Screw the latin script and its derivatives.

The example Vietnamese alphabet is interesting. I believe the reason for the script being adopted was because the country was so illiterate when the switch happened that it wasn't difficult. But Vietnam could easily keep its Chinese style script. After all Japan manages fine with its Chinese style script. Or they could create and implement a new one from scratch, like Korean did. Either way, this does not lead to the adoption of the Roman script.
From my understanding, Vietnamese is enormously unwieldy to write with Chinese characters, which was a big factor in why literacy was so low (the same was true of Korean and Chinese characters). Also, I'm not sure that I would say that Japan manages "fine," considering that they invented not one but two different alternative scripts to write Japanese in besides regular characters, katakana and hiragana. They clearly saw the need for an alternative, it just happened that the alternatives didn't take over. Overall, it seems that Chinese characters work more or less well for Chinese and badly for just about any other language.
 
As of 1815 (as per OP request) the Latin alphabet dominated in Western and Central Europe, and (almost totally) in the literate parts of the Western Hemisphere. Cyrillic dominated in the remaining Christian areas of Europe. Both were almost entirely absent elsewhere, except for writing European languages by people from Europe or otherwise Christianized.
In Africa, Afrikaans was mostly written in Latin script (Arabic script was also used). Everywhere else used either a form of Arabic or Ethiopian script (Coptic and its derivates and Tifinagh were very marginal at this point, Vai and other systems did not exist yet) or was largely illitterate. Asia, outside Siberia and the Philippines, almost exclusively used native scripts of various kinds at that point. A few societies had almost no local writing, but whenever writing in a foreign prestige language was used, Latin and Cyrillic was rare except in some parts of the Indonesian archipelago and in some coastal areas of India (where Dutch and Portuguese were used, and English or French to a somewhat lesser extent).
In the Americas, the native pre-Columbian writing tradition was essentially dead, likely beyond plausible recovery. Many peoples has not literacy at all, but almost all who did had access to Latin script almost exclusively (Cyrillic in Alaska, but very marginal). The Cherokee syllabary and the others on that model yet in the very near future.
In non-Ottoman Europe itself, alternatives to Latin and Cyrillic scripts were either long dead, marginal (used by Jewish minorities, or Arabic script used by the Lithuanian Tatars) or moribund (runes) but general literacy was likely past the point when a complete change could be deemed convenient. In Ottoman Europe, Latin was marginal, Cyrillic dominant among non Hellenic Christians. While the Latin dominance was not yet very much established yet, its foundations were. Could it be possible to stem that already rising tide?
I think it requires some radical and unlikely divergences, but I don't think it is impossible.

Here is a tentative sketch. Very unlikely, but here you go:
things in Britain go very badly in the Restoration period. Maybe the last phase of the Maratha Wars goes worse and longer for the Brits, in a way that ramifies into a messy situation both in India and the British Islands, with repercussions all over the Empire. Irish, Scottish and Welsh revivalist nationalisms emerge centering on Celtic languages (perhaps a Cornish cultural movement too) and they opt for a ogham-derived script just for the heck of it, but this leads to a Romantic-radical backlash in England too, where a Populist movement chose a "populist" (phonetic) spelling... and runes to write it, 'cause they are the "native" script after all. This works because there is a revolution going on and the new regime enforces this, while an awful lot of the English people already literate in Latin script are forced to flee. This, however, happens only after the pro-runes movement has had its own generational run in exile, where they plant the notion firmly among the German and Pan-Scandinavian nationalists, who follow a similar path when their own revolutionay movements succeed a little later. Under this influence, many Slavic nationalist movements also opt for promoting "native" literacy: they adapt Glagolitic from scratch instead of established scripts either Latin or Cyrillic (the latter is perceived as too tied to the oppressive Tsardom). All these revolutionaries are very secular, believe in a strange blend of mythic nativism and futuristic progress (compare some forms of right-wing Zionism) and find themselves with enough of a blank slate to work with across Northern, Central and Eastern Europe.
Similarly, in Latin America, maybe as a consequence of the different British attitude, the Criollo revolutionaries take a somewhat different tack... Plata and the Andes actually go for a constitutional monarchy under an Incan noble and chose Quechua as the new "national" language. Spanish does not disappear by any means, but it has competition, and a new script is devised for Quechua and other native languages with official status (you can bet Guarani, Mapudungun and Aymara are on board). This is done to emulate Mexico, where Nahuatl and Yucatec Maya are picked... and a syllabary based on a very haphazard "reconstruction" of the actual Maya glyphs is adopted for both. The reconstruction is so detached from the actual pre-Columbian writing that it does not even matter to discuss if it wrong (it is) but anyway they use that. For now, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal with Brazil and for a while the Netherlands cling to Latin, and Russia, temporarily, to Cyrillic (but only for Russian). Likewise, in the USA English remains written with the Latin script mostly, until the second wave of Caribbean slave revolutions hit the mainland, with their newfound "Liberty script", first invented in Jamaica by former slaves who remembered the Nsibidi signs of South Nigeria and turned it into an actual alphabet under inspiration of English itself. A Black-majority republic using this script warily looks at the rump US (including Canada) across the Potomac and Ohio rivers, but in the US themselves, native languages are increasingly written with derivates of the "Maya" syllabary (also used by Cherokee and others further South).
Disgusted by the "Pagan" runes used by their former colonial masters both English and Dutch, Afrikaners adopt a "holy" ortography - Hebrew. A lot of Protestant denominations in the English and Dutch speaking worlds follow suit, in the ensuing religious fervor, Latin script English loses ground in the US, without disappearing entirely (it also survives in Australia). Proposals to write French in the "Celtic" way are also made, but it would take a new, hardline revolutionary regime to try to enforce that after a long, bloody series of very nationalistic wars in the 1910's and 20's. These same wars also cause a Futurist new regime in Russia embracing neo-Glagolitic, and Italy finally unifying... under a weird sort of ideology that looks back at the Etruscans, and choses to make most Italians literate in a "Italic" script, derived from Etruscan and other non-Latin Italic writing systems, however poorly understood. Yeah, these people are Italian nationalists who hate the Roman legacy (let's say the capital of Italy ITTL is going to be Florence).
The militantly nativist anticlerical movement the soon thereafter creates a new Iberian Union does the same, using a fancyful "Decipherment" of Tartessian to write down "Spanish" (they actually would love to enforce Basque over the whole thing, but this proves too unpractical).
Venezuela still writes Castilian in Latin, and so do South Brazil (the bit that survived the slave revolts) and East Timor with Portuguese, but these are the main holdouts of Latin Script in the world by the year 2010, alongisde English-speaking East Austrialia, Lithuania and Hungary where the local Runicist movements never gained much steam (they had to mark the distance with the Germans somehow; Malta had revived Phoenician in the meantime). Ironically, the only other Germanic language still mostly using Latin script is... Icelandic.

This is a world of deeper nationalism, and where nationalism is more deeply linguistic and even more interested in ancient roots, "pure" origins and all the other myths the Nazis largely discredited ITTL. A world where a philosophical system that resembles what Heidegger did IOTL is dominant paradigm, where "authenticity" is a very serious political concern. Historians and (especially) archaeologists and philologists have MUCH more funding than IOTL (think historical OTL Israel's levels of fascination with archaeology worldwide), though the independent nature of their work is also even less guaranteed, given the politically sensitive nature of their job.
Of course, this would gradually lead to dismantle the notions that created this situations. But by then, they would have shaped the political and cultural context a lot. And there's mass literacy.
 
Last edited:
Post Napoleonic Wars? It's just not going to happen. Nations don't make policy based on ideals or principles,

Actually sometimes they do. The Latin alphabet is arguably a bad fit for Polish but the Poles were Catholic so they used it, in contrast to the Slavs that were Orthodox, who use Cyrillic.

Hindi and Urdu are sister languages but they use different scripts for purely cultural reasons.

Similarly, the Kurds of Turkey write with the Latin alphabet while those of Syria/Iraq often use Arabic alphabet. And so on.
 
Well, how come the script works for Persian?

Anyway, couldn't you just add a bunch of new vowel letters? Farsi has some letters that don't exist in Arabic.

Persian and Turkish are totally different - the former is in the Indo-European family while the latter is Turkic. Note that Urdu, another Indo-European language, also uses a modified Arabic script as do some Kurdish dialects.

That said, it’s also true that Atatürk sought to modernize and Westernize the country when he adopted Latin writing. The switch worked for both linguistic and political reasons.
 
Last edited:
That said, it’s also true that Atatürk sought to modernize and Westernize the country when he adopted Latin writing. The switch worked for both linguistic and political reasons.
Yeah, I want to prevent this. Making the middle east a prosperous bloc would make it so that Turkey would not want to "become European", and that associating with it's middle eastern neighbors would be seen as a better alternative.
 
Well, how come the script works for Persian?

Anyway, couldn't you just add a bunch of new vowel letters? Farsi has some letters that don't exist in Arabic.

Adding full vowel letters to the Perso Arabic script in a way that fits Turkish would... well, be a challenge. There is almost no straightforward way to create new vowel letters*, and while of course you can contrive one, it would alter the structure of how that writing system works graphically and you'd lose a lot of the synthetic strength of the system. You have to change the script deeply.

*In principle, while some letters are used also to mark vowel sounds, no letter in the Perso-Arabic script is inherently associated to one. This has important implications in the graphic rendition of metrics for instance, and generally in the way the script fits the language; the language being Arabic, of course, though the adaptation for Persian has worked decently. However, while it is relatively easy to add new letters marking consonants not found in Arabic, as Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu and other languages have actually done, especially through the use of diacritics, this is a lot harder to do with vowels; the letters marking vowels are not graphically supposed to bear diacritic dots, or already change value with them. Adding new letterforms would be graphically complicated.
 

Ban Kulin

Banned
Actually sometimes they do. The Latin alphabet is arguably a bad fit for Polish but the Poles were Catholic so they used it, in contrast to the Slavs that were Orthodox, who use Cyrillic.

Hindi and Urdu are sister languages but they use different scripts for purely cultural reasons.

Similarly, the Kurds of Turkey write with the Latin alphabet while those of Syria/Iraq often use Arabic alphabet. And so on.
Poles are a perfect example actually of the opposite of what you're saying. Principles and ideals (Catholicism) didn't dictate Latin script. Economics and politics dictated the religion AND the script. Cultural differences/reasons are all rooted in economics.
 
Also, does it really make economic sense for languages like Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew etc. to continue using unique writing systems?
It does, in the sense that the systems are already in place and therefore have major inertia. Overcoming that would require considerable effort, time and expense, though of course it can be done, as Turkey and other cases show.
 
From my understanding, Vietnamese is enormously unwieldy to write with Chinese characters, which was a big factor in why literacy was so low (the same was true of Korean and Chinese characters).
Indeed, the comparison to Korean Hanja is quite valid. Though from my understanding it actually wasn't very common since Vietnamese was actually very rarely written-- the written language was almost always Classical Chinese.
Also, I'm not sure that I would say that Japan manages "fine," considering that they invented not one but two different alternative scripts to write Japanese in besides regular characters, katakana and hiragana. They clearly saw the need for an alternative, it just happened that the alternatives didn't take over.
Actually, those scripts just started as colloquial ways to write kanji in cursive. They didn't specifically invent them per se, they kinda just came into being as a way of being convenient, especially for poets and other such writers. It's like how in English, many people will just write "ok" instead of "okay." Eventually, they just started being used as a way to teach children how to read before teaching kanji, since they were simpler to draw in many cases, and it evolved from there.
Overall, it seems that Chinese characters work more or less well for Chinese and badly for just about any other language.
It's actually quite fine in Japanese once they were able to fit it in with their different grammatical system-- the creation of hiragana did help quite a lot there. Without kanji, Japanese would be absolute hell to decipher, because of all their homophones.
 

Ban Kulin

Banned
Ah, really? What's the economic argument for Urdu to use Arabic script and Hindi to use Devanagari, for what is essentially the same language? And this when both countries also use English (with a third writing system) significantly?

Also, does it really make economic sense for languages like Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Hebrew etc. to continue using unique writing systems?

I think Marx was wrong about this.
Are you joking. The answer is always going to be the same. The native population of Pakistan and parts of India were Muslim, their clerics and doctors used Arabic script so when literacy went big, that's what Urdu uses. Similarly in India, even during Mughal and other Muslim dynasties' rule, the majority of the population was Hindu with a pre-existing Devanagari script and their own non-Muslim clerics and local learned men.

Ditto what Falecius said.

If Marx said this, then it's finally one thing he was right about.
 

Ban Kulin

Banned
This has absolutely nothing to do with marx. If you read marx and comes away thinking he was a strict economic determinist then you're a moron.

Not to say he's right about everything but he wasn't that reductionist.
Well then uhhh looks like you're calling funnyhat a moron. Not a nice thing to say.
 
Top