Sae wrote:Fair.
Whilst aye, there is no guarantee on what a Chinese Zamonhof would do but you can at least ascertain what is likely based on his philosophy. They're not directly comparable scenarios.
But what
was his philosophy? What we've seen here is other people's assumptions and assertions of his philosophy, not references to what he actually said and why.
As for Zamenhof's opinion on Latin vs Cyrillic on ease of use, I'm not sure, and I think a case could be using either system, because Cyrillic isn't hard to learn either, but it can be confusing when Latin is your native script but even that is not difficult to overcome. Maybe he got a glance of cursive Cyrillic and "noped" right out of there. :p
I assume you're too young to have ever encountered cursive Latin script then...? :p
I was lucky in that Scotland was early to replace cursive with what we called "joined up writing", and other English-speaking countries didn't get it and created a false dichotomy between cursive and print.
The thing is that cursive was designed to be written with fountain pens, so there was no possibility to move the pen backward; the "print" handwriting style was copying typefaces letter by letter, so you could write "r" using two lines on a fountain pen.
Scottish joined-up writing was something that was just dead easy with a pencil or a
fountain [edit]ballpoint[/edit] pen and you could write loads of letters really quickly.
Anyway, long story short: Russian cursive is a nightmare because it was designed when fountain pens were still a thing, and our cursive was equally as mental in Zamenhof's time. Can't find pictures of them, but words like "summer" and "number" were quite mental -- the Ns, Us and Ms disappeared into sequences of vertical lines, so imaging "sııııııııer" and "ıııııııber" isn't really a long way from what the cursive forms looked like.
Throwing Chinese script into the mix creates a more difficult to compare scenario because it is grossly different. He can get away with sticking to what he knows when the script isn't difficult to learn and is already so wide spread.
Doesn't make it an unfair comparison, though. Chinese characters are reasonably widespread compared to single-language scripts, so unless Zamenhof gave specific criteria as to why Latin, there's still plenty of space to argue that Zamenhof's decisions were culturally motivated.
Besides, the claim of Latin being widespread is very western-Europe centric -- Cyrillic was huge in the east of Europe and the caucuses, and pre-Stalin, we're talking about basically half of Europe (I grew up taking the word "Europe" to be everything west of the iron curtain, and even now I underestimate the amount of Europe that "Eastern Europe" accounts for).