876: Review of Writing-systems May 2, 2017

Alphabets and other writing-systems should have some way to write anything, theoretically. The issue is that some sounds are not present in all languages, and other phonological rules make certain languages either impossible or impractical to write in certain alphabets. While certain letters may represent different sounds in different languages, English, for example, has around only one sound produced at the back of the throat whereas Arabic can have up to seven, and some languages in the Caucasus can have more than twenty. This makes it very difficult to represent these sounds not present in English with the Latin alphabet that we use, and indeed there are separate Azerbaijani and Georgian scripts. Oppositely, languages like Greenlandic or Hawaiian necessitate that a vowel must follow a consonant, so the words become really long with lots of syllables. For Cree, which has this same problem when the Latin alphabet is applied, a new syllabary was a invented that makes writing a lot shorter. There are other factors that make languages difficult or impossible to accurately represent with writing-systems, but these are just a few.