You might like Mini / Mini Kore.

I no joke believe that the eventual end state of linguistic evolution is an ideographic written language with emoji as characters.

That would be terrible. Ideographic written languages are hard to learn (you need to memorize much more to get basic skills) and hard to parse (tokenization is more difficult).

Of course, if that means the entire world speaks the same language, the price would be worth it.

But I doubt we will converge on anything that is difficult to master, since water takes the path of least resistance.

That's not actually true. When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time. Studies have shown that it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their native spoken languages) than for an American student to learn to read/write English. It may defy what you think you know as common sense, but it is a replicable observation.

The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time. You learn to read by recognizing particular clusters of lines on a paper or screen as having semantic meaning, and your brain translates that directly. The imlpiactoin is the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe. (Did you read that OK?)

So essentially, you and a Chinese person both put in the same amount of effort to learn the same number of squiggly lines on paper as having semantic meaning, and memorizing a mapping of squiggles to words. It's just that in English the pronunciation is emphasized in the writing, whereas in Chinese it is mainly the meaning of the word that is focused on. But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.

But if so, rather than use a 3000 year old writing system with a lot of inherited historical baggage, why not start afresh? Keep the same basic concept (digital pictures in squares representing atomistic units of meaning, aligned in sequential order according to a grammar), but allow the pictures to make full benefit of today's digital display and font rendering technology. The logical end result of this is, I believe, emoji. Or something very close to it / evolved from it.

To get an idea of what I mean, you might want to check out Xu Bing's "Book from the Ground", which is a very readable book written in emoji, or something close to it. You can read about his work here:

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/emojis-comics-novel-futu...

> When MacArthur tried to get rid of the use of Chinese characters in Japanese writing during the post-WW2 occupation, he backed off when it was embarrassingly pointed out that Japan had a higher literacy rate than the US, despite having less of an investment in state schools at the time.

I’m not sure this can be solely attributed to the difference between character sets.

> The reason for this is that nobody except little children actually read by sounding out individual letters of words. That would be too much for the human mind to process in real time.

This sounds a lot like the theory that justified getting rid of phonics in schools, which has been an unmitigated disaster. It’s also not true when you consider how adult readers approach new words; English in particular isn’t great at this but there’s at least a hope that you’ll know how to pronounce a word you see written down, which approaches certainty in other alphabetic languages. This is useful for cross-referencing between spoken and written language.

> (Did you read that OK?)

Most English readers can mentally correct transposed letters, which is yet more evidence of the resiliency of alphabetic writing.

> But given that in this age most of our communication is through text which may never even be read aloud, it does make one wonder if the Chinese had the right idea all along.

I very much doubt that this is true. It might be true (or seem true) in the weird bubble you and I live in, but it’s not true for the majority of people.

> it does not take more time or effort for a child to learn to read and write Chinese or Japanese (assuming those are their native spoken languages) than for an American student to learn to read/write English.

As alphabetic orthographies go, English is almost uniquely horrible, though, so that's hardly surprising. Have they tried comparing to e.g. Spanish?

And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get to that point with a simpler, composable writing system - and the advantage of the alphabet (or a syllabary) is that you can still read everything before you get there, just slower. And that's just the reading part - the advantages of a decently phonemic alphabet or syllabary for writing are even more blatant.

> And yes, when we read with a practiced eye, we do pattern match entire words at once. But it's much easier to get to that point with a simpler, composable writing system

It is not. From the moment you learn a character in Chinese you are sight-reading by shape. It doesn't take much practice at all. Every bilingual Chinese-English person I know prefers reading Chinese, no matter how long they have been exposed to both languages as it is less mentally straining. English is my first language and even I experience this to some degree.

But until you do learn a Chinese character, you are unable to read it at all. Whereas with an alphabet or a syllabary, you can read anything as soon as you learn the letters; memorizing the shapes of the words comes later, and then only for those words you actually see often.

There's a reason why Hangul was a big deal in Korea when it was introduced, and why the upper classes tried to actively suppress it - it did, in fact, made reading and writing more accessible to the common folk. The same reasons why it was true then still apply.

I don’t think I agree with your conclusion. Taiwan had a higher degree of literacy than China in spite of traditional characters, yet most Chinese and Taiwanese people seem to have a hard time remembering characters. Indeed in China people just use pinyin mostly now to type, which uses the latin alphabet.

The best thing you can do today if you want quick adoption of a language is to use the latin alphabet.

Taiwanese mostly use BoPoMoFo input schemes, btw. The thing about "forgetting the characters" is recognition vs. production. Those are different skills supported by different parts of the brain, and if you only practice one then the other atrophies. Most people these days only write Chinese on a keyboard, so the computer does the work of transforming the phonetic input (BoPoMoFo in the case of Taiwan) into the correct character, saving the typist the trouble. Someone who forgot how to write a character will have no trouble entering it into an IME and selecting the right option. They'll know it when they see it.

If anything this just reinforces my original point: people consume written text more than they produce it, so we should optimize for that.

I agree with you up until the last point, they do produce it as well and most Chinese speakers are resorting to pinyin to produce, which uses the latin alphabet :D

Even Chinese speakers can usually guess the pronunciation of a word they’d never seen, because of how radicals work. English is barely better than Chinese at this.

Of course there are plenty of languages far better than either, with almost perfect match between spoken and written language. Language changes constantly, after all.

English is the worst possible representative of alphabet-based languages.