I think there may be a lot more insight to pull out of East Asian language case studies.
You can’t simply reform Chinese to be phonemic, because written pinyin doesn’t give you enough information to distinguish among the massive number of homophones (which you get from context clues in spoken language that aren’t available in writing) in a language where each character is a single syllable, and most words are ~2 characters on average, with very few longer than 4. Also, even though this is becoming less important in the modern world, you lose the advantage of mutually incomprehensible dialects being able to share a common written language. When the PRC, which wasn’t exactly in favor of classical scholarship, tried to modernize the language, the result was simplified characters, not an alphabet. (Side note: Mandarin has some of the easiest grammar of any language I’ve come across, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is tied into the use of very short words with almost no inflection/word form changes based on grammar, and also to the maintenance of ideographic writing).
From there, we have Japan and Korea, which started out importing Chinese characters, but have since diverged.
I don’t know the history in detail, but Korea created a phonemic alphabet centuries ago, and went back and forth a few times. I’d be curious how much data we have on the results. For one thing, it’s easier to learn, but also less stable over time as pronunciations change.
Japan uses multiple writing systems at once, both ideographic and phonetic. I don’t know when each was created, when each is chosen today, or how this affects language learners. What does the data look like there?
I do think it would be great to reform non-phonemic alphabetic written languages like English. That seems closer to a pure dead weight loss, a historical accident of having imported a foreign alphabet at the beginning of written English. Although… given how different registers of vocabulary in English tend to have different parent language families, I wonder if that might not add its own confusions too? Unlikely, but possible?
As an older example, there’s the Rosetta stone and the use of Demotic by linguists to translate previously-indecipherable heiroglyphics. Not sure what the lesson there would be, but seems relevant?
I think there may be a lot more insight to pull out of East Asian language case studies.
You can’t simply reform Chinese to be phonemic, because written pinyin doesn’t give you enough information to distinguish among the massive number of homophones (which you get from context clues in spoken language that aren’t available in writing) in a language where each character is a single syllable, and most words are ~2 characters on average, with very few longer than 4. Also, even though this is becoming less important in the modern world, you lose the advantage of mutually incomprehensible dialects being able to share a common written language. When the PRC, which wasn’t exactly in favor of classical scholarship, tried to modernize the language, the result was simplified characters, not an alphabet. (Side note: Mandarin has some of the easiest grammar of any language I’ve come across, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that is tied into the use of very short words with almost no inflection/word form changes based on grammar, and also to the maintenance of ideographic writing).
From there, we have Japan and Korea, which started out importing Chinese characters, but have since diverged.
I don’t know the history in detail, but Korea created a phonemic alphabet centuries ago, and went back and forth a few times. I’d be curious how much data we have on the results. For one thing, it’s easier to learn, but also less stable over time as pronunciations change.
Japan uses multiple writing systems at once, both ideographic and phonetic. I don’t know when each was created, when each is chosen today, or how this affects language learners. What does the data look like there?
I do think it would be great to reform non-phonemic alphabetic written languages like English. That seems closer to a pure dead weight loss, a historical accident of having imported a foreign alphabet at the beginning of written English. Although… given how different registers of vocabulary in English tend to have different parent language families, I wonder if that might not add its own confusions too? Unlikely, but possible?
As an older example, there’s the Rosetta stone and the use of Demotic by linguists to translate previously-indecipherable heiroglyphics. Not sure what the lesson there would be, but seems relevant?