Comment by nepaHack | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nepaHack | Hacker News Reader

This is what I commented on the blog post:

Really nice article. But the claim of "World's greatest alphabet" is a bit misleading. Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit like Hindi, Nepali etc. You'll find that all the things you've mentioned in the article are already used in Sanskrit and that too from the ancient times that predates the creation of Hanguel. In addition to that, sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate. You'll also find how interestingly the consonants are grouped according to the place of the origin of the sound, starting from the throat and ending to lip sounds.So the real "Greatest alphabet system" is Sanskrit.

Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work. That's entirely different topic though. Hope I've made you interested in Sanskrit now. Thanks

> Please read about the alphabet system of Sanskrit and various modern languages that derives from Sanskrit

The Sanskrit alphabet is very elegant indeed, but Sanskrit doesn't have a writing system. None of the various scripts used to encode Sanskrit (Siddham, Lantsa, Devanagari, Kharoshti etc.) are, in my opinion, anywhere near as well-structured as the Sanskrit alphabet.

>In addition to that, sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate.

That's nowhere near true; listen to some languages like Xhosa, or even a tonal language like Chinese, and try to transliterate them using Sanskrit.

>Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work.

Sanskrit grammar is highly regular, which is why it is used in some AI applications, but there's no reason to think it is "the best grammar to be used for scientific work." And, as structured as Sanskrit grammar is, it still opens itself up to ambiguities-- it is nowhere near as clean as an artificial language would be.

Sanskrit is a great language, but there's no need to oversell it.

Add to that the 15th Arabic letter ض [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6] cannot be pronounced in any other language to the point that Arabic is sometimes referred to as the language of ض.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet

Well, I'm sure that Sanskrit and its descendants are awesome languages, but your claim that "sanskrit alphabets encompasses almost every possible consonant and vowel sounds that a human can generate" is just bollocks. (Many Koreans make the same claim about Hangul, which is equally stupid.)

In fact, if any writing system could write every possible sounds that appear in a human language, it won't be a great system. It will be a terrible system for any single language. Why would an English speaker want to learn symbols for nasals, clicks, ejectives, implosives, laryngeals and tones?

It's even worse. For example, English alphabet doesn't distinguish aspiration, which is actually very convenient because the "p" in "pin" or "spin" are perceived as the same sound (even though only "pin" has aspiration). To English speakers, a writing system that distinguishes aspiration is actually worse, not better.

It might look much like the IPA...

>Sanskrit grammar is again another beautiful and well thought creation that is considered the best grammar to be used for scientific work.

J Robert Oppenheimer was a fan of Sanskrit. He quoted the Bhagavad Gita, "Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds," to express his feelings on observing the Trinity test.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e67mIPR6ryA

Reply on news.ycombinator.com