1454: Versatility of Writing Systems Dec 4, 2018

As discussed yesterday, writing systems don’t really determine how a language will or will not be expressed. This was, in a certain way, exhibited in English fairly recently with the advent of texting, and therefore texting language. Especially when it was the case that phones could have only 12 buttons and people would have to click several times to select any given letter, people economized on characters and gave the bare essentials, but these essentials were pretty much always consonants, especially when the vowels are in between them. In a certain way this became a bit like an abjad, which marks the consonants and usually only marks vowels at the bookends of words, or for diphthongs, like with Hebrew writing. This is not used as much anymore by necessity, but its use—in any capacity—shows the way in which people can be very flexible about writing systems in general.

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