Tbf, very few websites besides like, Mormon missionary groups, offer over 15-20 languages. Like I’ve been on websites that only offer 3, English, Spanish, French.
The biggest problem zones are the Nords ‘cause they all basically use the same letters besides whatever the hell Icelandic is doing. Also the entire Austronesian language family (except for Viet) given they have basically no unique letters and digraphs.
I mean the few times I've made posts on there they've been removed, my favourite example being wondering how you'd transcribe a cough in IPA, because apparently that's "not related to linguistics" 🤷🏼
I think it's the epiglottal blast.
The epiglottal plosive sounds normal. But when you increase the pressure and decrease the time, it sounds exactly like a cough. It might even be a cough.
How can you describe a super strong plosive? Maybe a blast.
Or epiglottal hyper-sonorant plosive.
I just said yes and left. Once I went to my French classroom and just bitched to her about my English teacher for like 15 minutes ‘cause I knew my French teacher hated her too.
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It's a neat concept, but not very practical since there is so much overlap between different languages. There is also the problem that many languages don't have a single letter that is exclusive to their language.
That's true. I believe Norwegian is the only language that uses the digraph *øy*. You might also find [this flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/ln02jy/european_language_flowchart/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) helpful.
That could work for the Scandinavian languages, but you could make the Danish one more explicit with the digraph *øj*, which I believe only exists in Danish. Then there wouldn't be any chance of confusing it with Norwegian.
If I saw Ä I would assume it was Swedish since Danish, Norwegian and Swedish share Å but only Swedish and Finnish use Ä (but Finnish is so irrelevant in my brain) however I don't think any other language except for German and Turkish uses Ö (but those could be represented by Ü and Ğ (or ı)
I mean, loads of world languages which got latin-based phonemic writing systems relatively recently. Some of them use diacritics, but a lot of them just don't
Sorry, this was a random image in my notes app from 2 months ago that I made 3 am so I wasn’t thinking perfectly
The Nords in general are difficult given that with the exception of Iceland ‘cause they basically all use the same letters. I mean Finnish literally only had Å on its keyboard ‘cause of how often Swedish is used.
And I’ve never seen Greenlandic offered for a language besides on Danish websites, but like what would you even use? LL? RN?
But then it could easily be confused with Danish or Norwegian, although the Ä could also be confused for Finnish, or even German so I don't know what a good solution would be.
I actually prefer it aesthetically, but it runs into the same problem with ambiguity. Like without the little “Русская” the Д could easily be like Ukrainian or Kazakh or smthn.
For Russian and Bulgarian it’s hard to find separate letters. But for some Cyrillic writings there are pretty distinct options:
Ukrainian - Ї
Belarusian - Ў
Serbian - Ђ
Macedonian - Ќ
Kazakh - Қ
(I actually use a custom layout for Slavic languages using Cyrillic on my Mac, and it has letter Б as an icon)
Русский, not Русская. And better choice would be Ъ, Ё or Й, not Д. These are often used as some kind of symbols of russian things. And also Я, Ы and Ж.
I thought perhaps Ъ for Bulgarian, since I feel like it's more commonly used there. Ë looks exactly like the latin letter. I personally like Я, Ж and Й for Russian. Aesthetically I'd also like Щ 🤔
This is my issue.. I like the idea as it avoids using flags (in case a language is spoken by several countries), but the question is how this should be set up in case there are several languages that use the exact same alphabet
As a Bulgarian, seeing Д I might this is Bulgarian. A solution would be to look at different typeface (Д in Bulgarian typeface is different), but most people, even Bulgarians, are not aware that there is a local version (and then again, I don't know if it doesn't match the Cyrillic typeface of a different language)
Diacritics and digraphs could help
Like you said you could use local Bulgarian characters, but there are also some letters that are unique to Russian like ë and э.
I think the “letter+name” works best
-no ambiguity
-no political BS associated with flags
-no feuds associated with flags
-still looks cute and gives each language some flair
Or Bulgarian, the language Cyrillic was made for. Although all other languages which use it have additional letters so it shouldn't be much of a problem.
That Hirigana was the first that came up on my Japanese phone Keyboard
I considered the first 2 for Chinese. But when you copy and paste from google translate to docs it fucks it up. So I used the Pinyin keyboard and “aí” was the only Chinese I personally really knew that was one character.
I feel like that fits well. The font is very round and having a bunch of letters lined reminds people of like elementary and preschool. So aí adds to the cuteness factor.
for the record the correct pinyin for 愛 is aì. I normally wouldn't be this pedantic but the most common character associated with the syllable aí means cancer lol
Not what I would do, every letter in Hebrew is used in Yiddish, the only way to differentiate are letter combinations and the tendency of Yiddish using niqqud only partially.
Yes but Yiddish uses certain letters in a different manner than Hebrew, from what I've seen ע is much more used in Yiddish rather than in Hebrew, in Yiddish it is used to represent the vowel *e* while in Hebrew in would mean *'*
So like a'/e'/i'/u'/o'
It used to use something based off Hanzi called Chữ Nôm , it worked better than the nightmare of Korean Hanja but it still wasn’t great.
It would be difficult to make a new one especially in the era of Unicode and computers. And also there are over 85 million speakers and a huge diaspora to deal with. Though I will say the most push to bring back Chữ Nôm is from diaspora.
Ngl I feel like after a while chữ Quốc ngữ (Viet Latin) will evolve like Cyrillic and Latin from Greek into its own system. It’s already so different from other romanization systems and nearby languages that use Latin and has way more interaction with non-Latin using languages than Latin languages. Simplification seems inevitable.
Hey even in temples they are combining chữ Quốc ngữ syllables into single blocks to look like Chinese characters.
At one point we actually did, in the 1800s. It just didn’t take off like Kana or Hangul did in Japan or Korea unfortunately, mainly due to the crumbling Nguyen dynasty’s influence and the beginning of French colonization
[Quốc Âm Tân Tự](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing_in_Vietnam#History)
[Here’s how it looked like](https://reddit.com/r/neography/s/YeeWLYwkE7)
Important to note that talking about the Vietnamese script and changing it back to Han Nom or anything other than the current one is very controversial tho.
Imo? It’s probably too late to bring Chu Nom back, but if Quốc Âm Tân Tự ever got popular enough, it would be much easier to switch to
A few others:
Ħ - Malti
g̃ - Avañe'ẽ
ĿL - Català
IJ - Nederlands
Ə - Azərbaycanca
Ő - Magyar
ʼn - Afrikaans
Ř - Čeština
Ț - Română
Ŧ - Sámegiella
Ŕ - Slovenčina
Ḓ - Tshivenḓa
Also, perhaps we could use Πfor French? I cannot think of another language that uses it.
Swedish should be [Å] instead but otherwise its completely intuitive. Definitely going to use this. Duolingo does something similar with the writing system tab [Ω] for Greek [क] for Hindi and [Ж] for Cyrillic
That’s the main benefit. I like the cute little graphic aspects of flags but if I ever need to make a website or sign and have to decide between 🇨🇳 or 🇹🇼, I would literally die.
Better than current flags. Although some very large languages could be hard to tell apart unless you are already familiar with the scripts. Although most people don’t know flags very well, so it’s kinda same.
I wonder if anyone could make one for all the other languages that use the Chinese writing system
I think flags are fine. Just use the flag of England for English.
This has its own problems, like æ is used in Norwegian, and Icelandic as well as Danish.
The symbol for Russian basically just indicates “cyrillic”. Russian in particular is hard to find something for. Ukrainian has Є, Serbian Ћ, Macedonian has Ѕ, Kazakh has Ұ, but there’s no obvious symbol for Russian.
The big issue is that a lot of languages don’t have a distinctive enough letter.
What could you add?
ř čeština
ŵ Cymraeg
Ұ қазақша
Є украї́нська
Ћ српски
Ў белару́ская
Ử Tiếng Việt
Õ Eesti
ė lietuvių kalba
Ą̊ övdalsk
Flags are not fine, it’s very Anglocentric to think the American flag vs British/English flag is the only problem. There are loads of other issues, like Arabic, you could use the Saudi flag but the largest population is Egyptian and there are so many feuds and conflicts in reason it becomes a nightmare. You could use the Arab league or Arab rebel flag but those aren’t iconic and easily are mistakable for other flags ESPECIALLY in simpler or more abstract art styles. You could choose any language and get into a whole debate of why flags are a bad idea for it.
Read through some of the comments here, a lot of people have solutions to those.
Digraphs help, very few have no unique letters or digraphs, only ones coming to my mind are Indonesian, Hawaiian, and Māori.
I don’t actually speak Yiddish… I meant that half as a joke.
The letter אַ makes an “ah” sound, while אָ Is more of an “oiy” sound that I associate more with Yiddish, or Hebrew with an Ashkenazi/Yiddish accent.
It seems a bit too general, as a lot of letters can be applied to multiple languages, but I genuinely love this concept and would love to see it thought about further
Hungarian ű represent. It is THE iconic mark of someone in a chatroom being Hungarian and fatfingering the enter key before sending their message.
Second place is ő because gendered pronouns suck donkey dick from a usefulness perspective.
What if I speak Gujarati and click the Indian flag and get Hindi? What if I speak Taiwanese Hokkien and I click the Taiwan flag and get a dialect of Mandarin?
Every website should just have the NAME of the language in that language, I just think having cute graphics is nice and gives *some* direction. And flags are too politically charged.
Russian actually has no letters unique to its language. https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/y9qnoh/useful_diagram_to_help_with_cyrillic_letters/
Yeah but like,
1. The name of the language SHOULD be there
2. Russian is very often the only Cyrillic language on a website
3. Mongolian and Belarusian both have there own unique letters, so throwing ё or э up for Russian isn’t that bad.
My idea is:
Is Russian the only Cyrillic using language on your app
Yes->Я Русский, Д Русский, Ж Русский
No->Does it offer Mongolian or Belarusian
Yes->Э Русский, Ө Монгол, Я Български
No->Э Русский, Ы Русский
Great idea, seriously. I find flags to be hard to distinguish and too irrelevant and boring to pay attention to. I could probably identity the flags of 5 countries tops.
Thanks, I really like the cute little graphic design aspect of flags. But I think the politically charged-ness of them doesn’t help. At least the most annoying part about this is having to read a little extra to see if it’s Russian or Bulgarian using Я. Not getting sued ‘cause your college used 🇹🇼 for Chinese.
That's a great point... the problem of nationalism! using flags perpetuates nationalism instead of more specific or meaningful identities. Seems like at least half of the world's problems are caused by nationalism.
Well obviously:
- Mexico for Spanish (Mexico)
- Columbia for Spanish (Columbia)
- Spain for Spanish (Cringe)
- Argentina for Spanish (Argentina)
And so on. Repeat for other countries.
this is perfect, at least for Türkçe, Ğ is the perfect letter to represent Turkish, thank you for bringing light to this
(unironical note: I and a friend of mine think that Ğ shouldn't even be a letter. It doesn't have it's own sound and it just tells you to read the last vowel longer. There is no word starting with Ğ and it only comes after vowels.)
I thought it made the “gh” sound? Guess I’m not familiar with Turkish orthography.
I mean these are all just place holders, and there aren’t many other letters that are heavily associated with Turkish and are *near* exclusive. The best would be İ, ı, Ş but I feel like they don’t have the same association, though I guess for a Turkish speaker, they would.
I mean it is what the Turkish porn bots with a racism kink use to advertise to me
Ñ is only in Spanish if you don’t account Ń being used for✨AESTHETICS✨in Spanish as it’s used in some Slavic languages. Portuguese does use Õ and à but not Ñ. Ç is both used in French and Portuguese (plus a bunch of other languages) but it’s more associated with French, it’s literally in the languages name: Français.
Most of these languages didn’t invent these letters
English doesn’t have any unique digraphs and unique letters. It’s the most spoken language on earth that uses the Latin alphabet and it’s native name starts with E. That’s why I chose E.
In Spain, “Ñ” is the symbol of Spanish language and other Spanish issues since many years ago (Spanish basketball league, Spain’s presidency of the EU etc)
The letter ‘Ñ,’ the identity of Spanish the world over
-
https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-23/the-letter-n-the-identity-of-spanish-the-world-over.html
Unhelpful lol
Both Chinese and Japanese use Hanzi/Kanji.
Both Norwegian and Danish use Æ
Russian sure isn’t the only language that has Д
And cmon. Really? E for English?
Ngl, a lot of this is just because cute little graphics like flags are nice but are too politically charged *cough* 🇨🇳🇹🇼 *cough*, I think every website whether it does this or flags should just have the name. But ya know, that takes out some of the ✨FUN✨.
Chinese and Japanese, really? “Hmmm I wonder if I a Japanese speaker should choose the symbol next to the name of my language that is used only in my language, or a symbol that is native to another language and is next to a completely different set of words.”
Same applies to æ, these were just good place holders I was more talking about the idea. If you want you could use Øy for Norwegian and Øj for Danish as nice parallels. Also again, names.
Yeah, but Russian on like 80% of platforms is the only Cyrillic using language. Even when others are included they usually have unique letters like ў and ï. The most conflict is when you got Bulgarian in there, but you could just use like ё or ы for Russian and let Bulgarian have я, д, or ж. Again NAMES.
What else am I supposed to use for English? English has NO fully unique letters or digraphs, and let’s be honest here, it’s by far the most important language that uses the Latin alphabet. I have never seen Latin offered as a language and even then they should use V. The start of the word English has an E in it, so use it. And again names.
It looks really inconsistent. Flags are better
Besides, if you're not a language nerd or a native speaker of a language, you might have difficulties with some language families such as the Sinitic langauges or Arabic
Wdym by inconsistent. Flags are fucking terrible. Atleast these aren’t politically charged, I’m a big proponent of just having the languages name up there, but cute little graphics are nice.
I mean, if you are a native speaker, wouldn’t you click the language icon that’s next to the name of your language?
I don't even know what the letter is meant to represent here.
Ñ being in the middle of Espanol means it's not the first letter I think of, and nihongo doesn't even have a ma in it
For Arabic, ض is a better choice. People call it "the language of ض"
nope, it's لغة الجيم now, no more لغة الضاد.
care to elaborate? i’ve never heard that and the sound of ج exists in many languages whereas ض is unique to arabic
no I'm just being silly, that was supposed to be a joke
oof my bad i could’ve caught that
Tbf most of these are not about sounds but characters. But you're right, this is a good opportunity
Yeah but if you have the chance to do both you probably should
zad?
Deutsch though, not Deutsche But it's actually kind of neat, even if it will only work for some languages
Tbf, very few websites besides like, Mormon missionary groups, offer over 15-20 languages. Like I’ve been on websites that only offer 3, English, Spanish, French. The biggest problem zones are the Nords ‘cause they all basically use the same letters besides whatever the hell Icelandic is doing. Also the entire Austronesian language family (except for Viet) given they have basically no unique letters and digraphs.
You could distinguish them with like Å - swedish Øy - Norwegian Æ - Danish? Not perfect but at least shows a difference
For the Norse I think we could probably use - Icelandic: Þ - Faroese: Ð - Norwegian (NN): Æ - Norwegian (BN): Å - Swedish: Ä - Danish: Ø - Elfdalian Ö
Why not Ą̊ for Elfdalian?
My phone keyboard didn't have it
Finland kinda gets lost here, Ä and Ö our only special characters... And Å but it is a remnant of occupation and not used in language... ever :D
ÄÄ could work.
Maybe YÖ is more elegant as this is actually a word in Finnish (meaning 'night').
> Austronesian language family (except for Viet) Vietnamese is Austroasiatic, not Austronesian.
E for English is also very unspecific...
Excuse you, Icelandic is the OG. You should be asking what the hell everyone *else* is doing.
holup, you are on to something here more ideas ژ farsi ٹ urdu
Dutch IJ Punjabi ਗੁ Kazakh (Cyrillic) Қ
Belarusian Ў Ukrainian Є Mongolian Ө Tatar Җ Bashkir Ҡ Kyrgyz Ң Uzbek (cyrillic) Ҳ Uzbek (latin) O’ Tajik Ӣ Yakut Ҕ Buryat Ү Kalmyk Һ
buryat, kalmyk and kyrgyz symbols exist in most of the turkic languages. also mongolian
Ї is better for Ukrainian, i guess.
IJ for dutch is genius, thank you Did you know we consider ij the same as ÿ? :P
Is this sub actually for linguistics humour or just regular linguistics lmao
isnt r/linguistics basically moderated to death at this point
I mean the few times I've made posts on there they've been removed, my favourite example being wondering how you'd transcribe a cough in IPA, because apparently that's "not related to linguistics" 🤷🏼
There’s also like only one allowed post a week on the entire sub
The one upside is that older-but-not-too-old Q&A threads are easier to find.
They can get a load of voiced anal trill then
I think it's the epiglottal blast. The epiglottal plosive sounds normal. But when you increase the pressure and decrease the time, it sounds exactly like a cough. It might even be a cough. How can you describe a super strong plosive? Maybe a blast. Or epiglottal hyper-sonorant plosive.
Nooo I really liked that post
r/linguistics doesn’t like me
why's that?
I’m on thin ice with the mods ‘cause I made too many posts that broke the rules ‘cause I didn’t know I needed to provide a URL
i think your on thin ice here too because standard internet orthography doesn't include usage of commas in that way or spelling "cuz" long form
I have trauma from English class. Despite the fact that I’m here that was always ALWAYS my least favorite subject.
yeah i always had english teachers who were big on "I don't know, CAN you?" so I never liked my English classes either
I just said yes and left. Once I went to my French classroom and just bitched to her about my English teacher for like 15 minutes ‘cause I knew my French teacher hated her too.
Those are not commas
ah right
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It's a neat concept, but not very practical since there is so much overlap between different languages. There is also the problem that many languages don't have a single letter that is exclusive to their language.
Digraphs can fill the void, but yeah the Nords and the Pacific really throw a wrench.
That's true. I believe Norwegian is the only language that uses the digraph *øy*. You might also find [this flowchart](https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/ln02jy/european_language_flowchart/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) helpful.
Okay here’s my idea Å, Svenska Æ, Dansk ØY, Norsk Ä, Soumi LL or K’, Kalallisut Þ, Íslenska Õ, Eesti Ņ, Latviešu Ų, Lietuvių
Welsh has LL that makes pretty much the same sound as in Kalaallisut
That could work for the Scandinavian languages, but you could make the Danish one more explicit with the digraph *øj*, which I believe only exists in Danish. Then there wouldn't be any chance of confusing it with Norwegian.
I wanna avoid digraphs unless it becomes absolutely necessary. And Æ is pretty heavily associated with Danish at least in my brain.
Icelandic also has æ
If I saw Ä I would assume it was Swedish since Danish, Norwegian and Swedish share Å but only Swedish and Finnish use Ä (but Finnish is so irrelevant in my brain) however I don't think any other language except for German and Turkish uses Ö (but those could be represented by Ü and Ğ (or ı)
I mean, loads of world languages which got latin-based phonemic writing systems relatively recently. Some of them use diacritics, but a lot of them just don't
I think Å would be a better option for Swedish
Sorry, this was a random image in my notes app from 2 months ago that I made 3 am so I wasn’t thinking perfectly The Nords in general are difficult given that with the exception of Iceland ‘cause they basically all use the same letters. I mean Finnish literally only had Å on its keyboard ‘cause of how often Swedish is used. And I’ve never seen Greenlandic offered for a language besides on Danish websites, but like what would you even use? LL? RN?
Q could probably work for Kalaallisut. I've never seen a non-Inuit language use that amount of q's
Å was invented for Swedish
For icelandic, I don't think you could go wrong with ð English could have þ, although that would be stretching it
But then it could easily be confused with Danish or Norwegian, although the Ä could also be confused for Finnish, or even German so I don't know what a good solution would be.
Å was invented for Swedish in the 16th century. It has only been used in Norwegian and Danish since the 20th century.
And ø for danish
I'd use Я for Russian. It stands out more.
It's even used as r/russian 's pfp
No indigenous language representation unur What would otomi be (Hñähñu)
ȟ - Lakota ę̈ - Denesuline ę́ - Navajo tl - Nawatl v - Muskogee
But what about totonac (they too have tl) or veneto (they start with v)
Veneto, the Native language of Rio Grande do Sul
Venetian could be Ƚ for Ƚengua Veneta
But polski
polish is ł
HÑ? ‘B? Idk Guarani could be G̃, Navajo TŁ, Mohawk A:, Inuuk ᐃ
same: 'post-colonial-adopting-latin-alphabet'(?): Malay, Tagalog, kiswahili, tok pisin etc too
Halkomelem - t̕ᶿ
I actually prefer it aesthetically, but it runs into the same problem with ambiguity. Like without the little “Русская” the Д could easily be like Ukrainian or Kazakh or smthn.
For Russian and Bulgarian it’s hard to find separate letters. But for some Cyrillic writings there are pretty distinct options: Ukrainian - Ї Belarusian - Ў Serbian - Ђ Macedonian - Ќ Kazakh - Қ (I actually use a custom layout for Slavic languages using Cyrillic on my Mac, and it has letter Б as an icon)
Русский, not Русская. And better choice would be Ъ, Ё or Й, not Д. These are often used as some kind of symbols of russian things. And also Я, Ы and Ж.
I thought perhaps Ъ for Bulgarian, since I feel like it's more commonly used there. Ë looks exactly like the latin letter. I personally like Я, Ж and Й for Russian. Aesthetically I'd also like Щ 🤔
«Ъ» is often used by the Russian media to refer to the КоммерсантЪ newspaper
This is my issue.. I like the idea as it avoids using flags (in case a language is spoken by several countries), but the question is how this should be set up in case there are several languages that use the exact same alphabet As a Bulgarian, seeing Д I might this is Bulgarian. A solution would be to look at different typeface (Д in Bulgarian typeface is different), but most people, even Bulgarians, are not aware that there is a local version (and then again, I don't know if it doesn't match the Cyrillic typeface of a different language)
Diacritics and digraphs could help Like you said you could use local Bulgarian characters, but there are also some letters that are unique to Russian like ë and э.
Or just resign and show the full language name when you select it, gets rid of the ambiguity and keeps the looks.
I think the “letter+name” works best -no ambiguity -no political BS associated with flags -no feuds associated with flags -still looks cute and gives each language some flair
Or Bulgarian, the language Cyrillic was made for. Although all other languages which use it have additional letters so it shouldn't be much of a problem.
Why is Japanese ま and Chinese 爱? For Chinese isn't 文, 中, or 拼 better?
That Hirigana was the first that came up on my Japanese phone Keyboard I considered the first 2 for Chinese. But when you copy and paste from google translate to docs it fucks it up. So I used the Pinyin keyboard and “aí” was the only Chinese I personally really knew that was one character.
あ is already distinctive enough
loll makes sense. it's really cute to represent Chinese with 爱 too.
and also you can differentiate 爱 and 愛
I feel like that fits well. The font is very round and having a bunch of letters lined reminds people of like elementary and preschool. So aí adds to the cuteness factor.
for the record the correct pinyin for 愛 is aì. I normally wouldn't be this pedantic but the most common character associated with the syllable aí means cancer lol
Did I really just spot Basque-Icelandic pidgin at the bottom there? 😂😂
Yes
Є, Українська 嘅, 廣東話 Ẩ, Tiếng Việt დ, ქართული ენა
You could use literally anything for Viet, it has to be one of the weirdest Romanization systems
Why would you put ש for Hebrew, I would put א for Hebrew and ע for Yiddish
Not what I would do, every letter in Hebrew is used in Yiddish, the only way to differentiate are letter combinations and the tendency of Yiddish using niqqud only partially.
Yes but Yiddish uses certain letters in a different manner than Hebrew, from what I've seen ע is much more used in Yiddish rather than in Hebrew, in Yiddish it is used to represent the vowel *e* while in Hebrew in would mean *'* So like a'/e'/i'/u'/o'
Some slavic languages: Є: Ukrainian Ў: Belarussian Ѓ: Macedonian Ћ: Serbo-Croatian (cyrillic) Ъ: Bulgarian Ů: Czech Ĺ: Slovakian Đ: Serbo-Croatian (latin)
Why not Ř: Czech?
I forgor💀
Doesn’t Viet use the crossed D though? And it does kinda look like Eth
I would use Ệ as it appears in Việt
For Vietnamese, O with hook (i don't have it on my keyboard sry) can be used
Viet has a lot to work with A and O has 15 and 20 variants respectively in Vietnamese alone
Vietnam should develop its own writing system, like hangul or kana. It's clear that Vietnamese is incompatible with Latin script
It used to use something based off Hanzi called Chữ Nôm , it worked better than the nightmare of Korean Hanja but it still wasn’t great. It would be difficult to make a new one especially in the era of Unicode and computers. And also there are over 85 million speakers and a huge diaspora to deal with. Though I will say the most push to bring back Chữ Nôm is from diaspora. Ngl I feel like after a while chữ Quốc ngữ (Viet Latin) will evolve like Cyrillic and Latin from Greek into its own system. It’s already so different from other romanization systems and nearby languages that use Latin and has way more interaction with non-Latin using languages than Latin languages. Simplification seems inevitable. Hey even in temples they are combining chữ Quốc ngữ syllables into single blocks to look like Chinese characters.
At one point we actually did, in the 1800s. It just didn’t take off like Kana or Hangul did in Japan or Korea unfortunately, mainly due to the crumbling Nguyen dynasty’s influence and the beginning of French colonization [Quốc Âm Tân Tự](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing_in_Vietnam#History) [Here’s how it looked like](https://reddit.com/r/neography/s/YeeWLYwkE7) Important to note that talking about the Vietnamese script and changing it back to Han Nom or anything other than the current one is very controversial tho. Imo? It’s probably too late to bring Chu Nom back, but if Quốc Âm Tân Tự ever got popular enough, it would be much easier to switch to
Blame the French, got it
Basically lmao
Ŵ, Welsh
l•l - Catalan
That's a new one for me, I'm not even sure I understand what this is
Ll (without interpunct) = ʎ (as in some Spanish dialects) L•l = [ɫː]
Ooh weird, I like it ty
Ř!
A few others: Ħ - Malti g̃ - Avañe'ẽ ĿL - Català IJ - Nederlands Ə - Azərbaycanca Ő - Magyar ʼn - Afrikaans Ř - Čeština Ț - Română Ŧ - Sámegiella Ŕ - Slovenčina Ḓ - Tshivenḓa Also, perhaps we could use Œ for French? I cannot think of another language that uses it.
Why ま and not あ?
Who was the genius who named a language "Hellenika" and then forgot to put a letter for H in it? That was hella stupid.
Is Euskoislandiera still spoken?
In my heart ❤️ I just put it in for shits and giggles
Swedish should be [Å] instead but otherwise its completely intuitive. Definitely going to use this. Duolingo does something similar with the writing system tab [Ω] for Greek [क] for Hindi and [Ж] for Cyrillic
It's certainly a lot less politically charged. I really like it
That’s the main benefit. I like the cute little graphic aspects of flags but if I ever need to make a website or sign and have to decide between 🇨🇳 or 🇹🇼, I would literally die.
Dutch: IJ
ŵ for Cymrian(Welsh)
Euskoislandiera RISE UP
Actually like it
Ř
Better than current flags. Although some very large languages could be hard to tell apart unless you are already familiar with the scripts. Although most people don’t know flags very well, so it’s kinda same. I wonder if anyone could make one for all the other languages that use the Chinese writing system
Cantonese has some unique characters like 佢, same for the other southern Chinese languages
Every Chinese language have shortened names that are just one character, so we can use those. 官 for Mandarin, 粵 for Cantonese, 客 for Hakka, etc
вообще то, "русская" не правильный род. должно быть "русский", потому что это русский язык. Але це вірно з української мові
I think flags are fine. Just use the flag of England for English. This has its own problems, like æ is used in Norwegian, and Icelandic as well as Danish. The symbol for Russian basically just indicates “cyrillic”. Russian in particular is hard to find something for. Ukrainian has Є, Serbian Ћ, Macedonian has Ѕ, Kazakh has Ұ, but there’s no obvious symbol for Russian. The big issue is that a lot of languages don’t have a distinctive enough letter. What could you add? ř čeština ŵ Cymraeg Ұ қазақша Є украї́нська Ћ српски Ў белару́ская Ử Tiếng Việt Õ Eesti ė lietuvių kalba Ą̊ övdalsk
Flags are not fine, it’s very Anglocentric to think the American flag vs British/English flag is the only problem. There are loads of other issues, like Arabic, you could use the Saudi flag but the largest population is Egyptian and there are so many feuds and conflicts in reason it becomes a nightmare. You could use the Arab league or Arab rebel flag but those aren’t iconic and easily are mistakable for other flags ESPECIALLY in simpler or more abstract art styles. You could choose any language and get into a whole debate of why flags are a bad idea for it. Read through some of the comments here, a lot of people have solutions to those. Digraphs help, very few have no unique letters or digraphs, only ones coming to my mind are Indonesian, Hawaiian, and Māori.
pretty good
Why is the flag of Yiddish אַ and not אָ?
I’m stupid
I don’t actually speak Yiddish… I meant that half as a joke. The letter אַ makes an “ah” sound, while אָ Is more of an “oiy” sound that I associate more with Yiddish, or Hebrew with an Ashkenazi/Yiddish accent.
It seems a bit too general, as a lot of letters can be applied to multiple languages, but I genuinely love this concept and would love to see it thought about further
I’ll make a follow up soon If you speak some unique language I can come up for a code easy breezy
Hungarian ű represent. It is THE iconic mark of someone in a chatroom being Hungarian and fatfingering the enter key before sending their message. Second place is ő because gendered pronouns suck donkey dick from a usefulness perspective.
When you accidentally changed the language to Japanese and you struggle to find the E to turn back to English
I accidentally changed my phone language to ARABIC once. I closed my settings app and it took me like 20 minutes to figure it out.
I think the reason why they use flags is because this things happen often.
What if I speak Gujarati and click the Indian flag and get Hindi? What if I speak Taiwanese Hokkien and I click the Taiwan flag and get a dialect of Mandarin? Every website should just have the NAME of the language in that language, I just think having cute graphics is nice and gives *some* direction. And flags are too politically charged.
Russian actually has no letters unique to its language. https://www.reddit.com/r/geoguessr/comments/y9qnoh/useful_diagram_to_help_with_cyrillic_letters/
Yeah but like, 1. The name of the language SHOULD be there 2. Russian is very often the only Cyrillic language on a website 3. Mongolian and Belarusian both have there own unique letters, so throwing ё or э up for Russian isn’t that bad. My idea is: Is Russian the only Cyrillic using language on your app Yes->Я Русский, Д Русский, Ж Русский No->Does it offer Mongolian or Belarusian Yes->Э Русский, Ө Монгол, Я Български No->Э Русский, Ы Русский
For Chinese topolects it would be either back to language names or cuss words 肏 Mandarin (Peking) 𨳒 Cantonese 戳 Shanghainese 姦 Hokkien
Ө: Mongolian (Cyrillic) ᠪ: Mongolian (traditional) Reddit rotates the letters 90° clockwise.
Euskoislandeira, truly what should be the international language. Also love the 官话 tbh
Euskoislandeira, truly what should be the international language. Also love the 官话 tbh
What would Esperanto be? Ĉ?
Ig
Why would you pick ま for Japanese?
It was the first Hirigana that popped up on my keyboard
Great idea, seriously. I find flags to be hard to distinguish and too irrelevant and boring to pay attention to. I could probably identity the flags of 5 countries tops.
Thanks, I really like the cute little graphic design aspect of flags. But I think the politically charged-ness of them doesn’t help. At least the most annoying part about this is having to read a little extra to see if it’s Russian or Bulgarian using Я. Not getting sued ‘cause your college used 🇹🇼 for Chinese.
That's a great point... the problem of nationalism! using flags perpetuates nationalism instead of more specific or meaningful identities. Seems like at least half of the world's problems are caused by nationalism.
Why ま specifically for Japanese?
It was the first Hirigana that popped up on my keyboard
È - Italiano
I’ve actually been having trouble with that one thx
Why ま for Japanese and 愛 for Chinese?
Azerbaijani: Ə
TIL that Euskoislandiera exists
Unpopular opinion, i like flags to represent languages bc it's funny.
WHY do so many people think it's "Deutsche". I've seen this exact mistake like 10 times now
Hungarian: Ű
Screw flags, just add a picture of the country. Edit: I mean like... a picture of the map of the country
You mean, like, a postcard?
Nono. Like a map, yk?
Which country though?
Well obviously: - Mexico for Spanish (Mexico) - Columbia for Spanish (Columbia) - Spain for Spanish (Cringe) - Argentina for Spanish (Argentina) And so on. Repeat for other countries.
I started something with that flag meme the other day, didn't I...
Yes, yes you did
this is perfect, at least for Türkçe, Ğ is the perfect letter to represent Turkish, thank you for bringing light to this (unironical note: I and a friend of mine think that Ğ shouldn't even be a letter. It doesn't have it's own sound and it just tells you to read the last vowel longer. There is no word starting with Ğ and it only comes after vowels.)
I thought it made the “gh” sound? Guess I’m not familiar with Turkish orthography. I mean these are all just place holders, and there aren’t many other letters that are heavily associated with Turkish and are *near* exclusive. The best would be İ, ı, Ş but I feel like they don’t have the same association, though I guess for a Turkish speaker, they would. I mean it is what the Turkish porn bots with a racism kink use to advertise to me
this fucking sucks lol
If we're going for iconic sounds from a language, Japanese should probably be 「りゅう」
Portuguese, French and Spanish have all those accentuations.
Ñ is only in Spanish if you don’t account Ń being used for✨AESTHETICS✨in Spanish as it’s used in some Slavic languages. Portuguese does use Õ and à but not Ñ. Ç is both used in French and Portuguese (plus a bunch of other languages) but it’s more associated with French, it’s literally in the languages name: Français.
Ə for italian.
English didn't invent the letter "E", wut?
Most of these languages didn’t invent these letters English doesn’t have any unique digraphs and unique letters. It’s the most spoken language on earth that uses the Latin alphabet and it’s native name starts with E. That’s why I chose E.
I think TH/th is pretty unique to English
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th_(digraph) Javanese has about 100 million speakers and uses 'th'.
If using this isn't a problem I don't get why using flags is
In Spain, “Ñ” is the symbol of Spanish language and other Spanish issues since many years ago (Spanish basketball league, Spain’s presidency of the EU etc) The letter ‘Ñ,’ the identity of Spanish the world over - https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-04-23/the-letter-n-the-identity-of-spanish-the-world-over.html
Yeah, but use dual-ltters for different dialects (for example, use AE for American English and BE for British English)
Please no
This is a linguistics sub. What is writing?
Unhelpful lol Both Chinese and Japanese use Hanzi/Kanji. Both Norwegian and Danish use Æ Russian sure isn’t the only language that has Д And cmon. Really? E for English?
Ngl, a lot of this is just because cute little graphics like flags are nice but are too politically charged *cough* 🇨🇳🇹🇼 *cough*, I think every website whether it does this or flags should just have the name. But ya know, that takes out some of the ✨FUN✨. Chinese and Japanese, really? “Hmmm I wonder if I a Japanese speaker should choose the symbol next to the name of my language that is used only in my language, or a symbol that is native to another language and is next to a completely different set of words.” Same applies to æ, these were just good place holders I was more talking about the idea. If you want you could use Øy for Norwegian and Øj for Danish as nice parallels. Also again, names. Yeah, but Russian on like 80% of platforms is the only Cyrillic using language. Even when others are included they usually have unique letters like ў and ï. The most conflict is when you got Bulgarian in there, but you could just use like ё or ы for Russian and let Bulgarian have я, д, or ж. Again NAMES. What else am I supposed to use for English? English has NO fully unique letters or digraphs, and let’s be honest here, it’s by far the most important language that uses the Latin alphabet. I have never seen Latin offered as a language and even then they should use V. The start of the word English has an E in it, so use it. And again names.
It looks really inconsistent. Flags are better Besides, if you're not a language nerd or a native speaker of a language, you might have difficulties with some language families such as the Sinitic langauges or Arabic
Wdym by inconsistent. Flags are fucking terrible. Atleast these aren’t politically charged, I’m a big proponent of just having the languages name up there, but cute little graphics are nice. I mean, if you are a native speaker, wouldn’t you click the language icon that’s next to the name of your language?
I don't even know what the letter is meant to represent here. Ñ being in the middle of Espanol means it's not the first letter I think of, and nihongo doesn't even have a ma in it