There’s is some confusion in the Indo-European family due to versions of a language which look different even though they sound the same. Serbian and Croatian are the same Slavic language, but the Orthodox Serbs write it in Cyrillic (Russian) letters and the Catholic Croats in the Roman alphabet. Since the Croats insist on the alphabet of the Latin gospels and the Serbs on that of their Orthodox gospels, then logically the Bosniaks and Kosovars, Slavic Muslims who also speak Serbo-Croatian, should write the language in the Arabic letters of the Qur’an. Actually, they did write it in Arabic while under the Ottomans, but now they use Roman.
Bosniak is the correct term for “Bosnian Muslim”. US newspaper reporting about the 1992-94 war often uses “Bosnian” as if it only meant the Muslims, but the country of Bosnia (technically, Bosnia-Herzegovina) is half Muslim (Bosniaks) and half Christian (35% Orthodox Serb and 15% Catholic Croatian.) C.f. those same newspapers’ use of “Semitic” as if it meant “Jewish”. 09Mar10 (Nigeria is another country which is split down the middle between Christians and Muslims, and it also suffers frequent religious violence.)
Exactly the same situation exists on the Indian subcontinent —
Hindi, the largest language in India, and
Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, are the
same, but the Indians (Hindus) write it in their own Devanagari script while Pakistanis (Muslims)
use the Arabic alphabet. It’s been said, tongue in cheek, that
Urdu is essentially Hindi with Arabic curse words. In print,
Devanagari and its derivatives are quite
recognizable; the letters all have a horizontal line at the top, so
each word is connected by a top bar. Someone facetiously said it
looks like a bunch of snakes hanging from a telephone line. For
example, 
is
the word “Sanskrit”.
In general, alphabets follow religion more closely than language. Eastern Europe is split down the middle by the alphabet-vs.-religion issue — Catholic Slavs like the Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, and Croats use Roman letters, even though they don’t match the sounds of those languages very well, while the Orthodox Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, and Bulgarians use Cyrillic, which was designed specifically for Slavic. The exception to this is Rumania, which uses the Roman alphabet (surprise!) even though the country is mostly Orthodox. In fact, Moldova, one of the former republics of the USSR, was once a province of Rumania and is in the process of switching back to the Roman alphabet from the Cyrillic that was imposed on them by the Soviets.
Unlike the Bosniaks and Kosovars, several Islamic countries and peoples who have no linguistic connection to Arabic do use the Arabic alphabet to write their languages — Pakistanis, Iranians, Afghans, and Kurds (all Indo-European), Malaysians, Turks, and some Kazakhs, Chechens, Kyrgyz, and Azerbaijani (all Central Asian), among others. Albanian was written in Arabic once upon a time, but now they use a Latin-based system with some extra letters thrown in. Yiddish (German) and Ladino (Spanish) are written in Hebrew characters, and the Catholic inhabitants of Malta write their Arabic-derived language in Roman letters.
23Sep09 Closer to home, you are reading this document in Roman letters instead of Germanic Runes because Catholic missionaries propagated them all across western Europe, replacing the Runic alphabet used by the Germans, Franks, Goths, and Vandals. (Note that the proto-Germans didn’t have paper or ink, since the runes, with their straight lines, are obviously designed to be scratched on wood or stone.) The Kelts also got forced into using Latin letters when they adopted western Christianity, leading to the notorious difference between spelling and sound in Gaelic and particularly, in Welsh.
It’s been pointed out that the Serbo/Croatian and Hindi/Urdu contingents are blind, while the Chinese are deaf. This provocative statement is based on the observation that a Serb and a Croat (or an Indian and a Pakistani) can hold a conversation but cannot write notes to each other — the same situation as if two blind persons (or one blind and one sighted) were trying to communicate. On the other hand, all the many dialects of Chinese use the same characters in the written language, but each dialect pronounces the words differently. Therefore, for example, speakers of Mandarin and Cantonese cannot talk to each other, but can always write notes — the same situation as if two deaf persons (or one deaf and one hearing) were trying to communicate. (This analogy leaves out such expedients as Braille and sign language, because those cases would involve both parties learning another method of communication they could share.)
One good example of the difference in Chinese dialects is the word
, the name of a refreshing
drink. In the Amoy dialect it is pronounced “tee” but in
Cantonese (and Mandarin) “chah”. The rest of the world is
pretty well split down the middle which sound it has adopted —
English tea, Spanish té, Hebrew
tei, etc. but Arabic shai, Russian chai, Greek
tsai and so on. English once used both tea and
cha before settling on the former.
Chinese writing is analogous to mathematical formulae: the sentence 2 + 6 / 3 = 4 is understandable on the page almost everywhere in the world, even though there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible ways of saying “two plus six divided by three equals four”. It’s been seriously suggested that if humans ever encounter intelligent (or rather, technologically-advanced) aliens, our first practical communication will be mathematical and scientific. (A sketch of an atom with six electrons means “Carbon” anywhere in the universe, and something like II + III = IIIII and II + I = IIII - I establishes the meaning of the plus, minus, and equals signs in tens seconds flat, no matter how many tentacles the alien might have or what kind of weird thought patterns occur in whatever passes for its brain.)
The comment about the Chinese being “deaf” is double-edged, because the various sign languages used by the deaf are not associated with spoken languages, either. American Sign Language (ASL), for example, is used in many countries where English is not spoken. Therefore a Mexican deaf person who only reads and writes Spanish, and a deaf resident of the US who does not know a word of that language, can communicate in ASL. On the other hand, ASL and British Sign Language are totally different, so deaf persons from England and America cannot understand each other! (ASL is derived from the earliest systematic signing system, which was developed in France.)
Other examples of language-independent communication are the set of
pictorial signs that decorate places like airports, and
“international-style” road signs. All users of the
airport, no matter what languages they can or cannot read, can still
(hopefully) find the rest room and the baggage carousel, and drivers
of all nationalities recognize the “No Left Turn” sign
with its arrow and diagonal red bar and know that yellow triangles
mean “Yield” while red octagons mean “Stop”
and a big blue /H/ points to a hospital. Yet another example is the
now-common use of the symbols | and ○ to
represent the concepts “on” and “off” on
electrical equipment. If there’s a single on/off button, it has
the combined symbol 
.
This allows the manufacturer to sell the same product in different
countries (or different areas of the same country, Canada for
instance) without having to re-do the controls. Indeed, many cars now
have dashboards with almost no words on them at all — only
symbols for headlights, horn, volume control, fuel, etc.
My laptop has keys labeled as Caps Lock, Scroll Lock, Num Lock, Rewind, Stop, Pause/Run, Fast Forward, Volume Up, Volume Down, Mute, Battery Status, Brightness Up, Brightness Down, Menu, Up, Down, Left, Right, and Sleep without using a single English word. (It also has keys with weird pictures that I’m told have something to do with Microsoft Windows. I wouldn’t know.) Perhaps even more common are the icons used in computer Graphical Interfaces, which have been converging to a standard set of functional symbols for some time.
The only really rational script is Hangul, the
Korean alphabet. In 1446, King Sejong the Great of Korea got
tired of the confusion of trying to use Chinese characters for the
unrelated Korean language, and created a new alphabet from scratch.
(The king was one of the best phoneticians in the country, and many
scholars think he did much of the work himself.) In any case, the net
result is a phonetic system where the shape of the letters indicate
where the tongue should be and how open the mouth should be for each
consonant, whether the vowels are “bright” or
“dark”, etc. Another unique feature of Hangul is that the
individual letters are not written in a row like most alphabets; they
are grouped into syllable clusters, so that at first glance Korean
looks more complex to the Western eye than it really is. For example,
the letters ㅎ (H), ㅏ (A), ㄴ (N), ㄱ (G or
K), ㅜ (U) and ㄱ (G or K again) become the two syllable
word 한국 Hanguk, the Korean word for Korea.
Here it is in a larger font so you can clearly see how the clusters
are assembled: 
(There are
rules for cluster formation — in general they are assembled
clockwise starting at the top left — so it’s possible for
a Korean computer user to key in the letters individually and let the
software worry about correctly combining them into clusters.) A
friend told me that, while on a plane to Korea, she studied the
principles and by the time it landed found she could pronounce every
written Korean word she encountered.
Even if an alphabetic system is “linear”, that doesn’t mean it has to be done with the sounds in strict left-to-right or right-to-left order. There are scripts where the letters of each word are in alphabetical order, or where the initial sound is in the center and the succeeding sounds go on both sides, sort of as if English spelled “baker” as “abekr” or “eabkr”. Even a “western” language like classical Greek sometimes was written in so-called boustrophedon style where alternate lines ran left-to-right and right-to-left. The word is Greek for “ox-turning”, like furrows in plowing. An example is
Mary had a little lamb, ,wons sa etihw saw eceelf stI And everywhere that Mary went .og ot erus saw bmal ehT
Every now and then some efficiency expert points out that boustrophedon would increase reading speed, since the eye would not have to snap back to the beginning of each new line and occasionally lose its place while doing so. Unfortunately, the chance of everyone being retrained is zero. Re-doing the books would be easy; everything is on a computer these days, and a very trivial program can change an entire book into boustrophedon. (We’ll probably still be using the very inefficient QWERTY keyboard layout a thousand years from now, and it doesn’t take more than a week or so for a touch typist to convert to a much more logical arrangement such as Dvorak; computers can switch back and forth with a single click.)
The Japanese should have paid attention to the Koreans. As mentioned previously, Japanese also is not related to Chinese, and so now the poor Japanese use four writing systems — Chinese-based word symbols (Kanji), two home-grown phonetic syllable sets (Katakana and Hiragana), and Romaji (aka Roman letters) — sometimes all mixed up in the same sentence. Hiragana and Katakana contain the same 45 syllables, but Hiragana is used for adaptations of Old Japanese words and modifiers (tenses, for example) that didn’t have Chinese symbol equivalents, while Katakana is used for phonetically rendering new or foreign terms as described above. Since the syllable systems are easy to memorize, Japanese children’s books use Hiragana to phonetically spell all words, including those where adults would use a Kanji character instead. In theory, Hiragana or Katakana could be used to represent all Japanese words; the Kanji forms (about a thousand of them) are kept mainly to avoid homonyms. Because the Japanese seem to think Roman letters are prestigious, everything from store and product names to license plates use Roman. Numerals might be Kanji, Hiragana, or “Arabic” 1…2…3.
Since Hiragana and Katakana are the same syllables, one can think of them as simply variants, much as capital letters differ from lower-case in English typography, and both differ from their hand-written versions. Since Katakana is used for foreign terms, it is perhaps analogous to how italics are used in English.
German did the same sort of thing until recently; German-language text was set 𝔦𝔫 𝔉𝔯𝔞𝔨𝔱𝔲𝔯 𝔱𝔶𝔭𝔢 (generically called Blackletter), but embedded foreign words and phrases were set in Roman. For example, look at this excerpt from a German dictionary, where the Latin, French, English, and Italian forms of the word “antiquary” are printed in Roman. The change to exclusive use of Roman is one of the few useful things for which Hitler was responsible, along with autobahns and the Volkswagen — in 1941 Fraktur and other Blackletter forms were declared to be Judenlettern and officially abolished. (They weren’t “Jewish letters” — they were a modification of the handwritten Latin letters used at the time of Charlemagne — but presumably the Nazis realized Fraktur was a handicap in their occupied territories, since the French, Dutch, Danes, etc. couldn’t read it easily and furthermore didn’t have the right typesetting equipment. At the conclusion of the war, the victorious Allies occupying Germany didn’t like it either, preventing any chance of a comeback.)
In this typical Japanese street scene, the WonderGOO storefront has Kanji words, Katakana syllables, Hiragana modifiers, Roman letters, Arabic numerals, and some apparent Western punctuation (exclamation points, dashes) thrown in for good measure, not to mention an international “handicapped parking” symbol! Just to make the visual confusion even worse, some of the writing is horizontal and some vertical. Note that “WonderGOO” isn’t even pronounceable in Japanese — it would have to be Wunderagu or something like that.
Also note that the characters on the sign tend to line up underneath each other. East Asian languages tradionally write each character, whether it is complex or simple, within a square box of the same size. Paradoxically, although ideographic languages have tens of thousands of characters, they are easy to typeset and print because, unlike western alphabets, proportional spacing and kerning don’t have to be taken into account. The only exception is Katakana, a modern invention which has some half-width characters.
