> If they're studying history, they'll need to learn to read a whole bunch of weird, ancient, dead script
I like when languages have lots of “backward compatibility”
For example Spanish handwriting system hasn’t changed much. Except perhaps it used to use more abbreviations.
A couple of months I went to a museum and was able to read 400 year old Spanish texts, and I can also grab a 200 year old book in Spanish and read it easily. As there have not been major Spelling or writing changes. With French I can even go further back.
This is more difficult in German where older books used to be printed in Fraktur and handwriting starts getting very different in the early 1900s.
I guess this gets more difficult in other languages like Mongolian, Turkish or Romanian which have undergone two or three different alphabet changes.
I like when languages have lots of “backward compatibility”
For example Spanish handwriting system hasn’t changed much. Except perhaps it used to use more abbreviations.
A couple of months I went to a museum and was able to read 400 year old Spanish texts, and I can also grab a 200 year old book in Spanish and read it easily. As there have not been major Spelling or writing changes. With French I can even go further back.
This is more difficult in German where older books used to be printed in Fraktur and handwriting starts getting very different in the early 1900s.
I guess this gets more difficult in other languages like Mongolian, Turkish or Romanian which have undergone two or three different alphabet changes.