Posted by nabla9 10/27/2024
These teens have become accustomed to reading and writing sentences composed of such acronyms, and they even use them in real-life conversations—much to the annoyance of cultural conservatives. This phenomenon highlights how online communication can influence offline speech patterns.
That's why all the comments that mention efficiency of different writing systems are heavily downvoted.
But if we think about writing systems' evolution as an optimization problem that optimizes for "efficiency" (whatever that means. It is pretty hard to define so I'm not even going to try) we could easily imagine some systems being stuck at a local minimum. Or maybe even all of them being stuck at different local minimums some of which are smaller than the others.
Text input is now universally phonetic, and young people have a lot of trouble remembering how to write words.
Add to this the enormous (and increasing) use of English words, written either in katakana or actually in Roman letters, and it's plain that Japan is further down the road of losing its writing identity than China is.
Thar said, South Asian languages are phonetic so similar problems to Chinese do not exist.
The best comparison for character amnesia in Chinese would probably be Japanese.
Many native English speakers can't pick up a pen and paper and write intelligibly and would be in real trouble if they lost their phones; an increasingly annoying number TALK into their phones, not even pretending to type and just spewing auto-corrected crap out into the world.
I'm skeptical of this claim. My family doctor had bad handwriting, and one time the hospital worker had to call him to ask if he ordered a x-ray or Ct scan.
Apparently, it became slightly better recently, now that doctors spend less time scribbling things and mostly type them instead.
What the author describes is a phenomenon like wanting to write the word "analogous" but having no idea how to even begin putting pen to paper. Not writing the word and ending up with "analagous" by mistake.
There are cases, almost certainly overrepresented here, where a character has some truly unique variation that the writer forgets. They know it is different but forget how. In almost all other instances it is a matter of forgetting “is it heart or fire here?” as these two are very similar. It’s like spelling with an i instead of an e.