Brief thoughts on inefficient writing systems

Even small problems in orthography are very difficult to fix.

Slovak is a phonemic Slavic language; sounds and letters have almost 1:1 relationship. The greatest exception to this rule are the letters "i" and "y", which correspond to exactly the same sound. That means, reading is easy, but to write correctly, you need to memorize a lot of rules. For example, in words of Greek origin, the letter "ι" is transcribed as "i", and "υ" is transcribed as "y", despite the same pronounciation in Slovak -- but of course, unless you speak Greek, your only way to use this rule is to memorize those words. And the rules for words of Slavic origin include a lot of memorization, too. Realistically, after learning all those rules, you need to read a lot, and hope that your brain will magically provide you the correct version when needed.

Which makes it a great system for recognizing people who remember obscure rules and read a lot!

The reasonable solution would be to simply start writing "i" everywhere. (Plus fix some other irregularities that depend on the "i/y" distinction.) So the kids of future generations would not have to spend two years at elementary school memorizing these rules and exceptions.

Except, when you look at the text written with "i" everywhere, the emotional reaction is that it feels stupid. It feels like written by someone who is not really good at writing, because they can't remember the rules and don't read a lot. The idea that this should become the official version of the language feels offensive. To put it bluntly, it's like you are asking all people to write like retards. Of course most of them will refuse!

You might enjoy the story of how the Korean written language, Hangul, came about. It was developed by one of the Kings because he thought the average Korean should have a language they could read and write and leaning Chinese characters was difficult for many -- probably for no other reason that most didn't have the luxury of time that the nobles and scholars had.

These is an historical movie about the event -- I suspect it's romanticized but the main lines are probably pretty accurate. Called The King's Letters. 

Ease/speed of learning is the wrong metric to evaluate a language or writing system.  How effective it is for communication among the literate is far more important.   And that communication includes interesting hard-to-measure features such as social signaling, intentional ambiguity, and extensibility to new concepts.

I've looked at this some. 

A deep problem here is that if writing has SOME slop in it, then it is textually usable in nearly identical ways by people whose words-on-the-tongue are quite different... and this is... good? Yes! It is good.

The designed phonological orthography of interslavic is an interesting example where they aspire to something quite similar to written english, so that no particular accent or dialect or nigh-unto-language is particularly privileged but also there are not lots of confusing collisions.

Since the whole language in that case is artificial, they can try to detect sound collisions and or written collisions and tweak the vocabulary at the same time. This leads, however, to the annoyance of people from russia or poland or bulgaria or wherever needing to not just relearn spelling, but to stop using some words, and start using others, based on language mutation since the 700s in totally other parts of the slavic sprachbund.

For interslavic it is probably fine to throw away or recreate words? It is a hobby. And for people with spare brain cycles, learning the twists might help them get ready to learn like... "ALL the other slavic languages"? Maybe?

Here are the first few lines in the least bad english spelling reform I know of, for a pretty funny poem. 

The Keyoss

Direst krîchur in Krieishon,
Studiing Inglish pronunsieishon,
Ay wil tîch yu in may verce
Sounds laik korps, kor, horce and werce.
It wil kîp yu, Sûzy, bizy,
Meik yor hed with hît gro dizy;
Tir in ay yor dress yûl têr.
So shal ay! O, hir may prêr,

Just kompêr hart, bird and herd,
Days and dayet, lord and werd,
Sord and sword, ritein and Britin,
(Maind the later, how its riten!)

Maybe if I read a bunch of easy stuff out loud I'd get the hang of it? It isn't SUPER hard. But I can't recognize the words is the problem. I have to MAYBE say them out loud? And then "hear" what I said and perform recognition on that? (Personally, I like not having to have the sounds in my head when I'm reading, if I don't want them.)

This is the answer key, and the original, which you are strongly encouraged to read out loud:

The Chaos (by G. Nolst Trenite)

Dearest creature in creation, 
Studying English pronunciation. 
I will teach you in my verse 
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. 
I will keep you, Suzy, busy, 
Make your head with heat grow dizzy. 
Tear in eye, your dress will tear. 
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard, 
Dies and diet, lord and word, 
Sword and sward, retain and Britain. 
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)

The author of that "riform" has a video (which I have just watched tonight at 1.75X speed).

For example, in Year 1 that useless letter "c" would be dropped to be replased either by "k" or "s", and likewise "x" would no longer be part of the alphabet. The only kase in which "c" would be retained would be the "ch" formation, which will be dealt with later. Year 2 might reform "w" spelling, so that "which" and "one" would take the same konsonant, wile Year 3 might well abolish "y" replasing it with "i" and Iear 4 might fiks the "g/j" anomali wonse and for all.

Jenerally, then, the improvement would kontinue iear bai iear with Iear 5 doing awai with useless double konsonants, and Iears 6-12 or so modifaiing vowlz and the rimeining voist and unvoist konsonants. Bai Iear 15 or sou, it wud fainali bi posibl tu meik ius ov thi ridandant letez "c", "y" and "x" -- bai now jast a memori in the maindz ov ould doderez -- tu riplais "ch", "sh", and "th" rispektivli.

Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

 I work on NLP AI systems and have spent a lot of the past decade working on developing training data, so I have a degree of expertise here. 

There are a lot of things that go into how hard a language is to learn. How close the spelling is to pronunciation is one of them, but not the dominant one for alphabetic languages (grammatical gender is another, which you don't mention).

But you are totally correct that learning a character-based system is much, much harder than learning an alphabetic (or syllabary) language. I think it's a huge disadvantage for e.g. China, where kids have to devote years of study and memorization to be literate, many more than in alphabetic languages. I would go further and say that they are forced to have their whole school system revolve around immense amounts of rote memorization, which I think could lead to the kinds of relative lack of creativity that the Chinese school systems are sometimes criticized for. I don't think you can learn written Chinese without massive amounts of memorization, leaving little room for other ways of thinking for a decade or more.

Further reading:

• Why Chinese is so damn hard
• Difficult and easy languages (Chinese is easy to learn to speak, super hard to learn to read/write)
• Linguist survey data on easy/hard languages

Of languages that got multiple votes, Catalan and Spanish (and Esperanto) rated as very easy, and written Chinese (and especially literary Sinitic which is old written Chinese) rated very hard.

You're making the mistake of thinking that writing is about adequate communication. It's not, or not only. It's also about signalling that you had enough slack / wealth to waste tons of your educational time and effort learning arbitrary rules, and thus that you are probably 1. somewhat disciplined 2. somewhat well-educated and 3. part of the elite, or at least not a total prole. This is how complex writing systems have survived so long.

Language isn’t just about efficiency; cultural aesthetic is a terminal value.

Also:

I think we should also take into account the value of English spellings that maintain common forms with other languages, even at the expense of being phonetic.

For instance, to a speaker of French or Spanish, the English word "diversification" would certainly seem less alien than a hypothetical respelling as "daiversifikeishun". Does having a common (or very similar) cross-language orthography for latinate words offer more advantages than the benefits of phonetic spellings? I'm not sure, but it should certainly be part of the discussion.

I suspect the benefit is greatest in technical fields with lots of latin-derived vocabulary (i.e. health & biology). Would international scientific cooperation become more difficult if French and Spanish speakers had to relearn spellings for words like "capillaries" [kapileirīs] or "canine" [keinain] whereas the original english was almost identical to the spelling in their native language.

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?

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Personally, I want a written language that not only is logographic, but breaks concepts down into their component parts, the way an alphabet breaks syllables into their component sounds. Think:

Latin Alphabet : Japanese syllabary :: Logobet : Chinese Logograms

The problem with phonemic orthographies is that they correspond to only one language, while logographies can correspond to any language; this provides a benefit in China, where the population speaks many mutually unintelligible languages, but everybody can read & understand the same written language. This is why logographies are superior to phonetic systems.

Still I've never heard anyone talk about language reform. Why is that?

Maybe because you haven't been paying attention? On the Chinese site there are effort for Simplified Chinese with the latest official implementation of a language reform in 2013. 

The last language reform of German which I'm speaking was in 1996. 

The French of their Academie Française which is constantly trying to do language reform and gets mostly ignored. 

As far as Both English and Chinese go, they are languages with very different language communities use quite different phonemes to express the same word.

To do an English spelling reform you would need to decide which dialect of English is the correct one to map and which dialects are wrong. The US and the UK had problem switching to the metric system which is much easier then doing language reform. 

A US president running on a platform of enforcing a switch to an English language with phonetic spelling would likely be seen much less serious as a candiate like Yang who calls for the switch to the metric system.

If you take Serbian as an example of a language going well, the Balkan is full of wars between people who believe they have a different national identity because they consider their dialect to be a full language and the dialect that other people speak to be another language. 

There are two problems with phonetic writing. 

1. Omonims. How to recognise, what is "rouz" (it may be rows, rose, rhos, ...).
2. Compactness. 施氏食狮史 is much shorter then "The Story of Mr. Shi Eating Lions" and much easier to understand then Shī-shì shí shī shǐ (again omonims).

Try to think, why we write 1, 2, 3, ... but (usually) not one, two, three. We learn a lot of characters, such as #$%@<>..., road signs, product signs, math signs, emoji, ...

Chinese is hard to learn, but easier to read.

Hence most people with power will not only never struggle with literacy themselves but they will also never meaningfully interact to the 10 − 20% of society which does.

On the other hand teachers are elites.