Most Efficient Alphabet?

[the last donut of the night]

So recently I was reading some stupid thing (I believe it was a list of ingredients) and the thought came up: is "our" alphabet, the Roman alphabet the most efficient or easy to use in the world today? Is it possible that abugidas (ie. Hebrew, Arabic alphabets) are more efficient?

Thanks y'all.

[Stand Your Ground]

I would think everyone would say their own language was easiest. Who the hell knows, I know English (obv) and I took Spanish in school but never learned much, shit was hard, to me anyway.

[bcbm]

i'd say mayan hieroglyphics.

[Tablo]

I think hiragana and the Japanese language as a whole is one of the more efficient languages, but kanji kinda fucks that up. Their language has a bad ass "alphabet", but they still insist on throwing in a few thousand kanji. :/

[MarxSchmarx]

I think hiragana and the Japanese language as a whole is one of the more efficient languages, but kanji kinda fucks that up. Their language has a bad ass "alphabet", but they still insist on throwing in a few thousand kanji. :/

One of the incredible advantages of hiragana is that it's often written the way the mouth is shaped when vocalizing the sound.

Hangul (korean) also gets a lot of credit - there are apparently now entire languages in New Guinea written in Hangul. North korea for example has done away with chinese characers altogether, and my understand is that south korea is successfully phasing it out.

[scarletghoul]

i'd say mayan hieroglyphics.
hieroglyphics that are an alphabet at the same time ? wow

If the question is about writing systems then i think the chinese is the best precisely because it's not phonetic, so writing can to an extent be read in any language, providing you know the characters. It would be good if the whole world starting universalising certain characters based on meaning.

As for alphabet I dunno, it really depends what the spoken language itself is like. For example the latin alphabet is inefficient for english as many letters can have the same sound, some sounds cannot be formed without a few letters, some letters have a million sounds etc. But for spanish it is much more efficient. I would guess that the hebrew alphabet is better for hebrew than the latin alphabet. And so on.

[scarletghoul]

Hangul (korean) also gets a lot of credit - there are apparently now entire languages in New Guinea written in Hangul. North korea for example has done away with chinese characers altogether, and my understand is that south korea is successfully phasing it out.

Oh yes, how could I forget hangul ! The coolest alphabet / writing system in the world. It's awesome how the words are blocky like chinese, but formed by individual letters

[Tablo]

Hangul (korean) also gets a lot of credit - there are apparently now entire languages in New Guinea written in Hangul. North korea for example has done away with chinese characers altogether, and my understand is that south korea is successfully phasing it out.
I have limited experience using hangul caracters, but I actually like them alot. This isn't based off any deep understanding of the Korean language though. I just like hangul. :)

[Weezer]

The Latin alphabet is pretty efficient, but they is a lot of variants of the letters and different dialects and accents you have to add to them.

I like Japnese Hiragana/katakana a lot, but kanji is a *****.

[bcbm]

hieroglyphics that are an alphabet at the same time ? wow

:closedeyes:

[meow]

what is most efficent alphabet? i suggest it is the one that represents the most sounds in the language it is for. japanese for example both alphabet represent most sound in japanese. kanji of course fuck things up. i dont agree that chinese characters are good. at least not for a spoken language. yes you can write various things not dependent on spoken language. but then you cant say how to say what is written.

(my thanks for scarletghoul is for the bit on alphabet not chinese characters.)

because the language determine what is most efficient you cant say what alphabet is most efficient unless you discount language in which case question is meaningless.

[Kotze]

Hangul makes references to the shape of mouth and tongue, not Hiragana.


because the language determine what is most efficient you cant say what alphabet is most efficient unless you discount language in which case question is meaningless.Somewhat disagree. I heard that content represented by writing systems with a higher number of symbols can be read faster. That discussion was about Japanese and English (native adult readers). Now you can counter that things get lost in translation, so it often isn't really the same content, but in Japanese you can write completely in syllables if you want, and there is also a reading speed difference between that and the normal way adults write there. I don't speak Japanese myself, but I asked several people about that and got the same answer.

What constitutes efficiency has changed, because ease in hand writing has become less important. I'd like to have a program for displaying text that replaces common letter sequences with single signs (one based on pronounciation would be even more efficient, but it would be harder to program). I'd also like to see a couple of symbols used that would give a document a more easily discernable structure, for example the words for example should be replaced by a sign that really jumps at the reader (more than e.g.), or even better, by two signs that mark the beginning and the end of the example, so you can skim the text better.

[kitsune]

Yes, the Japanese kana systems are syllabic; always a vowel or consonant + vowel combination, plus the syllabic n.

I like the ideogram approach, symbolically representing a concept. It's the same basic idea behind international pictographs that work everywhere regardless of language.

I've been wanting to learn more about hangul. I have heard that it is very logically structured.

[Dimentio]

So recently I was reading some stupid thing (I believe it was a list of ingredients) and the thought came up: is "our" alphabet, the Roman alphabet the most efficient or easy to use in the world today? Is it possible that abugidas (ie. Hebrew, Arabic alphabets) are more efficient?

Thanks y'all.

http://omniglot.com/

[Devrim]

As for alphabet I dunno, it really depends what the spoken language itself is like. For example the latin alphabet is inefficient for english as many letters can have the same sound, some sounds cannot be formed without a few letters, some letters have a million sounds etc. But for spanish it is much more efficient. I would guess that the hebrew alphabet is better for hebrew than the latin alphabet. And so on.

I think that this is a good point.Turkish changed alphabets in the 1920s. Part of the reason was the states modernisation programme, but another part was that a Latin alphabet was more suited to the differing vowels in the Turkish language (their are eight a,ı,o,u, and e,i,ö,ü), which the Arabic alphabet didn't have.

The Turkish alphabet has 29 letters. Six that English doesn't have, and there are three that English has that Turkish doesn't. The Arabic has 28 with some sounds Turkish doesn't have and some letters covering more than one Turkish sound.

I don't think there is a 'most efficient alphabet' in general, but possibly more efficient ones for particular languages.

Devrim

[Nolan]

It would be neat if someone made a way to write English in Cyrillic, and Spanish in Arabic.

My mother was a telephone operator, and she can write in shorthand (http://omniglot.com/writing/shorthand.htm). I'd say that's the most efficient.

[Dimentio]

As stated, look at www.omniglot.com

The Turkish alphabet looks almost exactly like the Swedish, with the exception of Ü.

That's a little cool.

[Pretty Flaco]

A friend of mine showed me hangul once because we were bored and it definitely looked easier for someone to learn and use efficiently than the latin alphabet

[Autumn Red]

Since I've done a lot of individual study on the various languages that use Abjads (Arabic, Hebrew, Amharic) I would probably be more inclined to say Abjads. The Arabic Abjad is incredibly complicated, as letters have different forms depending on where they are in the word. The Hebrew Abjad is a lot simpler, with only a handful of letters that have different forms at the end of a sentence (mem, nun, etc). The traditional lack of vowels can seem daunting to a learner of the languages, but native speakers can make perfect sense of it all. For instance, the Hebrew word Melekh (mem, lamed, kaph) is made out of the letters (M,L,Kh), and there can be a great variety of words made out of the three consonants, so a great deal of inference has to take place when reading Abjads. It gets kinda crazy when you consider that Melekh can mean cow, king, angel, ruler, sovereign, monarch, and dynasty.



It would be neat if someone made a way to write English in Cyrillic, and Spanish in Arabic.If you do it phonetically it shouldn't be a problem at all. I write in English all the time using the Arabic abjad.

[Sir Comradical]

Probably Punjabi.

http://www.ancientscripts.com/images/gurmukhi.gif

[Devrim]

As stated, look at www.omniglot.com (http://www.omniglot.com)

The Turkish alphabet looks almost exactly like the Swedish, with the exception of Ü.

That's a little cool.

Do you have ğ, ş, ı, İ, ö, and ç?

Turkish doesn't have q, w, or x.

Devrim

[Dimentio]

We have ä, ö and one letter we and Finaldn probably are alone in having, an A/a with a circle above which is pronounced "ou"

We have q, w and x

[the last donut of the night]

Also, I should have clarified this in the OP: I meant writing system, not just alphabet.

[28350]

Perhaps the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet)?

[leftace53]

What the hell does "efficient" mean in terms of alphabets anyways?
I mean, wouldn't pictures just be efficient enough, they convey the required message right? It seems to me that alphabets and languages itself are simply an organized form of representing something with auditory and visual means. So would efficient be something that can accurately represent something? Would it be something that encompasses all the possible sounds we can make? If efficiency is that a language can convey a thought with the least possible effort, then would efficiency depend on what language we already know? That too, if words that are uncommon are used to describe something common ("Zarf" is the word for a coffee cup holder without a handle - commonly found in cars), then it becomes inefficient. So wouldn't every language just be as inefficient or efficient as the next?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Perhaps the International Phonetic Alphabet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet)?

I'd go with this. Even it, though, isn't really complete with the number of vowels it has.

[kitsune]

It seems to me that one way to measure a writing system's efficiency is in how concisely it indicates sound units in that language. The most efficient system would have one specific way to express any given sound.

In that respect English is horribly inefficient. There are so many ways to indicate the f sound, for example. F in foot or ph in phone or gh in laugh. And the oo in good sounds completely different from the oo in food, yet it sounds the same as the ou in would, though not the ou in loud. Gah!