From a thread asking opinions about emoji usage.
However it happens and whomever is responsible here we are... and we're losing ground fast. And things like emojis are leading the charge.
Should we tell them @WhyEssEff@hexbear.net is responsible?
Link: https://hexbear.net/comment/4277133
I would say the transition from Cuneiform to the Aramaic script lead to a sharp decrease in literacy in Mesopotamia. Likewise I don't think Classical era Coptic speakers had a higher literacy rate than Ancient Egyptians. /semi serious
I would say that most transitions from logographic script to phonetic script result from a logographic writing culture being invaded by a phonetic writing culture, and usually ends with the logographic writing culture dying out completely (like the above). Likewise, The first attempt to create a phonetic script for Chinese was during the Mongol led Yuan Dynasty, which created the Phag-Pa script. All attempts to write Chinese phonetically are basically illegible and require you to write in a style that makes you sound like a lobotomite. You have to massively restrict your vocabulary and also essentially stop using any grammatical contractions.
Anecdotally iirc the PRC reformed the Yi language from a logographic script to a syllabary in one autonomous region while in another it remained as it was. The Yi script is a logographic script that is completely seperate from Chinese. IIRC literacy rates are like 2x higher in the region that didn't do the phonetic reform.
Hangul wasn't really used for most of its history, and only became widespread in like the 1890s. Past that Koreans seemed to have used a mixed orthography of Hangul and Chinese characters (kind of like how Japanese uses Kanji and Kana but less extreme because the korean system only used Chinese characters for Chinese origin words) until like 2 generations ago. I have a magazine published in like the 90s that still used this mixed orthography.
Also this random source I have puts overall Korean literacy in 1945 at 22%[1], which is on par with the previous mentioned Spanish and Qing literacy rates, despite this being like 50 years after the Gabo reforms (1896) when " the Hangul Korean alphabet was adopted in official documents for the first time in 1894.[26] Elementary school texts began using the Korean alphabet in 1895"[2]
That's fascinating. I wonder if there's been any solid work done on like average hours of education required to reach such and such a level of proficiency with different sorts of scripts, because I've always seen phonetic scripts portrayed as the vulgar and accessible ones while logographic systems are elite and require considerable training.
I do know that dyslexia basically only exists for phonetic writing.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282200
This study claims that German children with dyslexia when being taught Chinese characters performed as well as non-dyslexic German children.
I straight up can't find one about comparative hours learned, but I do remember seeing someone claim Spain spends less time teaching Spanish than the US does English and China Chinese. But also I assume for Spanish any writing before the renaissance is in Latin and most technical writing in English (I remember being really disappointed that the Cybersyn documentation was all in English), English has the challenge of teaching Germanic speaking children a bunch of Greek and Latin loanwords not used in daily life if they want full technicll literacy, and the Chinese education system will teach 8th century poetry to 8 year olds and 13th century poems to actual babies.
In my experience if you ever press anyone who claims logographic writing takes longer for evidence they'll just throw their arms up and go "but there's so many characters" and never produce any actual evidence.
Also now that you mention it, historically phonetic scripts have been limited to the elite in China. Phag-Pa script was basically only used by high level government officials. Manchu was something only the Manchu nobility used. Buddhists transmit their writing primarily in Chinese, with only the elite monks learning Sanskrit (which is highly phonetically regular). Chinese Muslims historically developed their own method of Islamic education that involved learning both Arabic for the Quran and Chinese to read the Chinese classics. Even BoPoMoFo was originally something that was only intended to be used by linguists. If any of these scripts were actually that much easier to use than Chinese, it surely would've spread to the lower classes.
The closest you get are the Dungan, who speak a language that's like 60% Chinese 40% Arabic loanwords, who used the Arabic script. Ironically Western linguists consider Dungan a dialect even though it's pretty much the only clear cut case of a seperate language compared to Chinese dialects they consider to be languages.
Just going to jump in here to say this is all fascinating. Thanks.