this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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IMO the "visual concept" is a weak argument - those are very abstract shapes.
And each character consists of strokes, or even unjoined glyphs, making them more eqivalent to a word rather than a letter.
In languages that I know, order of compound words mostly matters but order of words in a sentence can change a lot. In Ukrainian and Russian, it could be used for emphasis without tone, e.g. "она пошла домой" (she went home, neutral), "домой она пошла" (she went home), "пошла она домой" (she walked home). But in English, at least in conversational, non-contorted way, word order has to be preserved.
Well, yes, but, actually, no. Alphabets co-evolved with pronunciation. While Ukrainian and Belarusian (AFAIK) are very close phonetically to written text, Russian has a lot of a-o sound swaps, and English, in addition to a = æ and the th sound is... Well, you just have to know how to pronounce every word because they could derive or be borrowed from Spanish or French or any other latin-script language, but for some reason they keep the original spelling.