Sae wrote:Cainntear wrote: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.
His purpose was to create an easy to learn & flexible language that serves as a Universal second language, without delving into anyhing else we know that much and I don't think we need to know more for my point to stand. Using the Chinese script would be contrary to this goal.
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1) Zamenhof wanted to do good.
2) I know that isn't good.
Therefore Zamenhof wouldn't have done it.
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That's a bigger leap of logic than you think.
Your understanding of the issues isn't universal and there's no guarantee that Zamenhof would have seen it that way. Zamenhof was a doctor, he was natively bilingual, and his high school language list would be considered fairly average if he was a member of this site today. The state of the art in linguistics then was far less advanced that what even the most basic member here would know (have you heard talk of "subject and predicate", for example?)
Zamenhof didn't do everything right, hence Volapük being a better language. Esperanto only won out because Zamenhof presented a fixed target that would never change.
To an extent, Esperanto's success is a case of "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good", and if Esperantists could say as much, I'd have a lot more time for their views. The way I see it, they're more likely to say that it's perfect, which it absolutely is not.
I learned joined-up handwriting in school rather than cursive, but I know of cursive enough to be familiar with it, but had never seen anything comparable to what I've seen of Cyrillic cursive. Though my comment about Cyrillic cursive was mostly facetious and was kind of poking fun at it. But I except there may be latin cursive just as unreadable, but I've never seen any examples that are.
All good. I can't remember where I saw the examples, but reckon it must have been the History of English module. What I'd say about a lot of cultural artefacts is that they have a shared history and certain countries tend to "freeze" their culture and identify with it -- for example, most traditional music and/or dance styles in Europe are all part of a European culture, but then Basques, the Scottish, whoever end up holding onto one style slightly longer than the pan European fashion and then start to identify it as "theirs". I've seen Russian cursive and I identified that as being another example of a cross-border technical style artefact that was preserve in Russia as an identity marker.
Tangent that jumps to mind re History of English: the reason we spell "mother" and "son" with O rather than U is because the cursive forms of muther and sun were hard to read -- ıııııther and sıııı, more or less, so scribes joined the top of the U into something that would have looked a bit like a modern handwritten "a" [Note that on my screen, the "a" has a hook over the top, but that's not how I'd write it myself!] Pretty ever U sound written as O is due to people misreading scribes handwriting because they weren't aware of the reason they wrote like that.
Whereas, with the Chinese script, you'd have to have a pretty stubborn and unwavering cultural bias to not see that using it would be counter to the purpose behind the language you're creating. And I've not seen anything to suggest that Zamonhof was this. A Chinese Zamonhof would be aware there's simpler systems than the Chinese script.
Have you seen anything to suggest he wasn't? So far you've just given an opinion, which doesn't strike down the question.
But I think there is a fair argument to be made between chosing Latin & Cyrillic. I don't think me saying Latin was widespread is me having a Western European bias, it's more that Western Europe had colonized much of the world.
Ah, so you're saying that Latin is a more neutral character set because the colonial powers that invaded lands and enslaved the local populace brought Latin characters with them...?