What are the optimum number of symbols for a truly rich system of writing?

Subjective. Relative. One would need to be fluent in Cyrillic, Chinese, and English as well as the Latin languages to make any distinction, and even then, it would only be one subjective opinion.

Apparently Arabic is pretty rich in nuance and overlapping metaphor. It has to do with the root symbols being easily re-faceted by the application of many available dibs and dots over and under the linear strokes. I’m jealous.

I have heard that some Chinese characters also appear in Korean and in Japanese—that the characters overlap but often the meanings differ. How true is this?

I have always sort of thought of western alphabets as sort of like naming streets and finding an address by the cross streets and eastern characters are more like naming the intersections and finding a place by the name of the intersection.

@susanc Great point. Not great enough to convince me to tackle learning a new language, but pretty great. :-)

@anartist The logograms are used in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean. They stand for sounds, not things. But the Chinese use a simplified character set for them today, whereas the Japanese use the more complicated original Chinese logogram for their Kanji. The Chinese also use many thousands of real pictograms called sinographs, each of which stands for a specific concept (electricity, car or vehicle, fight or war and so on).

@ETpro thank you for that info. So use of the logograms is sort of like the variants of the Roman alphabet used for many of the European,N&S American, and Australian languages?

@anartist I just checked, and see that I answered out of school. No, even the logograms are symbols for things, not phonograms standing for sounds. The logograms are just a simple subset of the more complete Chinese language, and are more widely used throughout the Orient. Sorry for the bad info.

@ETpro k
so my streets and intersections theory still holds. Alphabets are streets and logograms are intersections, that is why there are so many more—a different philosophy behind the written language

I’m going to nominate Sanskrit., which is written in Devanagari. If I could go back to my undergraduate days, I would still study literature and philosophy, but I would also study this exquisite, subtle, and multifaceted language, which truly deserves its meaning of “polished” or “perfected.” It is the language of the gods.

@Jeruba how many characters? do you know?
Do Arabic, Aramaic, Farsi and Hindi come from Sanskrit?

I don’t think it’s the size of the alphabet that matters, but how you use it.

Scientific Language (character count high/complexity low): Terms used when interpretation of meaning must be exactly as intended; known worldwide and strictly enforced; pronunciation of words is simple and short. (compare to Scientific Latin)

Common Language (character count medium/complexity medium): Efficient in basic communication; open to improvisation in popular culture; known worldwide but due to lax enforcement diverse variations exist. (compare to English)

Artistic Language (character count low/complexity high): Interpretation of individual symbols remains very lax by principle, as does the drawing of them; this allows for freer expression; in the hands of skilled artists, concepts that could not possibly be conveyed by other language alone are possible; the symbols are not spoken but sung as musical notes (compare to runes, hieroglyphics, musical notation etc.)

A system similar to this is something I’d try out if I had a little world to rule over.

@Jeruba Interesting pick on Sanskrit from what I have read of it.Unfortunately, original Sanskrit was a spoken language only, and there was no writing system for it. Writing was not introduced till after Sanskrit had evolved into modern Prakrits. Even then, the ancient, verbally preserved religious texts were written down very reluctantly.

@zophu Excellent points, though I do not necessairly agree that common English is not up to the task of passing on complex, artistic thoughts. It is not the richness of individual graphemes or even of the individual words that sequences of them convery that gives the richness of our language. It is how all the many words understood by a well educated adult can be grouped to convey extremely complex, subtle thoughts and to call up familiar symbols of life in our minds.

English is an efficient enough language, I guess, and it will continue to evolve unless it’s stamped out by some tyrannical force or made completely obsolete by some jump in linguistic evolution. And, it’s not just the brain that effects the language used; the language also effects the brain and it’s effects would remain even if it were replaced. So there’s no reason to strait-up replace English that I can see.

But, the purpose of the artistic language I was imagining is to free the users from over-specific meanings of words and characters. You can only think so many things when I say the word “raven” regardless of what Edgar Allen Po’s poem meant by it. Think of tarot cards and their effects on the superstitious mind. Imagine that as a language people could write songs with, where the lyrics’ meanings are implied but the specific images conjured are up to the audience’s mind.

The three basic languages I listed above are really just three parts of one language. And it’s the basic patterns we naturally follow. It’s just that it’s not what the conventions are based off of directly; I think they should be. It is passed time we readdress language as a society. Communication is the most important aspect of our existence. And, it is the most disrespected. Privacy is dead, the media is constantly flooded with nonsense and confusion; over-sensation where information doesn’t matter and boredom where it does… Education stands to fucking improve as well. More efficient language would improve that exponentially.

You’ve seen what the English language can do. Imagine what a language that wasn’t invented centuries ago might be capable of.

@zophu Thanks for the clarification. I actually didn’t read it that way on the first post. I assumed you were just talking about the more figurative use of standard spoken and written English that great writers and poets and song composers already demonstrate.

There is no optimum, there are only trade offs. Educated Chinese readers of Chinese are faster, but education of kids is slow and tedious. Languages based on short character-based alphabets like Greek, Latin or Arabic are the other way round.

@mattbrowne There has to be some sweet spot. Certainly, the binary character set is insufficient for descriptive communication without the aid of computers to interpret it. There are some 45,000 graphemes in the Chinese dictionary, but there are around 1,000,000 words in the English dictionary. Surely the richness of a languages vocabulary has some impact on the richness of ideas you can express with that language.

The Norwegian alphabet has more characters (they have added vowels å æ ø) but their dictionary is considerably thinner than the English dictionary. I stand by my original statement. It’s not the size of the alphabet, but how you use it.

Icelandic is a pretty language with the extra characters there for the th’s and the rest. Instead of ‘borrowing’ words like ‘computer’ and ‘telephone’ from English when the technologies come out, they make up their own. They have a committee that works on this very subject to preserve their language and enrich it, rather than have it watered down. I think it’s kind of a neat idea.

@ETpro – You are right. A Latin alphabet with 6 letters seems suboptimal and one with 60 letters as well. Perhaps we need to conduct a large-scale study comparing the reading speeds of various languages. Like Norwegian, German has got extra letters: ä, ö, ü, and ß. However I don’t expect that 26 versus 30 makes much of a difference. The optimum could be anywhere between, say 20 and 40. And there are other factors like average length of morphemes for example. On average German morphemes are longer (comparing words doesn’t make sense). Does this mean it takes longer to read a German text compared to an English text? Not necessarily. Longer morphemes means extra redundancy which makes pattern recognition in the brain easier. Less context is required to resolve ambiguities.

@cazzie You raise some interesting examples. Thanks. I stand by my statement as well. A language that is limited to 45,000 words by its character set is not going to allow the same subtlety in expressiveness that one with 1,000,000 words affords.

@mattbrowne That would seem like a pretty accurate guess to me. Thanks.