I really wonder why Arabic has never gone back to printing. What we think of the Arabic "alphabet" is just it's cursive form. They have an alphabet that is basically just Syriac. Would have been easier to render on low bit displays. wouldn't have to deal with the word initial variants etc.
Japanese has (slightly) more homophones and favors monosyllabic Sino-Japanese in compound words. That makes it hard to depend entirely on phonetic script. Same reason why English retains irregular spellings to help with some disambiguation.
Comments
I really wonder why Arabic has never gone back to printing. What we think of the Arabic "alphabet" is just it's cursive form. They have an alphabet that is basically just Syriac. Would have been easier to render on low bit displays. wouldn't have to deal with the word initial variants etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nabataean_script
Same with Japan using mostly kanji when they have a syllabary available (while Korea invented a pretty neat alphabet and largely dropped hanja).
Japanese has (slightly) more homophones and favors monosyllabic Sino-Japanese in compound words. That makes it hard to depend entirely on phonetic script. Same reason why English retains irregular spellings to help with some disambiguation.