I dunno how I ended up there, but I found myself on the wikipedia entry for the name of Japan (Nihon?) which has a lot of Chinese and Japanese script.
It looks very cramped in whatever my default font size is, and a lot of the detail seems difficult to pick out. Particularly in the (I assume) traditional Chinese. Example: 大清帝國
Which got me wondering about font size. Do users of these scripts have different defaults? Or is it just because I’m not used to reading it?
I cant read arabic without zooming in a lot more than I do for latin text
I have wondered whether it’d be worthwhile to do a ground-up revision of Latin script for readability.
Like, the basic letterforms date back to Egyptian hieroglyphs, go through a bunch of alphabets that were designed to be used on rather different writing and display systems: hand carving, stroke-based systems with brushes, etc. Some didn’t have the same set of letters that modern Latin does, didn’t need to worry about them being distinguishable.
It’s not like someone sat down and said “what is the optimal mechanism for onscreen display for human eyes”, gathered a bunch of data, and went from there.
I mean, sure, it’s not awful, and we’ve tweaked it (like “programmer fonts” that have more-clearly-distinguishable “0” and “O” or “1”, “l”, “I”, “!”, and “|”). We’ve specialized some alphabets: a cursive capital “Z” doesn’t look much like a printed capital Z at all: 𝒵. A lowercase “a” differs a fair bit from a cursive lowercase “𝓪”.
But I feel like we probably could produce a better display alphabet, given modern science. Test what people can easily distinguish, and start from there, don’t worry about backwards compatibility and just target present-day display systems. Surely we could avoid things like the similar “i” and “j”. Capital and lowercase forms of some letters could be more-clearly distinguished. We don’t care how many strokes are required for a letter if it’s not handwritten. It’s easy enough to fill in an area of a letter if a human isn’t having to do it by hand.
Well, Hangul was developed precisely with efficiency in mind. Maybe not for screens specifically, though.
I think it would be incredibly hard to get people to switch without a compelling reason. Keep in mind that our modern keyboard layout is 150+ years old despite alternatives existing. Arabic letters are very close to English ones in sound but the readability suffers for me at least because it’s written in cursive with a lot of very similar-looking shapes (think of an i with 1 dot on top and an i with 2 dots being 2 separate letters) necessitating bigger font sizes.
English is about half of the internet and the modern lingua franca so unless it gets replaced or evolves over time, either of which would take decades, I don’t think any central body could make that change.
I agree that English probably isn’t going anywhere, but a change to the alphabet letterforms wouldn’t be throwing out all of English. I mean, the alphabet is a very small portion of English, and the precise forms are only part of that. That’s a limited amount of learning, and all you’d need on the device side is a “new style” font.
Stuff like spelling and grammar shifts are much larger in terms of learning, and those regularly happen.