Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme

[Erik Max Francis]

Alexander Schmolck wrote:

> Huh? You seem to be confused (BTW French is misleading here: it's
> vowels and
> consonants in English). *Kanji* are not phonetic, you seem to be
> talking about
> *kana*. And the blanket claim that Japanese spelling in kana is badly
> designed
> compared to say, English orthography seems really rather dubious to
> me.

Yes, indeed.  Kana is a far more efficient alphabet -- in terms of
graphemes mapping to the same sounds consistently -- than English.  Of
course, its orthography fits the Japanese language, not English, so kana
is not nearly as effective for writing English words (of course, the
Japanese happily do it).

But if someone is writing Japanese in kana (rather than kanji), it is
far easier to accurately read back what is written based only on the
kana.  The exceptions are some transformations done for brevity, usually
at the end of a sentence (desu ~= "dess"; "shita" ~= "shta"), and the
grammatical particles which for historical reasons are written different
than they're pronounced.

I saw a figure quoted for the efficiency (in that grapheme-phoneme
consistency mapping I mentioned earlier) of kana that put it well above
95%.  I can't fathom how low English's efficiency would be.

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