Ask HN: Why haven’t humans made more efficient writing methods?

> I feel like ever since the printing technology became more available, the pace of evolution of languages has slowed down.

This reminds me of the "universality" of the genetic code. That is, the "language" for translation of genetic information to proteins is pretty uniform (there are some exceptions). The obvious reason for why this "language" doesn't change is that even the tiniest changes will cause problems for the organism (several thousand genes depend on the legacy genetic code and if it changes, that could = death). As others have noted here, we have created niche writing methods like stenography, which would be analogous to non-canonical genetic code in mitochondria, for example (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_mitochondrial_genetics#G...). One can imagine that the mitochondrial genetic code can evolve away from the "universal" code because the mitochondrial code has fewer users (genes) depending on its legacy code.

I think, in a similar vein, once modern printing got everyone on the same page (ahem), we were sort of "locked in" and even minor changes would break a lot of already functioning communication.

I guess the question also reminds me of software engineers who don't want to mess with a decades-old legacy codebase for fear of breaking things that they are unaware of.

That being said, I imagine it could be done (creating a more efficient, widely used language/writing method), but it would take a LOT of effort.

What is "the download icon"? I'm not even sure there is such a thing. My browser has an icon that looks little bit like "↓̲", so I suppose that’s what you might mean. Unfortunately, my poor web browser doesn’t render "↓̲" the same way my text editor did, so there is that.

If there is some frequently–used icon for downloads, you would have to convince everyone to use it, update all the fonts to include it, update all the keyboards to type it, etc. Meanwhile the rest of us will just be over here typing out "download" instead. The beauty of an alphabet is that anyone can compose a new sequence of letters and they automatically have a new word! Nobody has to ask permission, or convince anyone, or add characters to their fonts, or provide justification to the Unicode committee.

In principle you could add letters to the alphabet, but would that really be more efficient? Maybe words could start using fewer letters drawn from a larger set, but the storage requirements for a given any given piece of text would likely remain the same. After all, the computer already translates everything we type into binary, which is just an alphabet with only two characters. Each character that we type becomes 8 or more of these binary bits. Adding letters to the alphabet will just mean that we use more bits for every character. Plus there's still the problem of updating all the fonts, and keyboards, and textbooks, and teaching everyone about the new letters.

Meanwhile the rest of us can just compose the letters we have into new arrangements as often as we please. Perhaps you should search for "spelling reform" and read about all the past failures to change how we write before you jump to the conclusion that it would be an obvious improvement. See also "Shannon information theory".

We have. see what stenographers do, for just one example.

Perhaps your question might be better "why haven't more efficient systems gained wider adoption," and there's a large "installed base" etc but also some hidden values to the inefficiencies that might not be apparent at first glance.

In the Russian language they actually removed a lot of letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography

According to phonology, all I-languages must be both systematic and practical, meaning they must be easy to write and read but also easy to speak. I actually ask the questions you have every day of my life.

There’s no reason why we couldn’t all be speaking/writing/reading our own augmented natural languages that our devices just translate and render to any other language. I’ve been working on this problem space for about a year and down the road I plan on writing base dialect called “Namilang”.

Alphabets are more efficient than pictographs. They're more efficient to read, to write, and to learn. So moving to icons is exactly the wrong direction.

I think your last sentence answers your question. Writing is still primarily a recording or log of verbal communication. The best writing sounds like poetry and also conjures up the emotion and angst of the author. Technical writing which I assume you are addressing is more visual which is why it tends to be dry and hard for readers to stay engage.

Question: are you familiar with Hangul? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul)

If yes, ask yourself why it (or other similar "featural" systems) are not dominating other "less efficient/expressive" systems like Latin Alphabet.

We have emojis now.

As for verbal communication you could look up the Esperanto movement/language.

> E.g. using the download icon to write “download” instead of using the alphabet to convey the same meaning?

Perhaps you'd like Chinese, that use ideograms instead of letters. 下载 (using Google translator)

I think there are many improvements. Shorthand comes to mind:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shorthand

I'd start by removing the definite and indefinite article from all languages. Would help writing too.