Asia's Orthographic Dilemma

[Unkotare]

There are 22 consonant and 7 vowel phonemes in Mandarin. Know these and you know how to pronounce words (leaving aside tones). There are 214 radicals in Mandarin. These radicals are basic logographic representations of ideas. These radicals can be combined in many different ways to make many thousands of "words" (you know, representations of ideas). The letters D-O-G only represent the idea of the animal that is man's best friend.

Any language you know is "easy," and any language you don't know is "hard." Which is to say that NO language is harder or easier. It's all relative to the learner.

 

[Unkotare]

This is a political thread, because the introduction of a Japanese alphabet makes it so. Because the Japanese have never used an alphabet, introducing such a thing makes it political due to an alphabet's overall efficiency, which efficiency translates to political economy, an economy that begins in elementary school: Japanese children are forming consonants long before they enter any school, though they have never seen graphic representations of these consonants standing on their own, they are always hidden by the syllabary. If Japanese children were shown an alphabet of 26 letters with which to learn to write their language, it would be impossible not to call it political if and when it was begun to be used in their society.

We invite arguments that rebut the politics of reading and writing systems.

Huh?

 

[Unkotare]

This is a political thread, because the introduction of a Japanese alphabet makes it so. Because the Japanese have never used an alphabet, introducing such a thing makes it political due to an alphabet's overall efficiency, which efficiency translates to political economy, an economy that begins in elementary school: Japanese children are forming consonants long before they enter any school, though they have never seen graphic representations of these consonants standing on their own, they are always hidden by the syllabary. ...

None of that makes any sense.