Speakeasy wrote:I am quite serious! With respect, I believe that you’re missing the point. Below are a few examples of scripts. None of them is more representative of spoken language than any other. They could all be used to represent any spoken language; the speakers need only come to an agreement as to what sounds and concepts the scribbles mean. Scripts are not naturally occurring, they are artificial constructions. Urdu script, Chinese script, Morse Code, or Emoji’s could quite literally be used to write the Slavic languages or any other languages.
Theoretically, yeah. All scripts are interchangeable. But in practice, it's not so simple.
I have two extreme examples in mind: Sanskrit and Classical Chinese.
Sanskrit can be (and was) written in almost all the Indic scripts. More information on the
Writing Systems of Sanskrit.
In contrast, using a transcription to record Classical Chinese is likely to lead to gibberish.
Here is a verse in Classical Chinese:
中秋時節最宜人
萬里澄空月一輪
Transcription (Vietnamese):
Trung thu thời tiết tối nghi nhân
Vạn lý trừng không nguyệt nhất luân
Translation (Vietnamese)
Trung thu thời tiết hợp lòng người
Muôn dặm trăng treo sáng giữa trời
Translation (English)
The weather and festival of Mid-Autumn is most pleasing
Across ten-thousand miles of clear sky hangs the moon, a single orb
(Source:
Nguyễn Thụy Đan – Randomly improvised on Mid-Autumn)
I will be surprised if the transcription makes any sense to a Vietnamese. Then, there is the famous
Story of the Tiger Shi. Even if we assume for a minute that the story is an exaggeration, it will still be difficult to believe that a script has no impact whatsoever on the language it is being used to record. In contrast to Japanese and Korean, Mandarin doesn't have many loan words. The script makes it difficult. Why would you write 德謨克拉西 (de mo ke la xi) when you can 民主 (democracy)?
In her 日本語が亡びるとき 英語の世紀の中で (The Fall of the Japanese Language in the Age of English ), Minae Mizumura (水村美苗) mentions a poem of Hagiwara Sakutaro (萩原朔太郎). The poem is ふらんす (France).
ふらんすへ行きたしと思へども
ふらんすはあまりに遠し
せめては新しき背広をきて
きままなる旅にいでてみん。
Here's her commentary on the poem:
You can discount her comments as the ramblings of a writer, but we cannot overlook the
research papers that suggest reading Kanji (or Hanzi) and an alphabetic script activate different parts of the brain. So it's not as if abolishing Kanji will have no impact whatsoever.
Yiddish can liberally borrow words from Hebrew because of its script, but German doesn't. It would look odd. To the fright of an ordinary Chinese,
Xiao'erjing is capable of easily assimilating Persian and Arabic words.
If we want a real world example, we can consider this Dungan text:
Җүнмый Нооруз җечи!
Няннян санйиүә 21 йиче минжын бу фын минзў ба Нооруз дон минлён зэмусы тэпин, тунйи, пиннан җечи на да щихуан гуәдини.
⠀
Кәсы җиннян Хырхыз Республикади Җынфу, ви бохў минжынди гончён, вәё бә җё даҗун дый коронавирус бин, динди дян ба Нооруз җечи бу гуә. Зусы җыгә еба мый йигә җящя, мый йигә жын җыдони – Чунтян долэли, ду нансуанди гуә пинан-вусы жызыни!
(Source:
Ассоциация Дунган Кыргызстана)
Dungan is similar to Mandarin Chinese but it's written in Cyrillic so it can borrow words relatively easily. Notice Russian (Республикади) and Persian (Нооруз) words. We cannot just attribute their presence to geographical proximity. Hong Kong was a British colony for almost a century but their written language doesn't (from what I know) have many borrowings from English.
So, I think that the choice of script does influence the evolution of a language. A script is a technology or a tool and the tools you use influence your behaviour.
Speakeasy wrote:Scripts “make sense” only by convention.
I agree with you. But don't you think that this statement is a truism? I cannot think of any social behaviour or technology that isn't based on convention. The Qwerty keyboard is a convention. All
Ausbau languages are convention.