Another Short History of Linguistics (49)

From above, a language shift from pictogram to alphabetic letter will lose at least two benefit, one is radical the silent part of a word (or character), and the other is the ability of introducing new sounds. When pictogram meet new sound, the language adopted it as a part of this language and give it a new symbol. While an alphabetic language meet a new sound in most case, the language has to announce that it is not a pure correct sound for human or just announce that it is noise. Until too much such ‘noise’ appeared then they have to use the closest alphabetic letter or letter groups to imitate these new sounds. This kind of remedy will still left a gap with the original sound. It doesn’t mean that original sound disappearing, it is still there, as a useful element for other language but denied by this language. Or we may say that the already existed letters of a certain alphabetic language handicapped the process of intake new sounds to this language greatly. Think about if we took English as the international language, as an alphabetic language, it has to depress sounds that not appeared in English. What if one day the United State lost ground? It will repeat what happened in the Latin of Rome again. And if we take a pictogram as international language, the things will be different, any new sound will have a totally different symbol (or character) for it. By the help of this language as a whole, peoples from the end of other side of world will know it easily. With more and more of such sounds, our international language will be the shortest one for oral expressing, audio receiving and memory in mind.