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Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

by ah-ha 7y ago

yorwba 7y ago
Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.
- nordsieck 7y ago
  > Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
  - elros 7y ago
    This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
    - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
      > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
      - L_Rahman 7y ago
        It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
        dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
  - oehtXRwMkIs 7y ago
    Read more about Hangul, it was never designed to look like Chinese. It has many interesting design decisions which are unique and not found in any other script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.
    - bmn__ 7y ago
      > it was never designed to look like Chinese Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese: 1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).
      - jdmichal 7y ago
        (1) and (3) also apply to Egyptian hieroglyphics... They're pretty generic design decisions for languages with composing characters. And (2) is just a syllabary, which is certainly not unique. Any composed syllabary that is meant to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom will likely meet (1) and (2).
  - tnova 7y ago
    To add to what has already been said: Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong. However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters. Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the same as the Korean characters.
    - tanilama 7y ago
      I don't think that is the still the case anymore. I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except: 1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea) 2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue). 3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon) Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning. As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.
    - eru 7y ago
      Another connection: the modern Korean alphabet shows some Mongolian influences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
  - mehrdadn 7y ago
    Vietnamese only became Latin alphabet recently (100 years ago). In fact it's always completely jarring for me to see Latin or Cyrillic characters for languages like Vietnamese [1] or Turkish [2]—about as jarring as it would be to see English written in Arabic characters. So much that, if you asked me what alphabets these languages use without giving me much of a chance to think, I would probably still intuitively reply that they use something close to Chinese or Arabic, completely forgetting the whole story changed a hundred years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet
    - riffraff 7y ago
      I understand the feeling for Vietnamese which is a tonal language, and indeed has a ton of "weird" annotations on the basic characters which make the usage of the latin glyphs pointless. But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.
      - pas 7y ago
        Why does it make latin glyphs pointless? Isn't it better to have a closer match to the phonemes that one actually has to say than having ideoglyphs? (Which are harder to learn, because writing and speaking becomes only loosely coupled.)
        robocat 7y ago
        These are the written vowels: Aa Ăă Ââ Ee Êê Ii Oo Ôô Ơơ Uu Ưư Yy On each of which you can add 5 different tone marks: https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/ https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/ Plus there are diphthongs and triphthongs (look at the zero coda and off glide coda columns): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...
  - xster 7y ago
    These are also common ones. It's also transplanted onto a bunch of other less well known non-sinitic languages like Khitan, Jurchen, Okinawan, Zhuang etc.
- Koshkin 7y ago
  In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.
mytailorisrich 7y ago
Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.
- KMag 7y ago
  Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
  - mytailorisrich 7y ago
    Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
    - bane 7y ago
      I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
  - koenigdavidmj 7y ago
    A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.
bmn__ 7y ago
Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script

Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

by ah-ha 7y ago

Looks like Arabic script written vertically. I was expecting something closer to Chinese writing.

Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) all went through a phase where Chinese was the only literary standard and as a result they also borrowed large amounts of Sino-Xenic vocabulary together with the writing system. This got me curious about whether Mongolian has enough Chinese loanwords that it could be written in a mixture of Chinese characters and phonetic script (similar to Japanese). That question led me to this article on the difference between Sino-Xenic and other borrowings from Chinese, using Mongolian as an example: http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic http://www.cjvlang.com/Spicks/sinoxenic.html#nonsinoxenic It mentions in passing that some people in Inner Mongolia do mix Chinese and Mongolian scripts in informal writing.

nordsieck 7y ago
> Chinese script is a bad fit for any non-Sinitic language. The languages that did adopt the script (mostly Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese) What does "adopt the script" mean? From what I understand, Korean is an alphabet language designed to look a bit like Chinese if you squint hard, and Vietnamese is straight up a latin alphabet language.
- elros 7y ago
  This is their current situation, but historically this has not been the case. Korean for a very long time was written with Chinese characters, as was Vietnamese. The article posted by GP also clarifies a distinction between adopting Chinese loan words as any given language may (such as the word "tea" in English), versus a particular model of bulk adoption of not only characters but vocabulary that occurred in JKV languages.
- yorwba 7y ago
  The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later, but it was in widespread use (among those who were literate at all) in both Korea and Vietnam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
  - LeonidasXIV 7y ago
    > The script was such a bad fit that it was abandoned later The mish-mash of katakana, hiragana, kanji (& their crutch furigana) plus romaji in Japanese sort of signifies how bad of a fit that script is to their own language and its use. In many ways it feels like throwing rocks before one's own feet.
    - L_Rahman 7y ago
      It's visually extremely inelegant as well. Seeing a kanji character next to a single stroke katakana character in the same word is ridiculous and yet somehow commonplace. I would be more surprised that the Japanese haven't done more to clean this up if it weren't for the cultural conservatism deeply embedded in its society.
      - dangerbird2 7y ago
        Likely one of the reasons Japan still uses its traditional scripts is that Japan has historically maintained a relatively high literacy rate dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate[1]. There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script, since the educational infrastructure is in place to teach the script to the vast majority of the population. By contrast, countries like Turkey, the People's Republic of China, and Vietnam had very low literacy rates when the government started engaging in mass literacy campaigns, creating an incentive to simplify the language since most people didn't know the traditional script anyway. Obviously, in all of those cases, there were ideological reasons for replacing those scripts as well [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#Edo_period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_Japan#...
- oehtXRwMkIs 7y ago
  Read more about Hangul, it was never designed to look like Chinese. It has many interesting design decisions which are unique and not found in any other script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul Its history will also tell you what it meant for Chinese characters to be adopted by China's neighbors.
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    > it was never designed to look like Chinese Not so quick, there are design decisions that deliberately carry over certain fundamental features from Chinese: 1. The script is not linear at its unit of writing, but fills a square with its base components from left to right, top to bottom (「한글」, not 「ㅎㅏㄴㄱㅡㄹ」; analogue 「韓字」, not 「十早韋宀子」). 2. One unit represents precisely one syllable. 3. Vertical writing retains the orientation of units (not rotating 90°).
    - jdmichal 7y ago
      (1) and (3) also apply to Egyptian hieroglyphics... They're pretty generic design decisions for languages with composing characters. And (2) is just a syllabary, which is certainly not unique. Any composed syllabary that is meant to read left-to-right, top-to-bottom will likely meet (1) and (2).
- tnova 7y ago
  To add to what has already been said: Hangul is the script you are thinking of, which was invented and introduced in the 15th century by King Sejong. However, there are many Chinese loan words in Korean language, especially on an academic level. You can even find Chinese characters in Korea today, usually in newspapers, on street or restaurant signs. For example, the Korean word for "president" is 대통령 (Taet'ongnyeong), but in newspapers it may be written as 大統領, which are the matching Chinese characters. Also, most Korean parents choose Chinese characters to write for their children's names, which read (more or less, as Korean does not have tones) the same as the Korean characters.
  - tanilama 7y ago
    I don't think that is the still the case anymore. I navigate from time to time to Korean website, very few occasion they actually uses Chinese characters, except: 1. Some countries names. 中(China)/美(US)/日(Japan)/北(North Korea) 2. Blue House (think of it as Korean's White House, representing the headquarters of the administration), sometimes referred as 青(Blue). 3. The president's surname, sometimes referred as 文(Moon) Except for those very limited cases, I don't think Korean people are actually using Hanja anymore, it almost feel like some sort of emoji for then, that they probably can't read it, just comprehend the meaning. As to Korean names, yes I think they still have a Chinese name registered somewhere, but no longer required and not shown on their government ID card.
  - eru 7y ago
    Another connection: the modern Korean alphabet shows some Mongolian influences. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
- mehrdadn 7y ago
  Vietnamese only became Latin alphabet recently (100 years ago). In fact it's always completely jarring for me to see Latin or Cyrillic characters for languages like Vietnamese [1] or Turkish [2]—about as jarring as it would be to see English written in Arabic characters. So much that, if you asked me what alphabets these languages use without giving me much of a chance to think, I would probably still intuitively reply that they use something close to Chinese or Arabic, completely forgetting the whole story changed a hundred years ago. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Turkish_alphabet
  - riffraff 7y ago
    I understand the feeling for Vietnamese which is a tonal language, and indeed has a ton of "weird" annotations on the basic characters which make the usage of the latin glyphs pointless. But Turkish seems to fit a latin script quite well, and the previous Arabic/Persian wasn't a "native" script for a Turkic language either, I think.
    - pas 7y ago
      Why does it make latin glyphs pointless? Isn't it better to have a closer match to the phonemes that one actually has to say than having ideoglyphs? (Which are harder to learn, because writing and speaking becomes only loosely coupled.)
      - robocat 7y ago
        These are the written vowels: Aa Ăă Ââ Ee Êê Ii Oo Ôô Ơơ Uu Ưư Yy On each of which you can add 5 different tone marks: https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/ https://vietnamesetypography.com/alphabet/ Plus there are diphthongs and triphthongs (look at the zero coda and off glide coda columns): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_phonology#ref_Notes Disclaimer: I know stuff all about Tiếng Việt, but it seemed really hard to learn how to hear and say the sounds when I tried for a few days with private lessons. Using so many diacritics modifies the Latin alphabet so much that it becomes something else...
- xster 7y ago
  These are also common ones. It's also transplanted onto a bunch of other less well known non-sinitic languages like Khitan, Jurchen, Okinawan, Zhuang etc.
Koshkin 7y ago
In fact, Chinese script is a perfect fit for any language already: you don’t even need to speak Chinese to be able to read it. English, in particular, would especially benefit from switching the writing system to (syllabic) pictograms: Show Fur, Bag Dad, Van Go, etc.
- yorwba 7y ago
  You need some way to associate characters and words and to remember that association. In Chinese languages and languages that heavily borrowed Chinese vocabulary, there are at least some cues that make remembering the pronunciation easier. (Characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced similarly.) Without those cues, using Chinese characters gets very tedious (e.g. writing native Japanese vocabulary using kanji). If you think otherwise, why don't you try writing the English text of your comment with Chinese characters?

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

It’s based on Old Uighur and originates from western Xinjiang. Not really invented by Uighurs, but whatever culture they succeeded in Turpan.

mytailorisrich 7y ago

Yes, it is derived from the Aramaic alphabet like the Arabic alphabet. The fun fact is that all alphabets in the world ultimately derive from the Phoenician alphabet as it spread West, North East, and South East.

KMag 7y ago
Well, major alphabets currently in wide use, excluding Korean, Japanese, and maybe a few others. Hebrew: Aleph, Bet, Gimel, Dalet, ... Greek: Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, ... Also, there's evidence that the Phoenician alphabet evolved from the Demotic alphabet, which was basically a late cursive script evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
- mytailorisrich 7y ago
  Well, Japanese uses syllabaries. The Korean alphabet is a better example of an 'independent' alphabet although it was likely influenced by existing alphabets and there is a theory that it was in particular influenced by Tibetan, which would link it to the "alphabet genealogical tree".
  - bane 7y ago
    I think you may mean it may have been influenced by the Phags-Pa script [1] (which was influenced by Tibetan, but quite different). Which was invented by a Tibetan and used during the Yuan dynasty. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
- koenigdavidmj 7y ago
  A clearer statement is that writing was only invented/discovered in isolation three times that we know of--by the Mayans, the Chinese, and somewhere in the middle east.

bmn__ 7y ago

Close, it's derived from Syriac. Arabic and Syriac have a common ancestor, Aramaic. http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script http://enwp.org/Mongolian_script