/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18640387]

which language has the most beautiful letters?

[Anonymous No.18640412]

>>18640387
I like Sanskrit written with siddham script

[Anonymous No.18640419]

beauty is in the eye of the beholder and thus, is wholly subjective

[Anonymous No.18640423]

>>18640387
日本語
>>18640419
>>>/r/eddit

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.18640425]

>>18640387
Georgian

[Anonymous No.18640427]

>>18640387
Chinese and Japanese are nice.

[Anonymous No.18640444]

>>18640387
English is nice when done correctly

[Anonymous No.18640455]

>>18640427
I will never understand how this meme alphabet functions

[Anonymous No.18640504]

>>18640387
Islamic calligraphy is excellent simply due to the sheer flexibility it offers - they can integrate writings into everything from photorealistic drawings of tigers to the walls of buildings. I'll always prefer well-executed Fraktur or highly flourished Engrosser's Script, though.

[Anonymous No.18640532]

>Chinese/Japanese
>Perso-Arabic
Like them, but they have already been said
I also like:
Hebrew
Tamil

[Anonymous No.18640562]

>>18640387
Arabic, without a doubt. Plus the Islamic ban on iconography has done wonders for the development of calligraphy as an art.
Chinese is a close second, Japanese obviously being included in this.
Ge'ez script is cool. It has obvious calligraphic potential, but the way it works as a syllabary is really interesting once you take the time to learn it. At first glance it looks intensely complicated, but it's really quite simple, with different brushstrokes corresponding to different syllables in obvious ways.
Inuktitut is also similar to Ge'ez in this way. The simplistic geometry of the signs themselves don't (in my opinion) lend themselves to calligraphic design very well, but they look really appealing in print and as neon signs.
Unfortunately, and I say this as a caucasian Euroboo who often gets called a white supremacist, the Roman alphabet looks like shit. It makes sense for latin-based languages, but when its used in English it isn't even sensible as an alphabet. There's zero calligraphic appeal to it, and its inefficient as a shorthand. The original Latin alphabet came from Etruscan tribesmen who were effective masons and metal workers that adopted some Phoenician symbols as a stand-in for sounds, and carved that into their work. Because the language evolved from being carved or scratched into metal and stone, it wasn't able to develop the flourishes and strokes of most languages (which evolved with ink brushes), so it has always been fairly primitive for writing with.

[« Ƹ̵̡Ӝ̵̨̄Ʒ » !!bGBGaUpA8kS No.18640570]

>>18640532
>Tamil
Oh that’s also nice!

[Anonymous No.18640572]

>>18640562
The ugliest alphabets though have to be Korean and Cyrillic.

[Anonymous No.18640588]

>>18640572
>Cyrillic
Why? It looks cool to me

[Anonymous No.18640590]

>>18640455
It's wildly overcomplicated but not actually that hard to grasp. While they're technically ideographs you basically read it phonetically like any other script.

[Anonymous No.18640591]

>>18640455
Each letter has a reading (or a few) and a meaning. The readings are all phonetic and the meanings intersect because all characters are built out of a certain number of radicals that compose them, and in turn can have said radicals within hinting at their meaning or sharing it.
I think mixing said characters with a phonetic syllabary the way Japanese does is the best you can get, although 日本語's phonetic limitations and awkward dependence on tone and pitch to differentiate otherwise identical words in conversation (a flaw shared with Chinese, I suppose) can lead to awkward application beyond writing and a limited vocabulary when it comes to casual discourse (but then again that's not what the thread is about).

[Anonymous No.18640592]

>>18640572
Cyrillic is identical to Latin imo. No substantial difference between the two. Ugliest is probably Egyptian hieroglyphics, which are slow to write, don't lend themselves to calligraphy at all, and aren't as efficient/patrician as Chinese glyphs but also lack the regularity of Latin and Arabic alphabets.

Korean I've heard is very logical, but I agree, its not that nice to look at. They're also right next to China, which has a beautiful writing system, but they have to be different. Never actually found any part of Korean culture appealing to be honest, it's like a shitty clone of America copy-pasted onto some god forsaken backwater stuck between two great civilizations.

[Anonymous No.18640598]

Tifinagh has a really cool magical/alien vibe to it.

[Anonymous No.18640605]

Anyone on /lit/ practice calligraphy or do it as a hobby? I've thought about starting a thread for it before but I couldn't decide which board it would go on.

[Anonymous No.18640608]

>>18640591
Tae Kim wrote an interesting blog post about why he thinks Chinese is actually easier than written Japanese.

http://www.guidetojapanese.org/blog/2006/07/20/which-is-harder-japanese-or-chinese/

It would make sense that Chinese grammar works more intuitively with the character set. I'm still very novice with Japanese but the Kanji really do feel like a foreign imposition.

[Anonymous No.18640615]

>>18640588
>>18640592
If you grow up with Latin then the cyrillic alphabet looks like it's yelling at you, and many letters are simply aesthetic abominations eg. д, ц, ф, and above all this utter meme letter ы

[Anonymous No.18640620]

>>18640608
Kanji were actually there first. The other alphabets were the result of women taking Kanji and simplifying it into a phonetic system because they weren't as educated as the men.

>>18640605
Do it. I don't practice but I take a very active interest in the skill. It would be a welcome change from most of the shit threads we have on here.

[Anonymous No.18640627]

I'm going with arabic too

[Anonymous No.18640629]

>>18640387
i really like how Hindi and Thai look

[Anonymous No.18640634]

>>18640620
Right, I know that. But similar to Korean the Chinese script is not really suited for the Japanese phonetics and morphology. You can do it, it just sucks.

[Anonymous No.18640651]

>All these anons praising Chinese and Arabic
Can we collectively agree that the world would be a better place if Xiao'erjing had become the standard Chinese script?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao%27erjing

[Anonymous No.18640657]

>>18640627
This is an ancient script though

[Anonymous No.18640673]

Runic script is the most beautiful imo. It lends itself quite well to art and is fairly easy to read. Just one look at the Franks Casket is enough to convince. Though the Arabic, Chinese, and cuneiform writing systems are all beautiful as well.

[Anonymous No.18640686]

>>18640651
No I don't like it. Looks like a script for an alternative reality where China got islamified. No thanks.

[Anonymous No.18640708]

>>18640419
sorry but beauty is a priori

[Anonymous No.18640744]

>>18640387
Arabic and Medieval Greek but Latin script and Palava are also great

[Anonymous No.18640750]

>>18640387
Greek>Latin>Hebrew>Japanese>Persian

[Anonymous No.18640774]

>>18640750
Pleb

[Anonymous No.18640984]

>>18640387
Jap

[Anonymous No.18640994]

>>18640419
reddit

[Anonymous No.18641027]

>>18640455
>>18640590
From what I've read the phonetical aspect of the Chinese alphabet was "designed" for classical Chinese, so while it's still there it's practically useless. I read this article the other day and it gives a simple to understand explanation of how the alphabet works, you might be interestes too: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

[Anonymous No.18641054]

>>18640455
Every sinogram is made up by a bunch of radicals, they're not entirely unique symbols.
You can see from the picture how many characters have a "hat" or they have an X symbol, or a box that looks like 目. You learn to see these like you see letters in a Latin word. These radicals also have a meaning - usually - that you can associate literally or less literally to the word's meaning. Obvious one, ki 木 in Japanese means tree and mori 森 means forest.
osoroshii 恐ろしい (scary) has the radical for heart 心 in it.
Then Japanese uses syllabic alphabets attached to the sinograms to convey grammatical inflexions that Chinese achieves in other ways. So scary 恐ろしい becomes not scary when you change the last "i" into "nai" 恐ろしない.
I'm super rusty so I may have made mistakes but that's how it works, more or less. Chinese is entirely different grammatically but the principles behind sinograms are exactly the same, except that Japanese uses two pronunciations, one derived from Chinese, one derived from the native Japanese. Generally you use the Chinese pronunciation in clusters of characters.

[Anonymous No.18641073]

>>18640387
The new captcha system

[Anonymous No.18641079]

>>18641054
I am literally too stupid to ever grasp this, how in the fuck do children learn this?

[Anonymous No.18641080]

>>18640673
Did you mean the
>Old Turkic Script

Also, this. >>18641073

[Anonymous No.18641082]

>>18640387
Apart from Chinese characters, I really love Hebrew and Quenya.
>>18640598
The fuck, this is the first time I see something like this. Definitely looks like alien script.

[Anonymous No.18641094]

>>18641079
Rote repetition. Japanese and Chinese children are subjected to years of grinding sinographs until they internalize it. A Japanese person isn't fully literate until he's out of middle school. As in he can't read a newspaper.
I've read about some interesting research that suggests that how unintuitive your native writing system is has implications on the rest of your education. Italian children for example with their super straightforward and consistent spelling develop deeper language skills quicker than English speaking children who do better in turn than their East Asian peers. It's not an unbridgeable gap, but a complicated writing system can mildly retard a young person's education.

[Anonymous No.18641106]

>>18641094
That seems like an almost unbelievable waste of time, especially for youth who could be learning other things. Is there some kind of benefit to this writing system that justifies it?

[Anonymous No.18641119]

>>18640387
>which language has the most beautiful letters?
Javanese script (Aksara Jawa, Hanacaraka, Carakan, and Dentawyanjana)
Sundanese script (Aksara Sunda Baku, ᮃᮊ᮪ᮞᮛ ᮞᮥᮔ᮪ᮓ ᮘᮊᮥ)
Balinese script

[Anonymous No.18641129]

>>18641106
I don't know about Chinese. For Japanese, the sound inventory is pretty limited so there are way more homophones than in European languages and kanji serve to disambiguate them in writing. Reading in just kana can be a real pain in the ass for this reason. Also Sinographs are very information dense, again as far as Japanese pure kana sentences are way longer and unwieldy compared to ones that use kanji properly.

This is surely not the most efficient way to achieve these ends but they're present nonetheless. Replacing sinographs would require a linguistic genius, just transferring to roman characters without alteration would present a lot of problems. It's not impossible, they did it with Hangul. But at this point there are so many Japanese speakers who are perfectly literate that trying to change the writing system would result in massive resistance. It's the sort of thing that would have been best achieved 200 years ago.

[Anonymous No.18641227]

>>18641106
NTA but it's really not as hard as you think to pick a Chinese derivative language and that anon is exaggerating. Actually a bigger factor to the detriment of Japanese literacy is the fact that the Japanese youth never read, they only read manga. This was addressed as a rather huge cultural problem several times. They read manga and light novels written horribly in babby tier Japanese, and this on top of English terminology having taken over like 40% of Japanese vocabulary means they use mangled English for everything and need furigana (pronunciation aids) on top of kanji to pronounce the words.

[Anonymous No.18641233]

>>18640455
Just read this, it explains how it works in pretty simple terms.
http://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

[Anonymous No.18641245]

>>18641227
Might the fact that Japanese youth favor really simple writing be caused by the system itself being very difficult to learn? I realize that's not proof but they might not be entirely unrelated. Were Japanese people more literate in the past? I doubt it.

[Anonymous No.18641286]

>>18640572
Korean might not be the best for aesthetics of how it looks but it's quite good for the aesthetics of how it works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K53oCDZPPiw
>>18640592
>Cyrillic is identical to Latin imo. No substantial difference between the two.
What about Cyrillic having the palatalization distinctions built into the vowel letters? Or in general being designed around the phonemic structure of Slavic languages.
>They're also right next to China, which has a beautiful writing system, but they have to be different.
They're okay for writing the Chinese loanwords, but trying to write the entire Korean language in Chinese characters is like a square peg in a round hole.
>>18640615
Their cursive forms are much nicer, though, see image.
>>18640708
So how do we know what the objectively beautiful things are?
>>18641129
>muh homophones
People understand spoken Japanese, and even listen to audiobooks. Also Japanese Braille has no kanji. The reason reading all in kana is a pain in the ass is because you're not used to it, plain and simple.

[Anonymous No.18641322]

>>18641245
>Might the fact that Japanese youth favor really simple writing
The youth always have shit taste and favor dumb things regardless of writing system, genetics or nationality. They're young, so they're dumb, and they like dumb things.

[Anonymous No.18641345]

Latin alphabet if you’re writing Finnish in cursive

[Anonymous No.18641542]

>>18640562
>Because the language evolved from being carved or scratched into metal and stone, it wasn't able to develop the flourishes and strokes of most languages (which evolved with ink brushes), so it has always been fairly primitive for writing with.
That makes it good you pussy ass wimp

Same reason why Futhark looks good

[Anonymous No.18641593]

>>18641094
what would you recommend a westerner do to emulate this process? I know Hiragana/Katakana of course because it's dumbfuck easy to learn, and have a beginners grasp on grammar and sentence structure, but I find the Kanjii to be quite daunting.

[Anonymous No.18641595]

>>18641286
>So how do we know what the objectively beautiful things are?
You need a soul for that. The realm of quality can't be quantified.

[Anonymous No.18641618]

>>18641593
Honestly, you'll learn a lot just by reading a bunch of things with furigana. Maybe use anki if you feel like that isn't enough.
>>18641595
So how come some humans end up disagreeing on what's beautiful?

[Anonymous No.18641649]

>>18641618
anything with furigana you'd recommend in particular. I don't really consume that much japanese media.

[Anonymous No.18641665]

>>18641649
Any shonen/shojo manga you find interesting, pretty much.

[Anonymous No.18641672]

>>18641618
>So how come some humans end up disagreeing on what's beautiful?
Hylics are incapable of perceiving beauty so they just default to whatever particular cultural values they were raised in. Calling them "human" is a stretch.

[Anonymous No.18641684]

>>18641618
Different souls.
Maybe a jew would find this beautiful but I find it utterly disgusting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEY9lmCZbIc
Same thing with Jazz.

[Anonymous No.18641691]

>>18641672
What the fuck is a hylic?

[Anonymous No.18641696]

>>18641684
So if it's a matter of differences between individual souls that sounds like it's only objective from the perspective of that particular individual.

[Anonymous No.18641722]

[Anonymous No.18641766]

>>18641696
There's nothing "objective" about it. Beauty is a divine attribute, the beautiful will always remain beautiful regardless of the observer.
It's that some people gravitate towards it naturally while others don't.
Even blacks ask on quora why are white babies attractive and so on, and I am sure that jews are self-aware about their ugliness.
>inb4 evolutionary explanation

[Anonymous No.18641793]

>>18641766
But some people gravitate towards DIFFERENT things.

[Anonymous No.18641820]

>>18641684
>racist bugman is incapable of higher-order beauty
Checks out.

>>18641696
The difference is one of quality, not perspective. Some souls are grander, some are baser, but the more elevated ones soul the more they can perceive beauty.

[Anonymous No.18641824]

>>18641793
Provide some examples and I'll tell you why those people are just automatonic sacks of meat going through the motions of being human.

[Anonymous No.18641849]

>>18641820
How do you know this?
>>18641824
If you already have your conclusion made up no matter what evidence you're presented with, why should I listen to anything you say?

[Anonymous No.18641869]

>>18641793
There's only beauty and the lack of beauty.
Your are either closer to the center or further away from it and you can't be completely detached from the center.
Even if you are very far from the center you will still recognize those who are closer to it (only thing you are able to do is look at them with envy, even wish to destroy them).
But because you have very little of it in your souls it can't be reflected properly neither your appearance nor in your art.

[Anonymous No.18641878]

>>18641869
Again though, how do you know that? How would we even go about testing this claim?

[Anonymous No.18641905]

In no particular order
>Chinese/Japanese
>Latin
>Persian
>Cyrillic
>Hebrew

[Anonymous No.18641985]

>>18641820
>racist
Is that supposed to be an insult?
>Some souls are grander, some are baser, but the more elevated ones soul the more they can perceive beauty
Should I call you a soulist here or what lol?
The souls of blacks are purer that the souls of jews. Jews are at the bottom of the soul hierarchy, having encyclopedic "knowledge" doesn't give you a soul, that's why all jewish composers and artists are shit.

[Anonymous No.18642042]

>>18640387
arabic probably has the most aesthetic look to it, but as a script I can't decide between it, japanese/chinese and cuneiform.

[Anonymous No.18642048]

>>18641691
>I post on a literature board despite being too dumb to use a dictionary

[Anonymous No.18642063]

>>18642048
I had looked it up and what I got made no sense since it wasn't even a noun. I looked into a little more and... you're a gnostic? That explains things, gnostics are generally somewhat batshit.

[Anonymous No.18642082]

>>18642063
>you're a gnostic?
You don't have to be in someone's retard club to learn their nomenclature.

[Anonymous No.18642095]

>>18642082
Well if you're not a gnostic you wouldn't be using a term for a concept that's specific to the gnostic worldview so what sense are you using it in?

[Anonymous No.18642113]

>>18640750
In terms of languages perhaps, but OP is specifically calligraphy.

[Anonymous No.18642121]

>>18642095
So an atheist should never say the word "confident"?

[Anonymous No.18642124]

>>18642121
?????

[Anonymous No.18642245]

>>18642124
>confident
>confide
>con-fide
>with-faith

[Anonymous No.18642255]

Hieratic Egyptian

[Anonymous No.18642271]

>>18640598
It reminds me of South Arabian script (the one used in Yemen before Arabic script)

[Anonymous No.18642281]

>>18640387
Wingdings

[Anonymous No.18642286]

>>18642245
The general concept of having faith in something isn't unique to a theist worldview though. Whereas as far as I can tell the concept of 'hylics' is pretty specifically not just theist but gnostic.

[Anonymous No.18642319]

>>18641054
Thank you for not butchering the explanation. I can't speak for Japanese (as you noted the syllabic nature of katakana(?)) but 'hanzi' (Chinese logograms/heiroglyphs) does not have an 'alphabet' and is not phonetic (in the sense that you can sound words out). I'd go as far as to say calling them 'letters' is a stretch.

The system of radicals is semantic (i.e alters the meaning) and sometimes (but less commonly) phonological. Note I speak very little Chinese and read even less but am ethnically chink and grew up in Chinese culture. I can read a total of maybe 10-15 characters (mostly food items).
>>18640608
I could be wrong but I think kanji is derived from Chinese 'hanzi' (more pronounced hanzu) and that the later developments (hiragana, katakana etc) were 'improvements' akin to Hangul (Korean script). I could be wrong as I know even less about Jap than the little I know about Chinese.
>>18640620
Well maybe I was right.

[Anonymous No.18642329]

>>18642319
I would say more commonly phonological. The majority of common characters have a phonetic component, and the more you include, the higher that percentage. Of course, the phonetic component is only approximate, but it still helps somewhat.

[Anonymous No.18642340]

>>18642286
No but the idea is somewhat roundabout in its similarity. A word is created with a specific conception, sometimes literal, sometimes metaphoric, and over time develops a looser usage in its lacking dimension. Confidence once as a term of faith bearing has been divorced from that to have now its own secular bent. And so it is with hylic, with its secular application being "of or having to do with matter, material," or in other words, a fun way to call someone a materialist. :^) We're all just funposting bro. Get with the times

[Anonymous No.18642372]

>>18642271
Wow some are identical with Elder Futhark.

[Anonymous No.18643717]

>>18641722
aesthetic. wheres this from?

[S10241875 No.18643744]

>>18640387
Ranjana (Sanskrit/Newar)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranjana_script
>>18640412
Also.

[Anonymous No.18643849]

>>18640444
Trips of truth.

[Anonymous No.18643872]

>>18641073
Based

[Anonymous No.18643987]

>>18640387
I like Avestan, it's a rarely talked about derivation of aramaic.