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It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to writ
by pipio21 10y ago
It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them.
Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status.
They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book.
The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries.
"as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent."
That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Retric 10y agoThey use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
- kafkaesq 10y agoThey use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects). As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.
- Retric 10y agoYou can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols. long A sound = vr in language 1. Z sound = vr in language 2. But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word. This means if you have 10 languages then ideograms are easier in 9/10 of them.
- kafkaesq 10y agoExcept that mappings between real languages and writing systems don't work that way (being in general far from truly phonetic).
- Retric 10y agoSure, they are not perfect, but you don't want rainbow and monkey to both be spelled VVKX because they are homonyms in another language so they must be homonyms in all your languages.
- wyuenho 10y agoWhat is this "alphabetic system" you speak of and why are you comparing "Chinese", whatever it means, with Mongolian?