Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

"phoglund" == phoglund <phoglund@xxxxxx> writes:

phoglund> You are the only bigot here. I am familiar with several
phoglund> alphabets, and they all have their shortcomings. Arabic
phoglund> alphabet is excellent for Semitic languages, but it is
phoglund> hardly bigoted to say that a more vowel- friendly
phoglund> writing system would suit better for, say, Iranian
phoglund> languages. Cyrillic alphabet is very good for Russian,
phoglund> but it is tiring to read.

Why? Is that just because you're not familiar with it? If so, then
it's not an intrinsic property of the alphabet. Rather, the problem
is you.


phoglund> Georgian alphabet is otherwise great, but it does not
phoglund> distinguish upper- from lower-case letters,

Which is a good thing: no need to learn another set of glyphs
representing the same letters. (The Cyrillic alphabet in printed form
is much bettern than the Latin alphabet here. Other than the "A" and
"E", the rest of the Cyrillic alphabet uses only smaller versions of
the uppercase letters as lowercase letters. No need to learn another
set of glyphs.)


phoglund> which in my opinion reduces readability.

I don't think so. Arabic doesn't have lowercase, but is very
readable. Korean Hanguls or Jamos do not have a lowercase set, but is
no less readable. Tibetan, Mongolian, Thai, Devanagari, Tamil,
Chinese, ... None of these make the stupid distinction between upper-
and lower-case.


phoglund> I would prefer to write Amharic in the Arabic
phoglund> alphabet. It looks more elegant and is easier to read,
phoglund> and I think it would be no problem to modify the Arabic
phoglund> alphabet for use in Amharic.

But this alphabet doesn't distinguish between upper- from lower-case.
Or you're going to introduce one?




--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
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