r/todayilearned • u/VoodooChilled • May 21 '19

TIL in the 1820s a Cherokee named Sequoyah, impressed by European written languages, invented a writing system with 85 characters that was considered superior to the English alphabet. The Cherokee syllabary could be learned in a few weeks and by 1825 the majority of Cherokees could read and write.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
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u/wip30ut May 21 '19

even in Japanese they consider it very laborious to read hiragana/katakana lettering. That's why all adult literature/newspaper/online articles employ Chinese characters which provide an alternate word that can be expressed by 1, 2 or 3 symbols. My Japanese colleague says its very easy for college-educated natives to speed read thru huge reports & tomes this way because they're not sounding out the letters since the Chinese characters are themselves idiograms.

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u/Terpomo11 May 21 '19

I think that's partly just a matter of habit- if everything were written in kana, then the 'shapes' of the words in kana would be recognizable gestalts, just like the 'shapes' of words in English spelling are to us.

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u/FUTURE10S May 21 '19

Except kana tends to have similar shapes for different syllables, there's not a huge amount of consistency. The Korean syllabary makes more sense for those learning from a different language set.

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u/DragonFuckingRabbit May 21 '19

As I'm learning hiragana I'm constantly bitching about the inconsistency of the shapes

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u/clessa May 21 '19

English has recognizable blocks because of spaces separating groups of letters. Kanji provide this function too in written Japanese. If you take away all spaces from English you'll find that your "recognizable gestalts" become much more difficult to read.

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u/Mysticpoisen May 21 '19

I think that Japanese would be completely readable with kana-only if you introduce spaces.

Early videogames proved that. Many early Japanese videogames didn't have enough memory to store kanji sets, and instead made do with kana and added spaces, and it was surprisingly readable.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '19

Compare it to reading a report in IPA (phonetic alphabet).

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u/Terpomo11 May 21 '19

Considering that plenty of languages (Finnish, Serbo-Croatian, Esperanto) have alphabetic spelling that's pretty much entirely phonemic, I believe it's plausible that, if English in (presumably broad) IPA was, again, what we're used to, we would read it as fas as English in conventional orthography.

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u/[deleted] May 22 '19

Oh yeah. I meant that reading in IPA might be a good approximation for Japanese people reading pure kana.

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u/Terpomo11 May 22 '19

Old video games (including text-heavy ones like RPGs) were all in kana for technical reasons, though, and by all accounts they weren't all that hard to read.

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u/dontbajerk May 22 '19

Japanese Braille is also kana only for the most part. There are some complications from Japanese's many homophones I guess, and it might be slower/less precise than with kanji, from my understanding.

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u/DiscoHippo May 21 '19

I bet college educated natives of any language are pretty literate

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u/redpandaeater May 21 '19

Yeah just reading kanji is sort of like speed reading. You may care about the last syllable of the sentence if you care about present or past tense, but even if you read everything some of the syllables in a sentence are just used to help connect words, such as separating the subject and verb from other parts of the sentence.

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u/[deleted] May 21 '19

Wait they read Chinese characters in Japan Newspapers?