Disclaimer: I'm not really sure if this has ever been suggested before in this forum. If it is the case, please direct me to the thread. Now, prepare for a long but (hopefully) interesting post
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Ever since I started learning Chinese at school, I was fascinated by the initially complex, sometimes overwhelming, yet beautiful writing system. After a couple months studying Chinese and realising that same the same characters are used in Japanese, I decided to study Japanese by myself. It’s been a daunting, yet overly enjoyable journey, and my fascination with the writing system has just increased ever since.

Then, it came to me. What if we could write in other languages with Chinese characters? I just thought that would be real sweet. Then I thought, I can’t be the only who has ever thought of this. So, after a quick a search on the Interwebs, I stumbled upon this old thread from 2002. A discussion exactly about what I had in mind.

Sadly, the thread died a couple years later, with the last reply being from 2005. That’s when I started to think about the possibilities, and started to think of a way to fully develop what was discussed in this thread.

After spending some time with the idea, I think it’s time to share what I’ve “come up with”. I can’t say it’s entirely an idea of my own, as most of the basic system is already covered by the author of above thread, but what I attempt to do is to take what already seemed like a solid foundation and expand upon it, ultimately adding completely new, fully functional elements.

For now, I will only cover the basics of this so-called “system”. Upon feedback from this community, I will update the thread with further aspects of the system as a functional whole. Now, without further ado! Prepare for a long, but hopefully amusing read:

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The following is a system (yet to be named) intended to be used as a way to write in English (and very possibly, other languages) using Kanji/Hanzi. This is, by no means, (yet) intended to be an “official" proposal to incorporate the Chinese/Japanese writing system into the English writing system, but should rather be seen as a mere alternative for Kanji enthusiasts (such as me, and hopefully most of you) to keep practicing their Kanjis, even when not writing in Japanese.

Note also that the purpose is not to replace the English writing system entirely, as not every word would be written in Kanji. My final intent is to have a system similar to Japanese, in which Kanji and a combination of the Latin alphabet (not really the best option) or another script (a better option according to me. A script made and revised by ourselves).

Please also note that this system is far from being complete. Actually, I’d say it’s still merely an idea in incubation process, even though I’ve already covered a lot of the problems that could arise. I’ve come up with several possible ways to tackle the many issues that could possibly arise from trying to mix two seemingly distinct writing systems, but still, many problems (mostly decisions about which option to implement to solve a given problem) remain. This is exactly why I decided to post it in here, so that us, as a community of Japanese learners/Kanji obsessed people, can further develop this system into something that’s actually usable: with rules, conventions, guidelines, etc, which can be used by anyone who already has a medium to advanced kanji knowledge to easily make the change.

Why bother?
Aside from the people deeply interested in Chinese/Japanese history, culture, literature, etc (or rather, just read it as “people deeply interested in Kanjis"), I think most of you might be thinking: Why on Earth would you/we even bother on trying to do such a thing? Well, aside from the mere “fun” Kanji enthusiasts would have, I think there would be many advantages to actually using it. Advantages that would serve in everyday life academic purposes, which could make casual learners develop an interest in using Kanjis outside their regular use in Japanese.

I attribute Asia’s (more specifically, Southeast Asia's) academic prowess, at least in part, to the language structure. I was fascinated when I first attempted to read “scientific” material in Chinese. Terms, process names, etc, are taken down to their simplest concepts and put together to form what at the time was for me a surprisingly concise, yet extremely coherent “new” term. I’m sure people with advanced knowledge of either Chinese or Japanese will second my opinion. Taking a quick a example, the word “anarchism” is loosely an “advanced” English word. Breaking down the word into its etymological roots, we get “an” from Medieval Latin and Greek, which means “without”, and “arkhos” which means leader. Lastly, we get the suffix -ic (-ism), which loosely translates to “having to do with, being related to” and the like. After this deconstruction, it is easy to “guess”, or better put, just plainly know what the word means.The thing is, we don’t see the word “anarchism” as the combination of these suffixes/roots/prefixes, but rather as a “whole”. We take the visual and auditive information of the word “anarchism” as a whole and assign it a meaning, just because, honestly, most of us don’t know (or care about) the meaning of said roots.

In contrast, taking a look at the word for anarchism in both Japanese and Chinese (Trad. characters), we get 無政府主義. We have 無, (without), 政府 (government) 主義 (doctrine, ideology, etc.). We could loosely translate this as “Way of thinking in which there is no government.” If you haven’t seen the obvious difference yet, allow me to explain: You can’t ignore the meaning. You can’t know 無 without knowing it means without, non-existent, etc. This allows you (and millions of Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, etc) to pretty much know (or guess) the meaning of any given new word you see, provided you know the characters. “Duh, we know this already”, you might be thinking. Now, thin again, but now throw in the factor that you could have the same effect in English (or pretty much any other European language).

Enter the actual system thingy. Now, based on my research and what I’ve read from other people who have had a similar idea before, but didn’t actually attempt to develop it, we could pretty much replace most (if not all) of the Latin/Greek roots present in the English (and other) languages with Kanji. Google says

"About 80 percent of the entries in any English dictionary are borrowed, mainly from Latin. Over 60 percent of all English words have Greek or Latin roots. In the vocabulary of the sciences and technology, the figure rises to over 90 percent. "

We’d pretty much have everything for any kind of day to day written communication. For the words that can’t be represented as Kanji, or that would just be better off that way, we’d the use what I said at the beginning of this post: Another script designed by ourselves, or in its worst case (aesthetically speaking) the regular Latin alphabet we (probably) love. I have come up with many ideas for such a script, of which I will include examples in a later update of this post.

Now, from the many ways in which we could accommodate Kanjis in the English language, I consider the following to be the most effective: Replace actual roots with its corresponding Kanji, unless a more general-use, single Kanji is more appropriate to cover a whole word. The MAIN difference from Chinese and Japanese would be the actual combinations of Kanjis we’d use to express the same word. This is nothing new, and is something that actually happens between Chinese and Japanese, where some words are represented with slightly different or totally different Kanji combinations. By doing this, we might (possibly) end up with three (or more for some Kanjis) different readings for each Kanji. The English, Greek and Latin readings.

For example, the word “International”, in both Chinese and Japanese is represented as 国際, where 国 means “country, nation” and 際, according to modern Japanese dictionaries, can mean occasion; side; edge; verge; dangerous; adventurous; indecent; time; when”. Uh okay, let’s just take “side”, and assume the idea behind it was to think about the “sides” of a “country or nation”, where of course, other countries reside. Now, taking the English word “International”, we can obviously assign 国 to the word/root “nation”… but what about "inter”? Well, since inter simply means “between”, my proposed Kanji would be 互, giving it that same reading when used in combination with other Kanjis. As such , we’d have the compound 互国, read as “inter nation”. Close, but not yet exactly what we’re looking for. Now, as we know, “international” is an adjective, so the only thing left is to have something to denote the “adjective” form or reading of that character. This is where our new script would come into play, emulating Japanese in the way it deals with grammatical inflexion. As a quick placeholder, let’s assume we borrow the Japanese Hiragana な to denote the adjective form of compounds, just like it does in Japanese with -na adjectives. We’d give it the reading of “-al”, and could now write 互国な, read as “international”. We now have our first functional [insert name of writing system here] Kanji compound!

Now, if we agree to read the character 化 as “-isation” (as it is generally translated) at the end of compounds, we’d have yet another word: 互国な化, read as “internationalisation”. By now, you should have a thorough picture of how the root/word-replacement system works. Inflexion and other grammatical words will be handled with either Kanji or the “new” script when appropriate.

There is still a lot more to this system, but I would to get feedback from all of you, as well as all the possible problems you think could arise with the implementation.

So, any thoughts?

Bril-*****-liant. Sounds like more fun than any conlang I can imagine.

I love it because many Central and East Asian spoken languages have been written using Chinese characters: Japanese of course but also Tangut, Khitan, Vietnamese. And Chinese has often been used to transcribe Tibetan, Sanskrit, Pali, and other South Asian languages. The famous "Secret History of the Mongols" (some say with parts being written by Genghis himself) survives only as a Chinese transcription of the original Mongolian. I'd love to be in that company.

Another potential advantage to this: speed. I remember reading an anecdote that a Chinese scholar visiting an Islamic capital in the middle ages amazed the locals by being able to write the words of the professor in real-time with ink and brush. Why not my class notes?

A final advantage: we could live Firefly.

That's exactly one of the many advantages this system would have! I've actually tried doing it in class with Chinese and it works wonders. Not only that, but after rereading my half-chinese-half-english notes, I was able to comprehend everything better due to the character compounds' simplistic nature.

I'm editing the post right now to include some of the major advantages.

Interesting concept, sounds like fun - certainly much more stimulating than any kind of shorthand I can think of, at least in my opinion.

I'd like to see this idea developed further. Though I'm afraid such an approach might mess up my kanji learner's brain. Upon seeing 互国な化, I instinctively read it as ごくになか, quite confusing and far from the intended shorthand ... erm, reading ?

Another thing is ... what would be the advantage of this over simply... well, writing in japanese/chinese or a mix of your l1 & kanji? 国際化 is easier and more instinctive to write than 互国な化. For a system like the one you have in mind to work, or to have any appeal to someone outside the kanjisphere, you'd have to find a way to simplify the script drastically.

Zephirot93 Wrote:So, any thoughts?

My thoughts: N-O spells "NO". Absolutely not. Keep kanji for Japanese and Chinese, the roman alphabet for English. (Well, you asked for my thoughts....)

I think English (and other major) languages will soon be able to be fully (or at least practically fully) represented in a writing system with Japanese roots. But it won't be the Kanji, it will be the Emoji.

Here's an interesting experiment with that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IConji If you read down, you'll find how some major problems in representing most languages with symbols or ideograms have been addressed (by changing symbols in a slight but predictable way, rather than adding suffixes in another script, to represent inflexions).

In English, using suffixes wouldn't work at all, because there are hundreds of irregular verbs for instance. You can't just write "在ed" (or 在+any suffix) to represent "was" You'd have to either use a different Kanji and no suffix, or give up and write it with an alphabet. Both solutions would be horribly inconsistent.

Japanese started out relatively simple, and evolved to work with the Kanji + suffix/particle writing system even better. Other languages haven't. That system wouldn't work well at all with them.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Here's an interesting experiment with that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IConji If you read down, you'll find how some major problems in representing most languages with symbols or ideograms have been addressed (by changing symbols in a slight but predictable way, rather than adding suffixes in another script, to represent inflexions).

This is absolutely amazing. I'd never heard of it...

Linval Wrote:Interesting concept, sounds like fun - certainly much more stimulating than any kind of shorthand I can think of, at least in my opinion.

I'd like to see this idea developed further. Though I'm afraid such an approach might mess up my kanji learner's brain. Upon seeing 互国な化, I instinctively read it as ごくになか, quite confusing and far from the intended shorthand ... erm, reading ?

Another thing is ... what would be the advantage of this over simply... well, writing in japanese/chinese or a mix of your l1 & kanji? 国際化 is easier and more instinctive to write than 互国な化. For a system like the one you have in mind to work, or to have any appeal to someone outside the kanjisphere, you'd have to find a way to simplify the script drastically.

I agree the change might be a bit confusing to people who are already used to Japanese. Even I still hesitate when I see one of my own compounds, but if Chinese people are able to learn Japanese and vice-versa, I'm sure we'd all be able to just get used to it.

I must admit though, when I first started imagining the potential of all this I went all the way to thinking it could someday be taken as a standard "way" of writing, as crazy as it sounds, "future English".

There are many people who believe Chinese will rise as the next world language. Many others are skeptical. As for me, I like to think of a future where learning Chinese characters in elementary school will be as second nature as it is learning English today in foreign countries. In other words, Kanji knowledge would be a regular academic requisite in most countries. Add just another tiny spoonful of craziness, and you can imagine most countries deciding to simply incorporate Chinese characters into their writing systems in a distant(?) future, since they'd be so common already.

Such scenario is as possible as it is crazy, at least in my opinion. As such, my aim, from the very beginning, is not to "adapt English to kanji", but rather to "adapt Kanji to English". The former was my first option, simply replacing words with the Japanese/Chinese vocabulary we already know, thus writing "international" simply as 国際. This would be a lot easier for people who already know the language... but what I'd prefer to do, is actually build a formal system adapted to English, and not the other way around.

This way, my theory is that learning characters would be a lot easier for people first attempting to learn Chinese of Japanese. You see, when we learn a new character, we have to process a lot of information at once. Stroke order, shape, readings, meaning, AND then associate the new sound with the new meaning. Chinese and Japanese people don't do this. They already know the word, since it's their language. They just associate the character with the word they already know. On the other hand, our brains have to almost double the effort.

Yeah, they wouldn't really be learning Chinese or Japanese, BUT they'd be learning the hundredths of characters needed to have even the slightest amount of literacy, at a significantly faster rate. They'd already know the characters and meaning, so learning Chinese and Japanese would be like learning any other language.

So uh, to summarise, the basic, general advantage (talking about people in general, not just people with previous exposure to Chinese or Japanese) is that we'd have a formal, logical way of adapting the characters to another language.

Adapting 国際 to the english word "international" in a logical way is already hard enough. I've tried it, and the result is that we'd end up with a couple hundredths of "readings" for each character.

Stansfield123 Wrote:I think English (and other major) languages will soon be able to be fully (or at least practically fully) represented in a writing system with Japanese roots. But it won't be the Kanji, it will be the Emoji.

Here's an interesting experiment with that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IConji If you read down, you'll find how some major problems in representing most languages with symbols or ideograms have been addressed (by changing symbols in a slight but predictable way, rather than adding suffixes in another script, to represent inflexions).

In English, using suffixes wouldn't work at all, because there are hundreds of irregular verbs for instance. You can't just write "在ed" (or 在+any suffix) to represent "was" You'd have to either use a different Kanji and no suffix, or give up and write it with an alphabet. Both solutions would be horribly inconsistent.

iConji seems like a very interesting concept I was unaware of. Still, its apparent inability to express concepts after a certain level of "abstractness" (at least from what I understood) would represent problems. Sure, you could always add more symbols, but we already have the Chinese characters. (I'll give you that you could reject this whole idea based on the same principle though, given we already have a writing system)

Regarding your "在ed" example, many irregular verbs would just be written using the "other" script, which would simply represent what the latin alphabet already does. Frankly, the idea of having a new script a la Hiragana has a mere aesthetic purpose, as combining Kanjis with latin letters looks plain horrible.

Let's imagine for a moment we decided to use Hangeul (the Korean script) as our replacement script. The block 왔 is read exactly as "was". In Chinese, 在 means "to be at some place", merely "at". Now, assuming that for some reason, we left "today" and "school" as they're written with Kanji in Ch/Jap, we'd do something like 今日、僕왔在学校. Today, I was at school, where the verb "to be" and its conjugations would all be represented by the phonetic quality of the "other" script.

Zephirot93 Wrote:I must admit though, when I first started imagining the potential of all this I went all the way to thinking it could someday be taken as a standard "way" of writing, as crazy as it sounds, "future English". [ ...] Add just another tiny spoonful of craziness, and you can imagine most countries deciding to simply incorporate Chinese characters into their writing systems in a distant(?) future, since they'd be so common already.[...] Such scenario is as possible as it is crazy, at least in my opinion.

I highlighted the keyword in your post.

That being said, don't take it the wrong way ; I do happen to have a soft spot for crazy people and their crazy ideas. At least it's something to think about.

I came to this post expecting to read on a shorthand system for note-taking for japanese / chinese learners. But now it seems that you want to put together a NWO universal scientific language. Oh crazy crazy you.

So that would basically be an Espéranto that would actually takes speakers from the sinosphere into account ? Eh, I can see that working.

Linval Wrote:

Zephirot93 Wrote:I must admit though, when I first started imagining the potential of all this I went all the way to thinking it could someday be taken as a standard "way" of writing, as crazy as it sounds, "future English". [ ...] Add just another tiny spoonful of craziness, and you can imagine most countries deciding to simply incorporate Chinese characters into their writing systems in a distant(?) future, since they'd be so common already.[...] Such scenario is as possible as it is crazy, at least in my opinion.

I highlighted the keyword in your post.

That being said, don't take it the wrong way ; I do happen to have a soft spot for crazy people and their crazy ideas. At least it's something to think about.

I came to this post expecting to read on a shorthand system for note taking for japanese / chinese learners. But now it seems that you want to put together a NWO universal scientific language. Oh Crazy crazy you.

So that would basically be an Espéranto that would actually takes speakers from the sinosphere into account ? Eh, I can see that working.

In a nutshell, yes! Kind of, at least. I know it all sounds crazy, but even if it doesn't happen, it wouldn't end up being just another alternative to writing in English, which would just be fun for a lot of people. It might even attract people who weren't interested in Chinese/Japanese before.

Expanding on my previous reply, the main advantage I forgot to mention of following a logical construction such as 互国な would mean that it'd be directly usable in other languages. That same construction would be entirely logical in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German and maybe even (I'm not sure of this one) Russian. Sure, each language would have slightly different readings for the "-al" bit, but it'd be a completely understandable, cross-language term. Oh, and using it in scientific papers would just be a blast.

For a moment, roughly imagine two global "language blocks". Languages from the eastern block (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc) represent "international" as 国際, while the guys from the western block write it as 互国な (English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, etc.)

That's not much of an advantage, though, because our common roman letters already allow European languages some level of inter-language understanding.

For your "international" example:
Spanish: internacional
French: international
German: international
Portuguese: internacional

And your 互国な example only works for languages that construct the term exactly in that way. The more words you try to do, the more the system stretches until it breaks -- no two spoken languages can be represented in exactly the same way (anyone who is tempted to mention Chinese, look at the wikipedia article on Written Cantonese.)

I also think that people undervalue the degree to which native English speakers (and other Romance languages) have an understanding of Greek and Latin roots even if they can't necessarily articulate it.

Now, of course you're going to have to take what I say with a grain of salt because I would rather see Chinese characters completely disappear from all languages rather than be used even more. If you're just doing this for fun that's fine, but for practical purposes it's not very useful.

Linval Wrote:

Zephirot93 Wrote:I must admit though, when I first started imagining the potential of all this I went all the way to thinking it could someday be taken as a standard "way" of writing, as crazy as it sounds, "future English". [ ...] Add just another tiny spoonful of craziness, and you can imagine most countries deciding to simply incorporate Chinese characters into their writing systems in a distant(?) future, since they'd be so common already.[...] Such scenario is as possible as it is crazy, at least in my opinion.

I highlighted the keyword in your post.

That being said, don't take it the wrong way ; I do happen to have a soft spot for crazy people and their crazy ideas. At least it's something to think about.

I came to this post expecting to read on a shorthand system for note-taking for japanese / chinese learners. But now it seems that you want to put together a NWO universal scientific language. Oh crazy crazy you.

Has anyone here read Arika Okrent's IN THE LAND OF INVENTED LANGUAGES? Things like this have been done before. Variations of Iconji have been done as well, though with minor differences. The most successful of them was Blissymbolics, which was used by a Canadian school to give children with cerebral palsy a "bridge" to communicating in English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols gives a synopsis of the full, sad tale, but you should really read Okrent's version; she's not only a linguist, but also a hell of a writer.

The basic point of Okrent's book, though, was that, yes, most of the people creating conlangs were a little...um...eccentric.

gaiaslastlaugh Wrote:Has anyone here read Arika Okrent's IN THE LAND OF INVENTED LANGUAGES? Things like this have been done before. Variations of Iconji have been done as well, though with minor differences. The most successful of them was Blissymbolics, which was used by a Canadian school to give children with cerebral palsy a "bridge" to communicating in English. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols gives a synopsis of the full, sad tale, but you should really read Okrent's version; she's not only a linguist, but also a hell of a writer.

The basic point of Okrent's book, though, was that, yes, most of the people creating conlangs were a little...um...eccentric.

Sounds like a good nightstand book. I was looking for something to replace my ベルセルク tomes (they can get a little too gloomy and depressing for the rainiest nights). I might just get that - fascinating subject.

Several of John DeFrancis' books talk about 16-19th century ideas about creating "universal symbols" or using Chinese characters for all languages, and 20th century attempts like the Bliss symbols. When Westerners first started learning about Chinese characters in the Renaissance period, they (wrongly) learned that the characters expressed meaning rather than any sounds in a language, and (semi-wrongly) learned that East Asian countries could all read the same material even though they spoke totally different languages. So they assumed it would be possible to use them for Western languages too and thus create a universal writing system.

A splendid idea! Perhaps you could start with some of the synonyms for 'drunk':

befuddled belligerent bent besotted blacked-out blasted blind blitzed blocked blotto boiled bombed bunkered bricked buttered buzzed caned canned clobbered cockneyed cranked crapulous crocked cut destroyed dipso dragged drunk embalmed euphoric fermented floating fried giddy gone groggy hammered hammerlocked happy high hooched impaired in rare form inebriated intoxicated juiced legless liquored-up lit loaded looped lubed lushed marinated mellow merry messed up obliterated obliviated out of it overloaded pasted pickled pie-eyed pissed plastered plotzed plowed polluted pounded ramboed ripped roaring rocked sauced sculpted shellacked shickered shitfaced slammed slopped up sloshed smashed snockered snookered sodden soused sizzled spaced stewed stiff stinking stinko stocious stoned swacked tanked 3 sheets to the wind tied one on tight tipsy toasted tomahawked torque trashed trolleyed tweaked twisted under the influence under the table under the weather unsober wallpapered wasted whipped wiped woozy wrecked zoned zonked

Once those are successfully kanjified (漢字化?), you can move on to the synonyms for 'good', of which there are apparently 380 in the Oxford Thesaurus.

Good luck!

anotherjohn Wrote:A splendid idea! Perhaps you could start with some of the synonyms for 'drunk':

befuddled belligerent bent besotted blacked-out blasted blind blitzed blocked blotto boiled bombed bunkered bricked buttered buzzed caned canned clobbered cockneyed cranked crapulous crocked cut destroyed dipso dragged drunk embalmed euphoric fermented floating fried giddy gone groggy hammered hammerlocked happy high hooched impaired in rare form inebriated intoxicated juiced legless liquored-up lit loaded looped lubed lushed marinated mellow merry messed up obliterated obliviated out of it overloaded pasted pickled pie-eyed pissed plastered plotzed plowed polluted pounded ramboed ripped roaring rocked sauced sculpted shellacked shickered shitfaced slammed slopped up sloshed smashed snockered snookered sodden soused sizzled spaced stewed stiff stinking stinko stocious stoned swacked tanked 3 sheets to the wind tied one on tight tipsy toasted tomahawked torque trashed trolleyed tweaked twisted under the influence under the table under the weather unsober wallpapered wasted whipped wiped woozy wrecked zoned zonked

Once those are successfully kanjified (漢字化?), you can move on to the synonyms for 'good', of which there are apparently 380 in the Oxford Thesaurus.

Good luck!

1.- I never said every word would be written in Kanji. Solution: to write them with the "phonetic" script. Problem solved.
2.- How many of those do you use in real life? Wallpapered? Really?

Zephirot93 Wrote:Wallpapered? Really?

I've got you covered for this one : 壁紙ed !

edit : sh*t, it's an actual word. Japanese is magic.

Zephirot93 Wrote:1.- I never said every word would be written in Kanji. Solution: to write them with the "phonetic" script. Problem solved.

What you describe starts to resemble.. well, Japanese

Zephirot93 Wrote:iConji seems like a very interesting concept I was unaware of. Still, its apparent inability to express concepts after a certain level of "abstractness" (at least from what I understood) would represent problems. Sure, you could always add more symbols, but we already have the Chinese characters. (I'll give you that you could reject this whole idea based on the same principle though, given we already have a writing system)

We already have the Chinese characters, but we can't use them to represent inflections, so we can't use them to represent the English language as easily as they can be used to represent Japanese. And the Japanese writing system is already the most complicated in the world. Imagine how complex and unseemly a similar, English writing system would get.

The problems you mention with iConji don't stem from the idea of using symbols this way, they stem from the requirement of using a "universal" writing system (that can be read in several different languages). You can't write English in a way that can be translated word for word into even German or French (let alone something more alien), with any degree of sophistication.

However, if that requirement is abandoned, then there's no reason why the system can't be developed to allow people to write anything they want in it. And it would be more elegant than the Japanese system, despite English being less elegant than the Japanese language.

And, of course, you could use the same set of symbols to write many different languages, which would make it by orders of magnitude easier to learn to read other languages that use the same system. Much easier than a Chinese person learning to read Japanese.

Zephirot93 Wrote:Let's imagine for a moment we decided to use Hangeul (the Korean script) as our replacement script.

That would make it look better on paper, but, conceptually, it wouldn't help at all. It's still the same convoluted mess of two complex scripts that have nothing in common.

Just think of all the extra complexity you'd have, compared to Japanese writing (which, like I said, is already the most complex in the world):
- no patterns as far as the readings of Kanji (English is just too diverse phonologically and across dialects)
- the second script is infinitely more complex than hiragana, there are literally no discernible spelling rules
- the second script is used more often, due to the many irregularities in English that won't allow for Kanji; if Japanese had half Hiragana, half Kanji, it would be significantly more difficult to read.

anotherjohn Wrote:A splendid idea! Perhaps you could start with some of the synonyms for 'drunk':

befuddled belligerent bent besotted blacked-out blasted blind blitzed blocked blotto boiled bombed bunkered bricked buttered buzzed caned canned clobbered cockneyed cranked crapulous crocked cut destroyed dipso dragged drunk embalmed euphoric fermented floating fried giddy gone groggy hammered hammerlocked happy high hooched impaired in rare form inebriated intoxicated juiced legless liquored-up lit loaded looped lubed lushed marinated mellow merry messed up obliterated obliviated out of it overloaded pasted pickled pie-eyed pissed plastered plotzed plowed polluted pounded ramboed ripped roaring rocked sauced sculpted shellacked shickered shitfaced slammed slopped up sloshed smashed snockered snookered sodden soused sizzled spaced stewed stiff stinking stinko stocious stoned swacked tanked 3 sheets to the wind tied one on tight tipsy toasted tomahawked torque trashed trolleyed tweaked twisted under the influence under the table under the weather unsober wallpapered wasted whipped wiped woozy wrecked zoned zonked

Once those are successfully kanjified (漢字化?), you can move on to the synonyms for 'good', of which there are apparently 380 in the Oxford Thesaurus.

Good luck!

Most of those are euphemisms. Japanese has them too you know. They don't require separate symbols, wallpapered can be written using the symbol for wall, paper and a suffix. Or, in the case of iConji, with the symbol for wall and the modified symbol for paper.

The iConji thing shows the limitations of any attempt at a purely pictographic/ideographic system, and the difference between a code and a writing system.

The problem with a code (like iConji) is that you have to agree beforehand on what the symbols mean and how they are combined. The ability to create new meanings or symbols is very limited (or nonexistent) without discussing the meaning beforehand. A writing system, on the other hand, can be extended without limit -- because it represents a language, the "code" is already known to the writer and reader without needing to specifically arrange the meaning beforehand.

Attempts at code symbol usage like iConji runs into cultural difference problems. I notice from just browsing the page that "good" is represented by a halo and angel wings, which is pure Western culture (granted, an aspect of Western culture that would be known elsewhere from Western pop culture). Their coffee example also uses English word order, and the use of a single symbol for "to be" is clearly a Western-language influenced decision as well.

Also the practical use is a little unclear on that page -- why would you use that system to suggest meeting for coffee? Surely if you're going to meet someone for coffee you two share some common language, so there's no reason to use iConji. I know that's just one example but it is hard to see how much actual use that would have.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The iConji thing shows the limitations of any attempt at a purely pictographic/ideographic system, and the difference between a code and a writing system.

The problem with a code (like iConji) is that you have to agree beforehand on what the symbols mean and how they are combined. The ability to create new meanings or symbols is very limited (or nonexistent) without discussing the meaning beforehand. A writing system, on the other hand, can be extended without limit -- because it represents a language, the "code" is already known to the writer and reader without needing to specifically arrange the meaning beforehand.

I don't understand the distinction you're making. Language is a representation of something else as well. The sound "apple" only means apple because that's what English speakers agreed upon. Apples could just as easily be called something else.

For a language to be fully functional, it needs to be specified, in dictionaries, textbooks, grammar books. A massive amount of work goes into doing that, especially for national languages.

Yes, for a symbolic English writing system to be fully functional, its creators would have to ensure that all free morphemes are represented in a predictable way. That would mean specifying which symbols stand for which free morpheme, and how those symbols are to be modified when a modified root is to be represented (either by changing the symbol itself slightly, in a predictable way, or by adding another symbol that stands for a specific type of prefix or suffix). But it would be less work than what it took to specify the English language. Much, much less work.

As far as the number of symbols it would take, that depends on how much of the language you want to represent as symbols. Obviously, if you want all of it (including words most people don't use), you would need an unrealistic number of symbols. But who said anything about "purely symbolic"? I'd settle for practically symbolic. For instance, for us to be having this conversation using exclusively symbols, we'd only need a few thousand.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Also the practical use is a little unclear on that page -- why would you use that system to suggest meeting for coffee? Surely if you're going to meet someone for coffee you two share some common language, so there's no reason to use iConji. I know that's just one example but it is hard to see how much actual use that would have.

It's meant to be used for short messages, on phones. The claim is that it's faster and easier than typing out the same message. And even if it's not faster, it's definitely more fun.

It also has the potential to be very helpful with language learning, if it's developed further.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Surely if you're going to meet someone for coffee you two share some common language

You really don't see why two people who don't share a language would ever wish to interact over the Internet or phone?

Stansfield123 Wrote:I don't understand the distinction you're making. Language is a representation of something else as well. The sound "apple" only means apple because that's what English speakers agreed upon. Apples could just as easily be called something else.

Languages arise naturally among any group of human beings, they are not a process of conscious invention. Writing systems are a technology invented to represent those languages (or borrowed from other cultures). This is a simplification; the Wikipedia article on language has more. But the point is that in normal circumstances, you learn the language you are exposed to as a child automatically and can use that language to communicate with others without instruction, and all of this happens whether or not the language has been codified or defined by anyone.

The writing systems arise when someone realizes that a picture of something can also represent a sound associated with that thing, and from there the writing system develops that can express all the sounds in the language. After that you no longer need to invent a new symbol for every new thing you want to express. Chinese may seem to violate this idea but it doesn't -- the compounding of words, use of phonetic elements in characters (which were once more reliable than they are now), and the use of characters purely for sound is part of this.

Quote:For a language to be fully functional, it needs to be specified, in dictionaries, textbooks, grammar books. A massive amount of work goes into doing that, especially for national languages.

That's an odd definition; it would mean that fully functional languages did not exist before writing, and that many of the world's languages are not fully functional.

Quote:For instance, for us to be having this conversation using exclusively symbols, we'd only need a few thousand.

But we would have had to invent and specify what all those symbols mean, and if you wanted to express something we hadn't agreed on, you would have no way to do it. Whereas we can have this conversation consisting of entirely new sentences and phrases because we both know English.

Quote:You really don't see why two people who don't share a language would ever wish to interact over the Internet or phone?

I was mostly just pointing out that their example was silly, and I think the interaction would be very limited. A purely ideographic writing system is impossible, as is a writing system that can represent two languages (or more) at the same time. How much progress you can make towards that theoretical goal is an open question, I suppose.

yudantaiteki Wrote:The iConji thing shows the limitations of any attempt at a purely pictographic/ideographic system, and the difference between a code and a writing system.

The problem with a code (like iConji) is that you have to agree beforehand on what the symbols mean and how they are combined. The ability to create new meanings or symbols is very limited (or nonexistent) without discussing the meaning beforehand. A writing system, on the other hand, can be extended without limit -- because it represents a language, the "code" is already known to the writer and reader without needing to specifically arrange the meaning beforehand.

I agree that iConji is silly. I mean, how would you translate the following into iConji:


-I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall.

-It did always seem so to us; but now, in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the dukes he values most, for equalities are so weighed that curiosity in neither can make choice of either's moiety.

(King Lear, Act I, Scene 1)