Comment by nwallin
4 years ago
I'm not sure I understand. Most European languages go through cycles where letters are added when languages are mixed together followed by periods of redundant letters disappearing. Old English had something like 39 letters. 'th' used to have its own letter: thorn.
I think character proliferation in CJK languages are a result of each word having its own character. The proliferation isn't fundamentally a proliferation of characters, it's a proliferation of words, which happens all the time in all languages. But only in certain languages does this proliferation of words result in additional characters being added to the language.
> I'm not sure I understand. Most European languages go through cycles where letters are added when languages are mixed together followed by periods of redundant letters disappearing. Old English had something like 39 letters. 'th' used to have its own letter: thorn.
There is a fundamental difference between pictographic languages where glyphs have intrinsic meaning, and alphabetic languages where letters reflect sounds.
Old English was much better spelled than current English because it didn't have a spelling. People wrote what they heard. The current mess is because we have 5 centuries of bad standards that can render ghoti as fish. I think you'll agree that the digraph ti, as in nation, is just as nonsensical as sh for the same sound and we'd be much better served by a single glyph for both.
We in fact have that already: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... English uses somewhere around 45 of those sounds depending on accent. Th for example renders two distinct sounds: ð and θ. þ is not any better than th, apart from brevity, because it also rendered to ð or θ when spoken depending on context.
Chinese is of course as much a pictographic language as English is an alphabetic one. A substantial number of glyphs come from combinations of simpler glyphs which have the same sound as the word you're trying to write.