Hello Orville,
"Relatively universal standard of writing spoken
languages" is an excellent phrase.
For "written languages", at least 12 writing systems
that I am aware of (not including signed languages)
are used as everyday writing (newspapers for wide
distribution for example):
Hebrew - Hebrew alphabet - one ancestor of Roman
alphabet, script is not known to many non-Jews. Used
to write Hebrew, Ladino, and Yiddish.
Arabic script - Used every day by 1/6 of the world's
population. The rules for writing it are arcane, a
word, if written in the Roman alphabet letter for
letter, would look mispelled.
Amharic script - Used by Ethiopians, based on Hebrew
script, syllabary.
Chinese script - Used by most Chinese, this is NOT an
alphabet, but a "character" system which is in fact,
writing ancient sign language into a form used to
translate 22 mutually unintelligible spoken languages
of China into a single written language.
Japanese - syllabary, based on the "appearance" of
Chinese script.
Roman alphabet - used, in some way, with some
variants, for many of the nations of Europe and the
Romance languages throughout the world. Based on
Greek, Hebrew, and other ancient alphabets.
Cyrillic script - based on Greek, used by all of the
Russian and former Russian republics.
Shorthand - a reduced form of writing "sounded
languages" like English. Requires special training
but is quick to write and interpret.
Sanskrit - One of three alphabets in daily use in
India, three thousand year history. India has to have
computer systems that can interpret Roman, Sanskrit,
and Arabic scripts.
Greek - used by Greek-speaking peoples the world over.
Cherokee - developed for everyday use by Sequoyah,
based on both Roman letters and ancient Cherokee
writing.
Korean - based on the shape of sounds in the mouth,
Korean words "look" like characters from Chinese, but
are in fact readable phonetically.
For signed languages, we are indeed fortunate to have
one system that can write all of them.
Charles Butler
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