Our writing system is completely incompatible with our language. English has 20-something distinct vowel sounds and 20-something distinct consonant sounds. We have an extraordinary range of phonemes compared to most other language. That, and we have an accent system.
That means we need an "alphabet" of at least 40 something characters to represent each sound. To compensate, we use digraphs, combinations of 2 or sometimes more characters to represent a single sound. It's incredibly difficult to tell whether the two characters next to each other are meant to be combined or separated.
The only reason we ended up using the latin alphabet was convenience and tradition. It takes enormous effort to learn how to pronounce the latin letters in our language, so much so that it is all but impossible for a foreigner to do it properly.
You'll understand what I am talking about if you learn to read Greek and Latin. It's a completely different story when you use the alphabet that actually matches the language.
I'm not saying forcing the Latin alphabet onto Germanic languages was ideal. What I'm saying is that European (and some others) writing systems are better than Asian writing systems, by which I mean the idea of using a couple dozen letters, with relatively simple designs, which represent sounds, and stringing them together phoenetically to make words, is better than Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai, Arabic, etc. Japanese isn't terrible but the characters are too complex and a lot of of them are not phoenetic. Chinese is bullshit. Korean is better but the way the characters are built is not as easy as building words in European writing. Thai and Arabic have the same problem as Korean but instead of neatly building characters, they build words by smashing symbols together. European writing systems are superior.
Because literacy rates in the "inferior" northeast asian languages was always WAY higher than the "superior" English writing system.
They've been dealing with the complexity of Chinese characters for the better part of 2,000 years, and they've done a pretty good job. The Koreans invented their own writing system but even that is not enough. There is a reason why most world languages were not alphabets.
Our writing system is better though. Ain't gonna convince me otherwise.
That means we need an "alphabet" of at least 40 something characters to represent each sound. To compensate, we use digraphs, combinations of 2 or sometimes more characters to represent a single sound. It's incredibly difficult to tell whether the two characters next to each other are meant to be combined or separated.
The only reason we ended up using the latin alphabet was convenience and tradition. It takes enormous effort to learn how to pronounce the latin letters in our language, so much so that it is all but impossible for a foreigner to do it properly.
You'll understand what I am talking about if you learn to read Greek and Latin. It's a completely different story when you use the alphabet that actually matches the language.
Because literacy rates in the "inferior" northeast asian languages was always WAY higher than the "superior" English writing system.
They've been dealing with the complexity of Chinese characters for the better part of 2,000 years, and they've done a pretty good job. The Koreans invented their own writing system but even that is not enough. There is a reason why most world languages were not alphabets.