I dunno how I ended up there, but I found myself on the wikipedia entry for the name of Japan (Nihon?) which has a lot of Chinese and Japanese script.
It looks very cramped in whatever my default font size is, and a lot of the detail seems difficult to pick out. Particularly in the (I assume) traditional Chinese. Example: 大清帝國
Which got me wondering about font size. Do users of these scripts have different defaults? Or is it just because I’m not used to reading it?
I think it would be incredibly hard to get people to switch without a compelling reason. Keep in mind that our modern keyboard layout is 150+ years old despite alternatives existing. Arabic letters are very close to English ones in sound but the readability suffers for me at least because it’s written in cursive with a lot of very similar-looking shapes (think of an i with 1 dot on top and an i with 2 dots being 2 separate letters) necessitating bigger font sizes.
English is about half of the internet and the modern lingua franca so unless it gets replaced or evolves over time, either of which would take decades, I don’t think any central body could make that change.
I agree that English probably isn’t going anywhere, but a change to the alphabet letterforms wouldn’t be throwing out all of English. I mean, the alphabet is a very small portion of English, and the precise forms are only part of that. That’s a limited amount of learning, and all you’d need on the device side is a “new style” font.
Stuff like spelling and grammar shifts are much larger in terms of learning, and those regularly happen.