← Back to context

Comment by FabHK

1 month ago

In his book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, John DeFrancis calls the English orthography the worst among the alphabetic ones, and Japanese the worst among the logographic ones.

Re English, maybe among major languages. Faroese orthography is bad in phonetic terms, but Faroese is not a well known language. I'm sure other smaller languages have even worse systems than English.

Among the major languages, French is also pretty awful. Its orthography is much less practical than Spanish or Italian.

Tibetan orthography is notoriously bad, but is neither alphabetic nor logographic. This is a result of Tibetan changing a great deal since it was first transcribed.