Languages changing from traditional writing to our alphabet?
 

I have...a bit of a fascination with Asian languages. Obviously, many of these are written with their own characters and alphabets. Russian interests me as well; it is written in Cyrillic. In my studies of various languages, I have learned three phonetic alphabets apart from the one I am typing in now, and am working on a fourth. I also know many characters with little to no suggestion as to how they should be pronounced. Naturally, this is...very difficult.

And for this reason, some countries whose languages are traditionally written with characters unfamiliar to us in the US are switching to our alphabet.

Vietnam did it several years ago. China is making the switch. I don't know who is next, but given the amount of communication between them and the US, I believe it will likely be Japan.

What are your thoughts on this type of switch?

On the positive side, it makes a language easier to learn for foreigners, thus making communication easier. On the negative side, it causes a language to lose meaning in many cases.

Perhaps your opinion differs for different languages? What language would you most/least like to see this happen to?

As a language enthusiast (go ahead and say "purist" if you want), I am very much against this form of switch. I'm not fond of being one of a select few 20 years down the road who can read simplified Chinese. To me, this seems like the powerful just going and half-assedly learning a language, and forcing those less powerful to adapt and deal with it. >.<; You already pretty much HAVE to speak English at least moderately well to get around in this world, and I would prefer if it would stay a separate language.

After two years of being on hold with it (don't ask), I have begun learning Chinese (Mandarin) again. The writing fascinates me, and I do not want to see it changed. It's confusing, yes...but it makes the language more meaningful. If it changes, then so does much of the meaning of the language.

I think I would probably scream if Japan switched to using romaji, for various reasons. The most trivial of which is that the internet would become a hell hole of people who "know how to write" basic words and think they've mastered the language...and also the fact that I have a bit of a personal attachment to the written language. However, the biggest reason is probably that, while it might seem to make it easier to learn at first...I fear it would actually make it harder. For instance, "four" and "death" are pronounced exactly the same, but written differently. Might be a bit awkward to learn if you can't read the difference between words. Some words have separate pronunciations - it gets difficult to remember that they're the same word unless you're looking at the character, and it is the same. Then there are compound words - some of them use completely different pronunciations for the same characters, and while it may be confusing to memorize the pronunciation, the meaning is easier to grab when looking at known characters. For instance, lets take 夜空/yozora. You might know "yoru" means "night," and "sora" means sky, but would you know right off that "yozora" means "night sky" if it was read this way? Possibly not. This is one of the cases where the pronunciation is similar to how you normally read said characters...but it is not the same, and that CAN make a very large difference for someone learning a new language. However, if you knew that 夜 means "night" and 空 means "sky," it becomes fairly obvious that 夜空 means "night sky." It reinforces the meaning while you get used to the pronunciation.
And then, of course, language enthusiast that I am...I must throw in something about connotations being lost. 体 and 躯, for instance, are more or less the same word. Both can be pronounced "karada," both mean "body." However, the former refers more to the body of a living person, the latter carries the connotation of a corpse. Would you know that if you just read "karada"? No, I do not think you would.

And after only about two months of being back on track with learning Mandarin, I've already found similar reasons for opposing this switch.

Do you agree or disagree? I'd love to hear your opinions.

I say that switching the alphabets is alright. It was much easier for me to learn English, because I had already learned about the letters back in Vietnam. Er, the only exception were the letters "F", "J", "W" and "Z".

I think English is the most widely used language in the world, note I said I think it is, so it is understandable that many countries are requiring children to learn to speak and write English. I think that it is a good thing that they are "switching" to our alphabet but, I also think that they need to keep their traditions and continue to teach children to write in their traditional alphabets/characters. People should never completely loose their heritage.

i think we should all make a switch to a universal anuguage, or one that we all go by in other words, but it should not be the english lphabet. We shpould create a new one that contribes all nations together so we can make the communications between these nations easier. In my eyes, we hould all go by latin, yes partly becuase i spweak it, but more importantly it is dead. No one speakes it, but we can all agree that it is not biased to any nation. SO i aggree with teh swithc to a completly different language

There not switching to ours its just that the Latin and and creek words and alphabets have a influence in most languages they might look similar butt hey didn't copy us

Some people might consider Latin to be biased towards Italian, Spanish, and French, or Indo-European languages in general. Personally, I kind of liked the use of language in the movie Serenity, where it was sort of a mix of English and Chinese. But I don't think it's the kind of thing you can make happen. It either will or it won't.

As far as languages changing alphabets, it really depends on the language. I agree that Mandarin and Japanese are best understood in their own writing systems. However, Kyrgyz has rotated between Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic alphabets, and is starting to lean back towards Latin. In this case, there's more room for the natural sounds of the Kyrgyz language in the Latin alphabet than Cyrillic, they just had to use Cyrillic while they were a part of the Soviet Union.