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> 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 t

> 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#...
      - tasogare 7y ago
        > There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed. Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
    - gryson 7y ago
      Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem). If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text. Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).
- tasogare 7y ago
  It wasn’t such a bad fit for Vietnamese, whose syllabic structure is basically the same as Chinese languages. Actually Han and Chu Nom were used for a way longer time than Quoc Ngu is. And the change to a latin based alphabet is more due to colonization than anything. For Korean you right though.
  - thefringthing 7y ago
    The absurd number of diacritics one must append to Latin letters in order to use that alphabet for Vietnamese is the best evidence that Vietnam should have had its own rationally constructed system like Korea.
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.

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#...
    - tasogare 7y ago
      > There's never been much of a push factor into simplifying the script No, actually there was two pushes in modern times. One advocating the use of romaji (or even French) which did not succeed. Then there was a set a post-WWII reforms that aimed to simplify the script by: standardizing kanji use (eg 言う instead of 言う or 云う), standardization of kanji readings (当用漢字), kanji stroke simplification (新字体), dropping the old kana usage (旧仮名遣), standardization of kanas themselves to get rid of 変体仮名. The convention also shifted from using katakana everywhere where kanji are not used to the mix of kanji/hiragana/katakana of today. So yes, the Japanese script changed quite a lot recently.
  - gryson 7y ago
    Why is it ridiculous? Why does it need to be cleaned up? I'm not sure what the problem is (I don't think I would classify you not finding it visually elegant as a problem). If anything, the Japanese writing system is very elegant in terms of information flow. In a general sense, each script has its use: kanji for content (meaning), hiragana for function (grammar), katakana for foreign words and sounds. Of course, there are many exceptions to that, but the mix of scripts has benefits for parsing text. Obviously, the Japanese writing system is not a single constructed system like Hangul, but I don't see any reason why it is inefficient (aside from, perhaps, the time required to learn kanji for school children).
tasogare 7y ago
It wasn’t such a bad fit for Vietnamese, whose syllabic structure is basically the same as Chinese languages. Actually Han and Chu Nom were used for a way longer time than Quoc Ngu is. And the change to a latin based alphabet is more due to colonization than anything. For Korean you right though.
- thefringthing 7y ago
  The absurd number of diacritics one must append to Latin letters in order to use that alphabet for Vietnamese is the best evidence that Vietnam should have had its own rationally constructed system like Korea.

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.