In alphabets you learn a small set of letters. Using those letters you form syllables. With those syllables you can read every single word in that language (yeah, through historical processes most languages fucked up the connection between syllables and phonemes, but that's a different matter). Meanwhile logographic systems have no logical way to form words, as most words are their own symbol. In current logogram languages you are expected to learn from 2000 to 4000 different characters (compared to an average of 20-something letters in alphabets) just to read **most** publications - and odds are that if you try to read something from an area you have no expertise in, you are going to stumble upon several words you can't even read (difference between ability to read and knowing the meaning. One may stumble upon a word they don't know the meaning of while using an alphabet, but they can still read the word. While if you don't know the right logogram for a word, even if you know the meaning of it, you can neither write nor read it). I find the distinction even more clear-cut than imperial vs metrics, as imperial just uses very confusing conversions. Logograms are way more unnecessarily complicated. Unfortunately I could never find again this cartoon strip I saw once. A kid showing his mom "Look, I drew a butterfly" and the mom saying "Great, I'm going to add it to the dictionary" lol

Unfortunately, people need that to live.

Put up or shut up

I did not mention an ethnicity. I mentioned you, specifically.

I mentioned logograms specfically, but this made me racist toward Japanese people. So hey, congratulation, you now hate latinos.

The more i look into different languages, the more i feel different languages are just as complex as each other, with complexity put in different places

Agree you've covered some of the pros of alphabet systems and cons of logographic systems, and those are totally valid. You're neglecting the other sides though, so let's balance that out: Here's some pros of logographic systems: * Higher information density - you can say more with less, and readers can parse it faster * Compound words are intuitive - just put the symbols for the two halves of the words next to each other (or visually combine them in some cases) * Symbols have direct meaning - there is usually no "sounding out" words to figure out what they mean, the symbol by itself fully encapsulates meaning, independent of pronunciation * Because meaning is independent from phonetics, ambiguity is reduced with homophones, in that two words that *sound* the same still have two different-looking symbols * Written communication can still be understood even across different dialects, and even across different languages altogether, if the same logographic system is used, and even if those logographic symbols have different pronunciations. This separation makes it possible to communicate across language barriers *without* having to learn a whole other language. * Logographic systems don't have to adapt to changes in pronunciation over time, they're stable Here's some cons of alphabet systems: * Much lower information density takes longer to read, most people have to internally convert the visual data to sound to understand it, so it physically takes more brainpower/effort to understand written text * Wild inconsistencies in phonetics within a language, requiring rote memorization of spelling "rules" and all of their various exceptions. Makes learning new words difficult as you can't be sure if you're "sounding it out" correctly unless you've heard the spoken word * Meaning directly depends on phonetics/pronunciation, which can lead to confusion and ambiguity with alternate pronunciations, alternate spellings, and differing dialects (e.g. Canadian French vs. Metropolitan French) * Learning a language that uses an alphabet system means learning it twice - the written language *and* the spoken language * Homophones and hereronyms? Good luck Also here's some food for thought. I 100% guarantee you use a logographic system every single day, very easily, without even realizing it. In fact, nearly the whole world uses it - Arabic numerals.

They don't own "literal letters."

Legitimate use of LLM?

> That guy's comment is racist as fuck tho Chances are high they hate it because they had to learn kanji in school or for work.

Like, haskell? But why?!

That's capitalist as fuck.

I don't know about a lot of those points. I can read French quite well, but can't speak it for shit, I don't know how much I have to "convert" in my head since its phonetics are irrelevant to me (and as English became a main online language, tons of people everywhere in the world can read and write it, but not really speak it since we are all communicating primarily through text - my English pronunciation sucks btw)... but anyway, about stability and adaptation, China has 120k+ different characters in its language, the vast majority got out of use because other ways to write the same thing became more popular, so I don't think it works like you described. Have you ever heard about Paulo Freire? The guy developed a very interesting literacy method, he tested it out with adult rural workers from poor regions and in just 2 months he was able to get those people to read and write (even if with grammatical mistakes) because his method is phonetic (well, there's quite more to it, but the reading/writing part is phonetic). For learning to read/write other languages, the "no sounding out" might be an advantage (like a lot of netizens writing in English without really speaking it), but for your own language, well, from what I understand they expect that only by high school the kids in Japan and China should be able to read their local newspaper because of the amount of characters they need to know for it, meanwhile Paulo Freire got adults, who have very low mental plasticity, able to do it in 2 months...

Totally "Given these hundred fonts, create a new font like them" Voila!

And each dev is free to make their own font. But if they want to uses someone else's, it stands to reason they might have to pay that someone else. If you draw a really cool painting. That doesn't mean I'm allowed to then just scan your artwork, print it on bottles and sell them. The problem here is no one had the foresight to realise it's a pretty big issue when you're leasing the rights to a specific font for a specific period of time, what happens after the lease expires? If they did, the contractual language would be different. It's not a problem in this sector alone. It's a problem, in many sectors, but no one seems to learn from others mistakes.

Elsewhere in these comments, someone did suggest generative AI, and frankly, yeah. Using a program to apply a particular art style to a zillion glyphs would be down right commendable, prior to ChatGPT.

> open-source fonts Don't they already exist?

This can quite appropriately be assigned as the top comment to _sooo_ many articles/posts.

>Excellent time for **the Japanese*" to drop ideogram/logogram system and have an alphabet like a functional language. "All I said is that the Japanese do not have a functional language. I don't understand where people think I was being derogatory about a specific race."

Evidently game devs have some distinct expectations, or they could already use those and save some money. This could be a rallying point for professional artists to build a font family conveying whimsy, authority, fantasy, antiquity, futurism, etc. Like how DejaVu covers a little bit of everything.