Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahfizz | Hacker News Reader

Unpopular opinion: written languages need to modernize. The printing press and typewriter forced the Romantic language from a format optimized for hand writing (cursive) into a format optimized for the modern world (print).

I think other languages would benefit from having a "print" format.

View on HN

Block-letter Roman-alphabet writing existed long before the printing press: consider e.g. ancient Roman monuments. Arguably, cursive was the anomaly: a form of writing optimized for a device capable of relatively continuous writing, in contrast to stone carving, clay tablets, brush writing, etc.

Cursive didn’t go away with the printing press. Non-romantic languages already “print” just fine too. If ASCII is for some reason needed, most non-romantic languages have a system for romanization. Cursive versions of romantic languages exist in unicode, they’re just neither popular, nor as well designed as languages with demand for script versions.

In my opinion, if any change was going to happen, switching to something similar to the International Phonetic Alphabet would make the most sense. Then any languages would be readable; already easy to encode any language in it, just not the norm.

What about a Hangul inspired version of IPA? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul

Hangul covers Korean language, IPA covers all languages. For example, some languages use clicks; though to be fair, IPA only currently covers 5 of the 6 clicks. Again, point is not IPA is the solution, but that having a common notation would make learning languages much easier and learning only one written notation would be needed.

I just wanted to use a concrete example of a featural writing system. It would of course not be Hangul if it had to accommodate all phonemes. The other direction to take would be to create a sophisticated (probably ML) model that could enable certain features to be optimized, like speed of syllable recognition. If we are constructing a modern writing system then that would definitely be a good approach.

It is not clear what this argument gets at, because:

• Other languages also have had a printing press for centuries, and typewriters for decades. (Not just "Romantic" languages, by which I assume you mean the Romance languages.)

• Cursive can be accommodated on the printing press too, so it has nothing to do with this issue. (In fact, some of the earliest 16-century type founders like Garamond and Granjon also made cursive types.)

(In fact, other writing systems have also already been influenced and "modernized" because of the printing press. Those changes have little to do with Unicode or codepoints.)

(We had this same discussion a week ago, on another submission from the same blog: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31794959 )

Written languages had cursive and print forms from the very beginning. Egyptian had hieroglyphs (carvings, monumental inscriptions, painting on walls and objects) and Hieratic (ink on papyrus) emerge at essentially the same time. Cuneiform had lapidary (carved in stone) and cursive (impressed in clay) forms.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com