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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

You want to change a written language for the express purpose of enabling computers to be able to detect word boundaries easier?

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Note that Japanese and Chinese already changed to commonly use horizontal left-to-right text (in addition to vertical top-to-bottom/right-to-left text, which is still usual especially in "proper published typesetting") in large part because computers handled that much better for decades.

It's not so much that because they handled it better, but because that was how they handled it. Even to this day vertical text layout in CSS is primitive.

Early Japanese on computers also used half-width kana but now it's all properly fullwidth.

Don't mistake technical limitations for choice.

I wonder if there's any Japanese sites out there that fully use the traditional style? Text top to botttom, right to left, and with the horizontal axis unbound (to the left) instead of the vertical.

I'm sure there are some extremely design-heavy sites that do it, but by then you would be fighting the DOM/CSS pretty hard, as default behaviors for stuff like underline position and 縦中横 (short bursts of horiz text within vertical text, for things like two-digit numbers) seem to be sketchy at best, and many things still don't seem to be uniform across browsers. UX would be affected as well, as things like text selection or right-clicking would feel quite awkward as it is so exceedingly rare. While us Japanese are fully capable of reading both horizontally+LtR and vertically+RtL, it's not in our expectations for the latter to appear in online web text.

It's not entirely unprecedented. Modern cyrillic shapes are in part influenced by the printing press - when it was being imported in Russia, they didn't want to mill an entire new set of characters, so they repurposed the latin ones that look like cyrillic characters and only added the ones that were missing. Of course, parent's suggestion will never pass, as it will require everyone everywhere to start using spaces, which is more trouble than it's worth to native language users.

Where did you get that idea? Peter I created Civil Script a few centuries after adoption of printing press in Russia.

It's just lighthearted pondering on the issue. Written language evolves, or is that only a standard applied to $YOUR_LANGUAGE when defending people not learning it?

I think having spaces is useful, too, for learning speed and expression.

Similar argument also applies to English. English isn't phonetic which makes it hard to pronounce correctly unless you are learning from a native speaker. But I don't see written English to evolve in a way that makes it easier to pronounce for new learners.

I'm a life-long English speaker and am 100% OK with changing the language to make it easier to learn.

Let’s make phase 1 be the unification of American and British spelling. That should be easy enough right?

It's not like they couldn't learn English. Oh, while we're at it, let's also force English into ASCII. And let's make it Lojban for good measure.

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