Re: The "best" system of writing

li [Gary Shannon] mi tulis la

> What is the "best" system of writing? Of course such a broad
> question cannot be
> answered in any absolute sense. For a system of writing to be
> judged good or
> bad it must be judged in reference to some specific set of
> criteria. For
> example, a system of writing might consist of delicate and
> ornate flourishes of
> great artistic beauty, but be virtually unreadable due to its
> complexity. Such
> a system could be called "good" when measured for artistic merit, but
> "terrible" when judged according to its legibility. So before
> I share my
> thoughts on the "best" system of writing I should clearly
> state my criteria.
>
> 1. Of first importance (to me) is reading efficiency. A thing
> written once can
> be read again and again, so the ease and quickness with which
> it can be read
> outweighs the ease of writing.
I would tend to say they should be balanced.  If writing isn't easy,
it's possible that the writer may rush and perform a sloppy job which
would render the end product difficult anyway.


> 2. It should be relatively compact, without sacrificing
> readability. If the
> same novel can be printed in one writing system on 30% fewer
> pages than with
> another writing system, then the eye can scan it 30% faster,
> and 30% fewer
> trees need to be cut down to make paper.
I found this could be done by making the symbols as simple as possible.
Then they can be make small and be written quickly.


> Any other criteria are, to me, of negliable significance and
> can be ignored.
> Thus it doesn't matter if the system is consistent, easy to learn, or
> phonetically accurate. We read by visually identifying the
> shape of the word
> (or ideograph) as a whole, and once those shapes are
> memorized by the fluent
> reader it doesn't make a bit of difference whether those
> shapes are constructed
> from systematic phonetic elements or made up of arbitrary squiggles.
Yes, but it's much easier to learn a phonetic system.  Learning to read
and write Hanzi/Kanji takes many years.  Learning to write phonemically
is something that could be picked up very quickly.


> The first criteria, readability, means that a particular word
> should be easily
> distinguished from all other words, without the need to
> examine minute details
> of the symbol that encode that word. Two words of twenty
> letters length which
> differ only by one vowel somewhere deep in the interior of
> the word would
> violate this principle. Words should be recognizable at the
> briefest glance.
> For this reason "eccentric" spelling is better than
> regularized spelling in
> that it lends more unique shapes to the words. "hit" and
> "bit" differ only by
> whether the bottom of the "h/b" shape is open or closed. This
> could be too
> subtle a difference if the ink is smudged or a speck of mud
> stains the page.
> Suppose, instead, that we spelled them "hit" and "bjt". Never
> mind that 'j' is
> phonetically wrong in that context, after all we have no
> trouble with the "gh"
> in "light", or the "L" in "walk". Once the word shape is
> memorized it doesn't
> matter that some element of that shape is "phonetically wrong".
>
> We do pretty much the same thing with "kite", "light" and
> "height" spelling the
> long-I sound "i-e", "igh" and "eigh", which does a good job
> of creating less
> ambiguous word shapes. We might even distinguish further
> between "night" and
> "right" (which differ only by how far down the upper loop of
> the "n/r" extends)
> by spelling them "right" and "nijt". This would be better
> because it would
> create more varied and less confusable word shapes. "right"
> and "nijt" are
> visually very different, which, once those shapes are
> thoroughly internalized,
> aids speed of recognition.
>
> Viewed in this light the "problems" of English spelling are
> actually virtues,
> and having recognized that fact, my next conlang is going to
> have extremely
> irregular, non-phonetic, and eccentric spelling aimed at
> making the written
> words as compact and individually unambiguous as possible,
> thus rendering them
> readable at a faster rate and with less error, (once those shapes are
> internalized of course).
The problems in English spelling definitely outweigh the virtues.  We
could respell "write", "right" and "rite" phonemically as "rait" and it
wouldn't make much difference in reading because the true meaning would
be picked up contextually anyway.  "Right" as it is has several
meanings.  It can be the opposite of "left", "correct", or used as in
"civil right".

The differences in spelling are not there because to distinguish the
words but are a legacy of a time when these words were pronounced
differently.