds or carved individually. Even if they were cast, there were not the economies of scale available with the small number of different characters used in an alphabetic system. The wage for engraving on bronze was many times that for carving characters on wood and a set of metal type might contain 200-400,000 characters.
>movable type was initially used by government offices which needed to produce large number of copies and by itinerant printers producing family registers who would carry perhaps 20,000 pieces of wooden type with them and cut any other characters needed locally. But small local printers often found that wooden blocks suited their needs better.[10]
The Chinese (and Asians generally) didn't fully exploit the invention of movable type because their writing system made it impractical. Not only do you need thousands of unique character blocks, but each of them actually ends up being more expensive than alphabetic blocks would be because of the lack of economies of scale (they'd end up hand-carving each one, instead of banging them out of moulds for cheap as in the West).
>>276514
>he doesn't know where the printing press was invented
>>278046
daily reminder that if you don't use printing press to eliterate your general populace and spring a general scientific revolution, your doing it wrong
>encyclopedias
>official reports
TOP KEK
>>278046
Seems to be true in this case (can't speak to gunpowder):
>Mechanical presses as used in European printing remained unknown in East Asia.[41] Instead, printing remained an unmechanized, laborious process with pressing the back of the paper onto the inked block by manual "rubbing" with a hand tool.[42] In Korea, the first printing presses were introduced as late as 1881-83,[43][44] while in Japan, after an early but brief interlude in the 1590s,[45] Gutenberg's printing press arrived in Nagasaki in 1848 on a Dutch ship.[46]
This is interesting: http://edition.cnn.com/2010/LIVING/09/06/arabic.difficulty.learning/
>Some Arabic characters look exactly like others but with different meanings and sounds -- and with only slight variations such as lines or dots, the university said. To add to the confusion, some sounds are represented by a variety of different symbols.
>"The results have revealed that the right brain is involved in the reading process for English and Hebrew, but not for Arabic," the university said.
>According to the researchers, identifying details such as the location and number of dots that is critical in differentiating letters in Arabic. But that's a hard task for the right half of the brain because that hemisphere primarily uses broader information to identify letters.
>"This means that children acquiring languages other than Arabic draw on the use of both hemispheres in the first stages of learning to read, while children learning to read Arabic do not have the participation of the right brain," the researchers said. "Hence, it may be the case that reading processes take longer to be automatized in Arabic."
>>278151
"I cdn'uolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg: the phaonmneel pweor of the hmuan mnid. Aoccdrnig to a rseearch taem at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. Scuh a cdonition is arppoiatrely cllaed Typoglycemia .
"Amzanig huh? Yaeh and you awlyas thguoht slpeling was ipmorantt."
Pretty neat. Can read text like this at 100% speed with no added difficulty.
>>278101
>eliterate
Looks like someone's civilization failed to invent the printing press kek.
That said, Europe's general populace were only literate by the 1700's (due to Public Schooling) and not the press. Furthermore, if we're talking about the 1400's-1500;s China, Korea, and Japan had large portions of their populations already literate due to the fact that they had large scale bureaucracies that needed shitloads of people to run it as opposed to Europe and its feudal aristocracies.
>>278163
>>278091
>By 1500, printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had produced more than twenty million volumes.[8] In the 16th century, with presses spreading further afield, their output rose to an estimated 150 to 200 million copies.
Who was reading these millions of books if literacy wasn't widespread?
>>278176
The Aristocracy? Burghers? Italians?
Meanwhile a large portion of European population from the 1500's-1600's still dwelt in the countryside. Goodluck finding literacy there.
>>278163
>that said, Europe's general populace were only literate by the 1700's
Jesus, you stupid fuck, I was memeing, but you're just plain wrong.
General literacy (as in, above 10-30%) only came about in the 19th century with the beginnings of public schooling through the social state.
But what really mattered in 16th/17th century Europe was the spread of ideas amongst those 10-20%, who were generally outside of monolithic organisations like the chinese bureaucratic machine.
In some shittier parts of Europe, even later (see, Ottomen, Russians)
>>278197
>Habsburgs.
>Not Monolithic Organizations.
>>276486
Oh this could be interesting...
>superior
Never mind, dropped.
>>277175
Are you retarded? Where did he say blacks are stupider? Where did he call himself a supremacist?
You are infering this from nothing. I frequently criticize my country, does this mean I'm rascist because it's not a white country?
Jesus christ, kill yourself.
>>278161
Not having to concentrate on the detail how text appears, and being free to 'skim' through texts, really frees people up to focus their minds on the content and meaning of what they're reading.
I can't read Chinese or Arabic, but I'd imagine you have to keep very focused on the details of the letter forms to get the meaning, which means they're concentrating more on the act of reading than on the meaning of what they're reading. That must suck.
moon runes seem like theyre faster to read tdh, like if you look at something in english, the look at the same thing translated to japanese there's 'less' in japanese. is there any truth to this
>>278262
>there is less in japanese
Not at all.
Before hidpi became a thing in the past few years, asian type could be really difficult to read even on modern computers. 'Mactype', which is a font renderer for Windows which renders characters more true to form (like a Mac), actually started as a project to make Japanese/Chinese easier to read on Windows computers.
I suspect this also explains why HUGE smartphones are so popular in Asia.
>>278315
"Hello" is 7 by my count with the upper-case H. But don't disagree in principal.
I can't imagine how someone could even read that Chinese text everything is so tiny and crammed together (and I'm on a retina macbook).
>>277942
That's probably why they speak faster in Spanish. Of course, part of the reason is that there's tighter restrictions on how you can put consonants together in Spanish, and so fewer possible syllables, i.e. fewer possible monosyllabic words.
>>278315
>Dictionary
16 strokes actually.
D i t i r y have two strokes each
>>278101
>encyclopedias
>TOP KEK
What the fuck?
>>276514
>For one, I'd imagine it's massively faster to learn to read and write with an alphabet vs. something logographic like Chinese in particular.
Eh, sincerely doubt that, because logographics have makes words have instant access to semantic meaning. If a picture of a tree, is the word for the tree, there is no ambiguity, whereas in the West and in typical alphabetical writing systems the semantic meaning of words and signs are clearly way more ambiguous and misleading.
It would make more sense that the populations that originally evolved a written language used pictures and direct signs to give meaning, like hieroglyphs and stuff like that.
>>278564
>>278334
I suppose it depends on how you write. I make H, D, and i in one stroke but them my handwriting has always been a godawful messy ligature scrawl.
Also, cuneiform is proof that you can use a logosyllabary for an agglutinative language.
Remember that cuneiform is supposed to be written with a wedge, so the triangles are actually one stroke and not 3.
Chinese typewriter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6iu9Nie4Oc
>>278151
>>278251
I learnt some persian here to be able to read poetry in the original language. I know it's not exactly arabic, but for writing is pretty much the same. It's not hard at all and you would literally need to be retarded or very distracted to find difficult the dots thing. The lack of written vowel sounds is more disturbing because it fucks you when you don't know the word, but that's it, and it's actually false that they don't write a single vowel.
It becomes way more difficult when they start doing flourishes with caligraphy, though. Also apparently old books didn't have the dots so that was probably pretty hard to read.
>>278597
Nope. It really is much harder.
The Chinese teach their kids latin characters in order to teach them Chinese characters.
>>278638
>The Chinese teach their kids latin characters in order to teach them Chinese characters.
[citation needed], also, there might be other reasons for that, that have nothing to do with the difficulty of Chinese characters, i.e kids and teenagers use the internet several hours a day and are way more exposed to English these days than before.
>>278334
Well, they don't read the individual strokes, they see the outline of the character, much like we see word shapes rather than individual letters in English. That's why it's so easy to miss spelling errors.
>>278628
Ligature handwriting is the ubermensch handwriting t.b.h. family
>>278648
Just google it. I was surprised too.
Apparently they teach them latin characters first (which they learn quickly and easily since it's - no big secret here - actually really easy!), and then introduce the Chinese characters alongside the latin (so the latin essentially subtitles the Chinese), then phase out the latin as they get older and have memorized enough Chinese characters. Although if you're Chinese of any age and don't know what a Chinese character means and is pronounced when you look it up in a Chinese dictionary the pronunciation will be in latin.
>>278665
That's not how you write 口
>>277490
We spaniards have quite a lot of homonyms but we mostly solve them with ´, if we solve them at all (context is usually enough). For example sólo (only) and solo (alone). It's better than adding random letters for no reason in my opinion, but maybe that's because spanish words are often already pretty long.
>>278628
I write in cursive so I literally make one stroke for any length of words unless small i, letter T, or H shows up.
>>278665
It actually wouldn't render in my browser, I had to do a Google image search (guess I need more up-to-date fonts).
>>278665
Page turned into mobile version
>>278747
More meme characters: 齉蠢龖爨攀馕
These are all 'simplified' Chinese too.
>>278800
I don't think I could remember how to write these if it's all I did in a month.
No wonder their kids are killing themselves.
>>278800
>honey, you're getting late to school
>wait a second mom, I'm writing a character
Side note, one Japanese guy once posted about this character. Everyone in that thread was scared.
>>278262
Japanese makes it pretty easy to skim over a text, since you can get a basic idea of the contents by just reading the kanji and ignoring everything else.
>>278800
Far as I can tell, only the last one is actually different in its simplified form (it contains the simplified form of the 食 radical), the others being the same as the traditional forms. (But then, only about a quarter of simplified characters are actually altered, anyway.) #3 contains a character that's simplified, which means it should be simplified in this derivative too, but for some reason it isn't. Same goes for #4, actually.
>>278597
Most Chinese characters have very little to do with what the word represents.
>>278928
一二三? But I guess characters like those are the exception rather than the rule.
>>278905
You're a Chinaman?
Can you confirm or deny that pinyin is taught before Chinese characters in primary schools?
>>278948
Nah, ain't a Chinaman, just study the language. And not very actively, either, but I know some. As for pinyin being taught first, I seem to recall reading to that effect.
>>278629
Really interesting talk about chinese typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdT-oFxc-C0
>>278629
What language is this in? Sounds kind of like Swedish.
>>276566
The latin alphabet isn't exactly easier, it's just that the Turks took the Persoarabic alphabet and didn't make any changes for it to fit their drastically different language.
>>276869
I thought the point of an IQ test was to test the ability to see connections and evaluate likely possibilities rather than testing rote memorisation.
>>279139
Exactly, which is why the argument is bull.
>>277295
Writing in stone, then evolving
You need the hammer in the right hand
As a student of persian, I can assure you the arabic script is fucked up concerning vowels.
You really have to memorize those vowels, which isn't as hard as finding what they are pronounced in the internet. However, after reading the word and looking up the pronunciation about 5 times, you get pretty confident of how they are pronounced,
As far as skimping over, you get better with time, AS IT OBVIOUSLY HAPPENS IN EVERY LANGUAGE.
The letters are not so hard to tell apart also.
ج چ ح خ look the same but at least to me it feels like you're saying it is hard to differentiate 'd' from 'b'
>>279434
Really?
That wouldn't explain arabic, which seems to be brush-written by nature.
>>276526
The difficulty of using the Japanese language on computers in the 1970s and 80s is part of the reason that the west is so dominant in computing. Sometimes this stuff does have a tangible effect.
>>276514
...Didn't the Chinese INVENT movable type?
>>278665
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biangbiang_noodles
Neat. These sound pretty good.
>>282315
It's very noticeable that Asians dominate computer hardware design, but the West dominates software design. Not sure if this can be tied to the writing system, although it's worth noting that computer programming languages are all based on English.
>>282320
Read the thread. It was invented in Asia, but never exploited much. It took off like a rocket once it reached the West.
>>279106
It is.
>>282315
Apparently fax machines are still very popular in Japan. I'd guess it's because of the difficulty of entering and formatting Japanese text into digital documents.
>>282360
No, it's because the Japanese are oldfag traditionalists despite the high-tech stereotype. Electronic Japanese was solved years ago and is quite simple. They just love paper copies, old-time seals, filing cabinets etc.
>>282360
> I'd guess it's because of the difficulty of entering and formatting Japanese text into digital documents.
Not really 先輩
The only good thing about Latin is that we roughly agree on what each letter sounds like.
That is the only good thing about latin.
On the other hand: Irregular pronunciations can go fuck itself.
>>276595
>Apparently that works well enough for Semitic languages
The only reason it works for Hebrew is due extensive internal education.
There is still a good chance they are pronouncing everything wrong, since they don't write down how things are actually pronounced.
I.E YWHA is still guesswork.
>>276652
Nobody is taught IPA as a part of their base education.
IPA is a tool to tell students they are butchering pronunciation, but nobody will ever teach them how to read IPA, so IPA can go fuck itself.
>>276778
Who came up with that shitty theory anyhow?
All you need to do to avoid people being literate is to NOT teach them.
I.E Europa got literacy over a few decades because mandatory training of reading and writing was introduced in countries.
>>282615
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ɛ̃fini
> It's pronounced like the French word infini. The name is actually written with a tilde over the initial lower case e (as in ɛ̃), and can therefore be assumed to be IPA, the pronunciation symbols universally taught in Japan, and quite often used in product naming.
Not true? Or maybe no longer true?
>>282634
"technically" we where taught IPA when learning English, since you pronounce letters a little bit differently.
The reality is most likely that its just a thing in their books, and its never used.
Remember: For Japan IPA is useful to learn English, French, German, but not Spanish IE.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUmdx2YHGcA
Urdu newspaper still written by hand. Apparently this was standard practice in Pakistan until the 90s due to the difficulty of inputting and typesetting.
In east asia, the countries which adopted the latin alphabet are also among the poorest.
Although it might be said that's because they were the most intensely colonized by the west.
>>282716
>the countries which adopted the latin alphabet
vietnamese is the worst.
They have like 20 vowels, so they have to use lots of diacritics. And at the same time, they mark their tones so most of the time you have 2 of them on every vowel most of the time
all this whilst using shit ton of portugese-based digraphs for consonants.
>>276652
You can literally learn katakana and hiragana in a week.
>>282807
Visiting Vietnam I found it easy enough to type out (to translate stuff).
Certainly much better than elsewhere in Asia where it's difficult or impossible for a non-native to read anything. Also greatly simplified reading signs and menus and stuff, and I quickly became familiar with a lot of written words even if the tones were greek to me.
The latin alphabet perhaps more than anything else makes Vietnam easier to travel than anywhere else in East Asia.
>>278815
It's not that hard to write, really. In Chinese/Kanji (trad. variant seen here) you remember the radicals that compose the character. For example, 春+虫+虫 or 龍+龍. The turbomeme characters are typically joke/rare characters much like "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious".
Reading would be extremely difficult if full pinyin (hiragana for Japanese) was used for Chinese as it exists today. Sometimes you can infer the pronunciation and meaning of a character solely from the radicals which compose it.
>>276737
>>282832
I mean that it would be better for them to use their own alphabet, like the ones their neighbours use
>>276737
>>282922
You don't think Asians cheat at everything?
Having taught school there, I can tell you they don't have the stigma against it we do in the west. School is simply about getting a certain grade in the end, full stop.
>>283005
>Western Education
>N-No Child Left Behind!
>>282615
>All you need to do to avoid people being literate is to NOT teach them.
People can teach themselves to read. And it's not like you couldn't just beg your village priest to teach you if he was a nice guy.
Learning how to read and learning an entirely new language at the same time, though? Not gonna happen.
