Which writing system/script is the worst?

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lolcow yoghurt

Puppychan character design school attender
kiwifarms.net
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Nov 17, 2019
Georgian, Armenian and Thai are awful writing systems where everything looks the same.
 
Ottoman Turkic was a fucking mess and it's telling that when they swapped to the Latin alphabet, their literacy rates exploded.
The choice of writing system absolutely does matter for a culture. There's two experiments in writing systems in America that relate to education. The Cherokee syllabary was created by a man who saw Whites writing but didn't know how to read himself, so he understood the concept but not the specifics (and this is also why many of the syllabary symbols look like Roman letters). Cherokee language uses only syllables formed from a consonant or diphthong followed by a vowel, which limits it to around 80 syllables, so small enough to give each one a unique symbol. Because of that there is no concept of spelling, so it was incredibly quick to teach Cherokees how to write in it and their literacy rate boomed from near 0 to near 100 over night. It was worthless for transmitting knowledge between cultures, though (it had to be translated into Cherokee before it could be rendered into writing, as the English language has no limit on the number of syllables that can be written).

Mormon Deseret was a similar thing, attempting to do it with phonemes instead of syllables. It did not catch on, however, and has been relegated to just a minor nationalist project (like the few Celts that still speak Gaelic). It likewise had some trouble in that the list of phonemes wasn't truly exhaustive. IPA is not a legitimate replacement for Deseret, as IPA is not written to be immediately understandable with distinctive symbols but is instead a slow, scientific thing akin to giving a pronunciation guide.

Some other major choices of what writing system to use reflect advantages of a certain social context. Chinese characters are awful for printing (ironically), keyboards, and really pretty much everything, but what they are good for is a multiethnic empire where the same symbol can mean the same concept in different languages. That is, they don't really write a word as a graphical representation of an auditory word, rather it's a graphical representation of the abstract concept and so can be applied to any number of mutually incomprehensible dialects. That's brilliant for its time.
 
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Id say korean hangul could count as meh..
It consists of like ~4 block types (날, 라, 즞, 즈 and iirc there is a rare 4 symbol block type) , and each block starts with a consonant symbol, unless its ㅇ(ng) which becomes silent. The blocktype depends on the vowel symbols shape and if there are two consonants present. As a concept its pretty neat and interesting.. but seems a bit cumbersome for an efficient or good writing system.
 
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