====== Adapting Kanji to English ====== A while ago I started wondering if English would benefit from being written in Chinese characters, as the English spelling system is already something of a mess, maybe a pure logography would benefit English.\\ While I'm not the first person to come up with this idea, the other attempts I've seen have been underwhelming, to say the least. ===== Notes ===== ==== Kanji ==== I'm using Kanji over Hanzi or Hanja because I'm most familiar with Kanji over the other two, and because Japanese uses Kanji in a mixed script. If English were to adopt Chinese characters, then I believe it would likely use a mixed script. ==== English mixed script ==== While thinking about this, I realized English already appears to use a mixed script. It has two alphabets (uppercase and lowercase), similar to Japan's two syllabaries (Hiragana and Katakana), and a logography. However, there appear to be far less logographs in English, and they're all almost exclusively used for short-hand. The best example I can think of is the #, which can be read as 'hash'/'hashtag'/'number' depending on the surrounding context. ==== Yingzi ==== [[http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm|Yingzi]] was something created by a conlanger mimicking Chinese characters, and one of the other attempts at creating a logography for English. While I've gone through the article, I think that Yingzi is honestly kind of stupid, but that's only because the symbols the author chose are over-complicated, and thus uncomfortable for actual use. ===== Kanji Only ===== Kanji adapted to English but without a mixed script, so purely logographic.\\ Since I haven't had the time, I haven't bothered to work on this yet. ===== Mixed Script ===== Kanji adapted to English with latin used in addition to Kanji in a mixed script.\\ Similarly to the previous section, I haven't worked on this yet. ===== English Logography ===== Since English already contains a few logographs, I figured it would make sense to mix the existing symbols together to create a unique logography. I've already identified a few symbols that could serve as good logographs, which are listed below. ==== Logographs ==== * Numerals * 0 * 1 * 2 * 3 * 4 * 5 * 6 * 7 * 8 * 9 * Currency symbols * $ * Money, Currency, Dollars (american or otherwise) * ¥ * Money, Currency, Yen, Yuan * ¢ * Cents, pennies, small amounts of money. * € * Money, Euro * Other * # * Number, Hash, Numeral * @ * At, location, area * % * Percentage, division * ~ * 'Around'; 'Roughly' * ♪ * Music; Playful tone. * X * In regular English it's already occasionally read as ‘cross’ or ‘Christ’. {{tag>linguas}}