What writing systems do you know

[finlay]

Obviously, I'm not in Korea, so I don't have to know it by any means, but I've seen a few transl(iter)ations on the train and stuff, so it can be fun to try and decipher them. It does throw up some weird results sometimes, though: my local station Kami-Shakujii is transliterated on some of the signs as 가미샤쿠지이 – with different transliterations of the two /k/s in the Japanese. Presumably this is because Korean romanization is a bit of a mess. (I would argue that 카미샤크지이 is a better transliteration...)

Probably because ㄱ becomes voiced intervocalically, so if they had used 구 rather than 쿠 it would be more similar to "Shagujii" than "Shakujii"...I guess it doesn't make a huge difference, but they wanted to be consistent or something. If I was doing the transliterating, I probably would have done what you did (카 at the beginning...but then again, I'm just a beginner, so...)

(going back to the representing allophones thing...)

In the modern romanization of Korean, ㄱ is represented as <g> in initial/medial position, and <k> only in coda. So this would be transliterated as "Gamisyakujii". In the older romanization, it's represented as <k> intially and in the coda, and <g> medially, while /kʰ/ is represented as <k'> or something, which would yield "Kamisyak'ujii" – so reasonably accurate if you use that system. But it raises the question of how you would distinguish the Japanese g/k difference if you're going to transliterate both of them initially as ㄱ, which is why I think that it would be better with 카.

The only romanization of Korean I've seen that makes any sense at all is the Yale one, and that's apparently at least used by linguists, but few others. It's the only one that preserves the Hangul morphophonemic orthography to any degree – the others transliterate letters differently depending on their position in the word, which isn't necessarily useful. That said, the modern romanization does use consonant letters more efficiently (in Yale the aforementioned word would be "Kamisyakhwucii", I think) – its vowels are annoying, though, especially the use of digraphs; eo for ʌ seems only to have been influenced by the existence of the spelling "Seoul", which actually comes from Se-oul rather than Seo-ul.

[Rui]

The only romanization of Korean I've seen that makes any sense at all is the Yale one, and that's apparently at least used by linguists, but few others. It's the only one that preserves the Hangul morphophonemic orthography to any degree – the others transliterate letters differently depending on their position in the word, which isn't necessarily useful. That said, the modern romanization does use consonant letters more efficiently (in Yale the aforementioned word would be "Kamisyakhwucii", I think) – its vowels are annoying, though, especially the use of digraphs; eo for ʌ seems only to have been influenced by the existence of the spelling "Seoul", which actually comes from Se-oul rather than Seo-ul.

I'm just curious where the extra "o" came from then, since according to Wikipedia, ㅓ is romanized as "e" in Yale, and name of the city is 서울, which should be Seul by Yale, and Sŏul by McCune-Reischauer....were they trying to combine the two or something? Or did it actually used to be romanized as one of those 2 before the new romanization took effect in 2000? My understanding is that the new romanization system is basically the M-R system with eliminated diacritics and more consistent representation of stops, so maybe they did come up with it on their own? I have no idea and Googling and Wikipediaing are not helping.

edit Nevermind, found it, apparently the name derives from French where it is romanized as "oul" instead of "ul"

With regards to the Yale system, maybe it's just because I'm more used to seeing the new romanization, but I find that one the most appealing, and Yale to be rather ugly.

[Mr. Z]

Yale is ugly. It's for linguist. Linguists' romanizations of East Asian languages are always uglier than the normal ones.

[prettydragoon]

Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, and Devanagari. Also, some random kana and kanji.

[sirdanilot]

I can only read Latin, Greek and Hebrew scripts with confidence. I can usually decipher Cyrillic, hiragana and katakana, and some kanji too (but that has mostly evaporated).

[Bristel]

Latin, of course.
Hiragana and katakana
Kanji (maybe around 200 I can recognize, or more)
Hangeul (just a little bit)
Cyrillic (I can read most of it, but some symbols elude me)

[finlay]

The only romanization of Korean I've seen that makes any sense at all is the Yale one, and that's apparently at least used by linguists, but few others. It's the only one that preserves the Hangul morphophonemic orthography to any degree – the others transliterate letters differently depending on their position in the word, which isn't necessarily useful. That said, the modern romanization does use consonant letters more efficiently (in Yale the aforementioned word would be "Kamisyakhwucii", I think) – its vowels are annoying, though, especially the use of digraphs; eo for ʌ seems only to have been influenced by the existence of the spelling "Seoul", which actually comes from Se-oul rather than Seo-ul.

I'm just curious where the extra "o" came from then, since according to Wikipedia, ㅓ is romanized as "e" in Yale, and name of the city is 서울, which should be Seul by Yale, and Sŏul by McCune-Reischauer....were they trying to combine the two or something? Or did it actually used to be romanized as one of those 2 before the new romanization took effect in 2000? My understanding is that the new romanization system is basically the M-R system with eliminated diacritics and more consistent representation of stops, so maybe they did come up with it on their own? I have no idea and Googling and Wikipediaing are not helping.

edit Nevermind, found it, apparently the name derives from French where it is romanized as "oul" instead of "ul"

With regards to the Yale system, maybe it's just because I'm more used to seeing the new romanization, but I find that one the most appealing, and Yale to be rather ugly.

Yeah, French Séoul. It'd be "Sewul" in Yale. Personally I'd take the Yale system as my base, but use the stops from the RR system and "ou" for /u/... that would make more sense. Mind you, I don't actually use the language, so maybe this is all moot. Fortunately Japanese doesn't run into nearly so many problems. You've got a little bit with the inconsistent representation of [ʃ], [tʃ], etc, but the main consonants and vowels are very consistent. For instance, the aforementioned station is written several different ways in English within the station itself. (It says Kami-Shakujii in one place, Kami-Syakujii in another, and that's not even getting into the potential problems with hyphenation, when some places spell it Kamishakujii as one word, which becomes annoyingly important when you try and type it into certain websites... Frankly this isn't as bad as trying to work out which consonant is which in Korean...)

Also, I couldn't find a train app on my iphone in English so I often just write it in Japanese anyway (上石神井, which at least is consistent...).

[Ser]

I can use the Latin, Han'geul, Arabic and Chinese scripts pretty comfortably, though still working for my Arabic and Chinese handwriting to look truly native-like. (I can probably fake a Chinese girl's clear/slow handwriting, and that's about it; and I still can't slur Arabic quickly and tightly like a native does, though I've recently done significant progress.)

To people who write in Devanagari: when... do you write the horizontal line in a word. Do you build it piece by piece with each letter? Do you draw it first?

:إ كن ونكمفرتبلي يوز

Same things for this as what Ančiri said about the Hebrew. And it should be اي, because إ is /ʔi/. And the Greek should be more like Αϊ κεν ανκάμφταμπλι ιούζ; what you wrote says /e kan inkomfertavli iiz/.

Just as with Hebrew אים, writing ونـــ in Arabic could only mean the waaw is consonantal, it does need a glottal stop: أنكمفرتبلي (or أنكمفتبلي following pronunciation more closely). آي would be another perfectly legit way to render "I" too, cf. آيس كريم "ice cream" (a borrowing in actual use).

[Jipí]

To people who write in Devanagari: when... do you write the horizontal line in a word. Do you build it piece by piece with each letter? Do you draw it first?

No, AFAIK you draw it last. Because drawing it first would be stupid in handwriting, unless you had a really good idea how much space a word takes. And drawing it for each letter individually would make pretty uneven lines, which looks stupid and is probably uncomfortable to read.

[GrinningManiac]

To people who write in Devanagari: when... do you write the horizontal line in a word. Do you build it piece by piece with each letter? Do you draw it first?

No, AFAIK you draw it last. Because drawing it first would be stupid in handwriting, unless you had a really good idea how much space a word takes. And drawing it for each letter individually would make pretty uneven lines, which looks stupid and is probably uncomfortable to read.

Yeah Guitarplayer is right. You draw it last. The same like you would do when underlining a title - you write the words and then strike a line over/under them. If you're like me and you leave a little gap in the underline for hanging tails like "g" and "y" then this also happens in Devanagari with certain letters or conjuncts which extend through the top line.

Because I can write Devanagari I can also, given a few minutes to familiarise myself with the minor differences, write in Gujurati Lipi, Gurmukhi and maybe Bangla Lipi

Would you say that Devanagari is the simplest, or at least the most useful, of the Brahmic scripts?

I would say it's definately the most widely-used. I'd compare Devanagari to Gujurati and Gurmukhi like I would compare the standard Latin alphabet to stuff like Turkish or Czech with their special characters - it's recognisable and readable but it's a bit more hassle and some things are new or difficult to read.

It's a very simple system which makes a lot of sense and in actuality a lot of the letters correspond with their Latin counterparts.

For example

प is P
र is R (take away the straight backstroke of R and you'll see it's the same shape)
ज is J
क is K (looks like the cursive k with the circle for the top diagonal)
न is N
द is D (looks like d)

[Bristel]

I've seen people (L2 speakers of Arabic and Hebrew) switch to a left hand when writing in Arabic or Hebrew. Does this help writing right-to-left or just a writing comfort thing? Or a habit?

[Jipí]

If you're like me and you leave a little gap in the underline for hanging tails like "g" and "y" then this also happens in Devanagari with certain letters or conjuncts which extend through the top line.

Yep, there's some kind-of minimal pairs between consonant graphemes:

घ (gha) vs. ध (dha)
य (ya) vs. थ (tha) vs. श (śa)
म (ma) vs. भ (bha)

It's a very simple system which makes a lot of sense and in actuality a lot of the letters correspond with their Latin counterparts.

You know that Brahmic writing systems are possibly¹ derived from Semitic scripts, just like the Roman (and Cyrillic) alphabet by proxy of Greek and Phoenician, right?

द is D (looks like d)

ट (ṭa) ठ (ṭha) ड (ḍa) ढ (ḍha) द (da) Mwahaha. (And ड vs. ङ (ṅa))



¹) The Talk page of that article for this section is rather entertaining mostly because of Hindu nationalist views of course claiming it as India's own indigenous invention. There's even an ALL-CAPS CLAIM in it. Fun fun.

[finlay]

I've seen people (L2 speakers of Arabic and Hebrew) switch to a left hand when writing in Arabic or Hebrew. Does this help writing right-to-left or just a writing comfort thing? Or a habit?

It would only help if you're actually ambidextrous. But I've actually heard that even though they write "backwards", the strokes are still sort of designed to be written by a right-hander, in terms of the stroke order and so on. I know this is definitely the case for Chinese-derived scripts – in theory, since they traditionally write top-to-bottom, one should be able to get away with being either left or right handed, but actually stroke order is much more difficult for a left-hander, to a greater degree than it is for left-handers writing the Latin alphabet. It's also generally stricter.

(One thing they tend to do is write horizontal strokes before vertical strokes, due to the top-to-bottom order, so when they write in the Latin alphabet in my classes, the ones who haven't learned American-style cursive tend to write the horizontal stroke of t or the dot of i before the vertical stroke...)

[Mr. Z]

I've seen people (L2 speakers of Arabic and Hebrew) switch to a left hand when writing in Arabic or Hebrew. Does this help writing right-to-left or just a writing comfort thing? Or a habit?

And the greatest disadvantage of right-to-left writing is that when a right-handed person (such as me) writes with a pen, their hand becomes full of blue ink. Ugh.
(Hey, am I the only one who has a spelling pronunciation of "ugh" as [ʔʌɣ]?)

[Jipí]

That's why I usually see lefthanded people turn their hand to an awkward position so they can basically hold the pen from above instead of below the line.

[finlay]

I've seen people (L2 speakers of Arabic and Hebrew) switch to a left hand when writing in Arabic or Hebrew. Does this help writing right-to-left or just a writing comfort thing? Or a habit?

And the greatest disadvantage of right-to-left writing is that when a right-handed person (such as me) writes with a pen, their hand becomes full of blue ink. Ugh.
(Hey, am I the only one who has a spelling pronunciation of "ugh" as [ʔʌɣ]?)

No... I can't really think of another way to pronounce it. It's a slightly extralinguistic sound, like a tut.

[sucaeyl]

And the greatest disadvantage of right-to-left writing is that when a right-handed person (such as me) writes with a pen, their hand becomes full of blue ink. Ugh.
(Hey, am I the only one who has a spelling pronunciation of "ugh" as [ʔʌɣ]?)

No... I can't really think of another way to pronounce it. It's a slightly extralinguistic sound, like a tut.

I was sure it was [ʔʌx] or even [ʔʌχ].

[Rui]

It would only help if you're actually ambidextrous. But I've actually heard that even though they write "backwards", the strokes are still sort of designed to be written by a right-hander, in terms of the stroke order and so on. I know this is definitely the case for Chinese-derived scripts – in theory, since they traditionally write top-to-bottom, one should be able to get away with being either left or right handed, but actually stroke order is much more difficult for a left-hander, to a greater degree than it is for left-handers writing the Latin alphabet. It's also generally stricter.

(One thing they tend to do is write horizontal strokes before vertical strokes, due to the top-to-bottom order, so when they write in the Latin alphabet in my classes, the ones who haven't learned American-style cursive tend to write the horizontal stroke of t or the dot of i before the vertical stroke...)

Yeah, I remember my Chinese teacher in high school essentially forced me to write my horizontal strokes from left to right, rather than my more comfortable right-to-left way (I'm left handed), and that messed up my Chinese handwriting for a while because I (STILL) cannot draw a straight line from left to right. When a character isn't in a top>bottom format, it's generally written left to right as well. Left-side radicals are written first, then the rest of the character.

It was even worse when I took an Asian Calligraphy class last year, since I couldn't even ground my hand to steady the line, AND I couldn't see what I was writing.

That's why I usually see lefthanded people turn their hand to an awkward position so they can basically hold the pen from above instead of below the line.

I have noticed that basically every left-handed person I know (including me) has the same grip and style of writing where they curl their wrist so that the pen actually does come from above the line...whereas there is so much variety in the grip and stuff of right-handed people.

[Dewrad]

I can read/write Latin, Greek, Cyrillic (most European flavours, that is, I'm a little hazy on some of the characters used for the tuppeny-ha'penny Central Asian languages) and the Elder and Anglo-Saxon futharks with relative fluency, although I'm sure my Cyrillic handwriting leaves a lot to be desired.

And that's pretty much it. I can puzzle out Gothic, of course, but Georgian and Armenian just look like tengwar to me. I've tried with the Brahmic family, I really have, but Devanagari defeats me entirely. Arabic is just a squiggly line, and Hebrew just looks like boxes. And they're both written the wrong way round. Let's not even start with those heathen eastern scripts, or that weird cheapo-60's-scifi-knockoff writing used for Native American languages in Canada.

[GrinningManiac]

If you're like me and you leave a little gap in the underline for hanging tails like "g" and "y" then this also happens in Devanagari with certain letters or conjuncts which extend through the top line.

Yep, there's some kind-of minimal pairs between consonant graphemes:

घ (gha) vs. ध (dha)
य (ya) vs. थ (tha) vs. श (śa)
म (ma) vs. भ (bha)

It's a very simple system which makes a lot of sense and in actuality a lot of the letters correspond with their Latin counterparts.

You know that Brahmic writing systems are possibly¹ derived from Semitic scripts, just like the Roman (and Cyrillic) alphabet by proxy of Greek and Phoenician, right?

द is D (looks like d)

ट (ṭa) ठ (ṭha) ड (ḍa) ढ (ḍha) द (da) Mwahaha. (And ड vs. ङ (ṅa))



¹) The Talk page of that article for this section is rather entertaining mostly because of Hindu nationalist views of course claiming it as India's own indigenous invention. There's even an ALL-CAPS CLAIM in it. Fun fun.

Ach leave the newbies alone with the retroflex series

And for heaven's sake don't mention the two arbitrarily-different letters for "sha"

[Drydic]

And for heaven's sake don't mention the two arbitrarily-different letters for "sha"

What 'arbitrarily-different' letters? श Śa and ब ṣa? They are hardly arbitrarily different. Sure maybe for certain individual languages (Hindi, for sure; I happen to know that Bengali goes even further and merges all three of ś ṣ s into [ʃ]/[ç] [my source says "palatal [š]"]) their sounds are homophonous, but not in all languages.

[Gulliver]

Latin and shakey hiragana. I used to be able to read it when I was doing my Japanese course, but I have to think about it now. I'm unlikely to ever have to use Japanese, so that's no great loss.

[finlay]

I have noticed that basically every left-handed person I know (including me) has the same grip and style of writing where they curl their wrist so that the pen actually does come from above the line...whereas there is so much variety in the grip and stuff of right-handed people.

I've seen some who turn the paper and have their hand coming from below.

[GrinningManiac]

And for heaven's sake don't mention the two arbitrarily-different letters for "sha"

What 'arbitrarily-different' letters? श Śa and ब ṣa? They are hardly arbitrarily different. Sure maybe for certain individual languages (Hindi, for sure; I happen to know that Bengali goes even further and merges all three of ś ṣ s into [ʃ]/[ç] [my source says "palatal [š]"]) their sounds are homophonous, but not in all languages.

I'm talking about Hindi, though I understand since the discussion is about Devanagari the terms are not synonymous. However I would say that you've used the wrong letters there. You've quoted श Śa and ब ba. You're looking for ष ṣa

[Jipí]

I thought you referred to:

श ś(a) appears as a different, simple ribbon-shaped fragment preceding व va, न na, च ca, ल la, and र ra, causing these second members to be shifted down and reduced in size. Thus श्व śva, श्न śna, श्च śca श्ल śla, and श्र śra.