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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

The problem with ideograms is what happens when things go wrong.

There are a lot of people out there who are barely literate; although for obvious reasons probably not so many of them make it to HN. If someone don't know how to spell and needs to communicate in a latin script they have a couple of chances. Sounding things out, guessing at spellings for words that have only been heard, etc.

The idea is interesting and worth exploring; but ultimately I'd worry that it will be exclusionary and hard to work with for people who don't do much written communicating.

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It seems like everything you said is true of current written languages. If you don’t know how to read/write it, you won’t understand it. I feel that this writing system is best used to facilitate inter-cultural communication, as opposed to making it easier for people to read/write.

Humans are quite good at optimizing language without even thinking about it. This is a fact that almost all conlangs ignore. They are a fun mental exercise for linguists, but will ultimately never see any serious usage.

> I feel that this writing system is best used to facilitate inter-cultural communication

This happens in China

When I used to spend time with a Mandarin speaker, he explained to me that written Chinese is the same throughout the country, but the dialects are often so different that they can't understand each other.

It would be as if all romance languages were written the same way, so that written Italian, Spanish, French, ect, were the same.

I'm a native Spanish speaker. I can understand written French, Portuguese and Italian with a little effort. Speech is a different story. Italian is the closest phonetically.

This is exactly how Arabic works today. It's a huge impediment, not a benefit.

Can you please elaborate on why it’s an impediment?

Because this way no-one has written forms of their mother tongue. They have to learn a second language and its written form. As others are pointing out, the situation is pretty much equivalent to Europe 1000 years ago when Latin had evolved into separate languages but all writing was still done in Latin. What would you prefer: being able to speak and write in French or speak in French but have to learn Latin to be able to write?

For much of European history, Latin acted as a common written language, and Italian, Spanish, French were vulgar Latin with different influences (this is probably a simplification)

How do conlangs ignore that, and what's the outcome then?

I presume conlangs ignore this by design as fixed language. They are formed and mostly governed by rules, but the anthropological component of language never makes it into the design because there is no timeline of evolving usage.

And again, presuming here, but the outcome is a language that fails to adapt to the culture(s) that depends on it, and thereby becomes useless. Language, as we know it, evolved over an expansive period of time, from the first association of sounds to objects, now all the way to complex written grammar that includes some half-dozen tenses, some gendered, singulars/plurals, etc. We can describe things with written language that are otherwise indescribable with physical or spoken language, like the Portuguese saudade (a physical and emotional state of intense, fixated longing for someone or something that is absent, or which existed previously in a different state).

> but the anthropological component of language never makes it into the design because there is no timeline of evolving usage.

Not true. A lot of folk in the conlanging community, perhaps inspired by the world-building of Tolkien, very deliberately set their languages in a physical world, and a historical continuum.

As a concrete example, have a look at Biblaridion's video about Ilothwi here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpXsrBd2xn8

Languages in the Loglan family, notably Lojban, have an explicit audio-visual isomorphism which maps phonemes to/from letters. In theory, this should allow people to learn to read and write long after they have learned how to listen and speak; in practice, it seems to lead to many alternative orthographies and a fragmentation of readability.

Most conlangs aren't like Blisssymbols -- they have normal words that are made out of roots that can be understood either within the context of the language, or as in the case of languages like Esperanto and Interlingua, use roots from other languages so that word meanings can be guessed from knowledge of other languages.

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