Despite the recent news, this is definitely not a new phenomenon.  As far back as the 1980′s, I was already hearing of Japanese forgetting how to write kanji due to the increasing ubiquity of ワプロ or word processors.  While the ワプロ of the 80′s may have gone out of style, the use of keyboards as character input devices, be they on laptops or smart phones, seems to have contributed to a loss of ability in writing characters by hand.  I, myself, certainly lost much of my ability to hand-write Japanese as I got more into typing the language on keyboards.

According to an article on breitbart.com, there is even a Chinese phrase to describe the phenomenon: 提笔忘字 [tibiwangzi], or “take pen, forget character.”

In another article on cnet.com, Chris Matyszczyk opines, “This amnesia might seem like a problem only for character-based languages, but I wonder whether they’re the only victims. Surely you, too, have seen, say, the English language increasingly tortured by the uncertain hands of those who spend far too long touching keys rather than pens, books, or other humans.”

This has certainly been a concern of mine for a while now.  While I can still read and type Japanese with no problem, remembering how to write kanji by hand is a real problem.  What are your thoughts?

Scientists have used a computer program to decipher a written language that is more than three thousand years old.  The program automatically translated the ancient written language of Ugaritic within just a few hours.  Scientists hope the breakthrough could help them decipher the few ancient languages that they have been unable to translate so far.

Ugaritic was last used around 1200 B.C. in western Syria and consists of dots on clay tablets. It was first discovered in 1920 but was not deciphered until 1932.  Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology told the program that the language was related to another known language, in this case Hebrew.

Read more here and here.