The Gare and Elin Translate It Out: keikaku means plan

[Elin]

@Elin: Okay, I am now convinced. I didn't really put much thought on the amount of sound they can make.

Like I say, it would work for some languages. Vietnamese and Korean both did away with Chinese characters without problem. But it wouldn't work for Chinese or Japanese. Chinese characters have stuck around as long as they have in those two languages for good reason.

Actually, there was a move by the Chinese Communist Party to do away with Chinese characters shortly after they came to power. They suggested that Chinese characters oppressed the people by making it too hard for them to read. The plans were scrapped after research suggested that it was quite the opposite, and that Chinese became even harder without them. Eventually, they opted to just simplify lots of characters.

Yeah, you should totally do that. Believe me my own language is worse than English, and maybe even Japanese, so I think EVERYONE should make their writings easier.

My point wasn't that we should keep English spelling intact. It was that your suggestion that kanji are getting in the way of Japanese being learned by more people is misguided when you look at something like the difficulties of English spelling (arguably just as difficult and time consuming as kanji, and far less practical) versus the amount of people who have learned English to fluency.

You see, I'm a programmer, and computer languages have been evolving since they existed. People make up entire new languages just to make it more understandable, and easier to use.

The trouble with making up languages is that compared to a real language, they have none of the culture, none of the history, none of the beauty, none of the wealth of art in the language... They're cold, impersonal, and... well... machine-like. Of course with continued and widespread use, they'd eventually develop all of that. But they'd also develop the quirks and illogical points of any natural language. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it) humans can't be like machines and use a completely logical, organised language for very long.

I just can't see why the same shouldn't be done with regular languages? Why don't they make one that is easier to use?

People have, most notably Esperanto, which was designed as a universal second language, and which has very simple and flexible grammar, completely phonetic pronunciation, etc... I definitely agree with and appreciate the concept, even if Esperanto itself wasn't perfect (for one thing, the guy who created it only had deep knowledge of about five languages, all European, and it has a major bias towards speakers of European languages).

I would totally gather all the sounds everyone in the world can make and make a single alphabet set that could represent any language.

This has been done too, with the international phonetic alphabet, which is used in linguistics and suchlike.

I didn't mean that literally. Over 9000 is just an internet meme which basically means "a hell lot".

Haha, I thought as much after I posted, but I do regularly hear claims that you need to learn upwards of ten or fifteen thousand characters to be fluent in Japanese, which is just nonsense.