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How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
by mmooss 1y ago
How did the language end up with a Latin alphabet?
- itake 1y agoSame as Vietnam: No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization.
- rafram 1y agoSort of. Indonesian had Jawi, based on the Arabic script. People in today's Vietnam mostly wrote in Chinese AFAIK. Those methods of writing were dominant among the people who could write. But the populations were mostly illiterate, so it was easy for colonial administrators to supplant the existing writing systems with Latin as they introduced European-style schooling.
- LAC-Tech 1y agoHow well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? I mean I note that there are some Chinese languages, with millions of speakers, where the largest written text they have is a bible written in a Roman script. If those are a challenge surely Vietnamese must be as well.
- alephnerd 1y agoLike this - https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%E1%BB%AF_N%C3%B4m
- wisty 1y agoLike Korean and Japanese it has a different grammar and vocabulary. Japanese added a bunch other characters and Korean just made up a new (phonetic) script.
- realusername 1y ago> How well do Chinese characters mesh with Vietnamese? Not very well. The old vietnamese script with Chinese characters had a lot of custom additions not in Chinese to make it work. It clearly was ducktaped.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoThere are non-Chinese languages in China that use Chinese characters phonetically for writing. Most of these are newer though, since the 1950s.
- realusername 1y agoThat was kind of like that with vietnamese, a mix of phonetic-only characters, fully custom characters and standard ones all blend together, it's quite a mess. I doubt any Chinese speaker can understand that. The colonial administration didn't have to push too hard to make people switch, the customized chinese script wasn't very popular.
- seanmcdirmid 1y agoChinese speakers won't understand Zhuang, Yi, or Bai as well. Latinization would probably be more effective, but China would lose some face. They even re-popularized an old form of Uighur script for Mongolian (while Mongolians in outer Mongolia/Russia use Cyrillic).
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- eaksa 1y agoDespite its name, Jawi wasn’t used all that much in Java – it had always been more popular in the Malay peninsula. Java, as with many parts of Indonesia, used Brahmic abugidas descended from the Pallava script of Southern India (just like the Thai and Khmer scripts). Latin was chosen to write the Indonesian language for the same reason Malay was chosen as the language’s base: it was a politically neutral choice to unite a diverse archipelago.
- faizmokh 1y agoJawi is also not popular nowadays among the malaysian malays. Every now and then it will pop up in the news due to politicians using it as a tool to cause racial divide.
- mc32 1y agoVietnam adopted the Latin alphabet from a missionary of some sort a couple of centuries before they were colonized by France --at the time Vietnam was decolonizing from China. The French made some modifications to how the alphabet was used to represent their phonemes.
- dboreham 1y agoBtw, after a couple of days being super-confused in Thailand I reverse-engineered this history from signs in English I kept seeing that in no way matched the Thai pronunciation. Finally the penny dropped that whoever had come up with the "English" phonetic spelling of Thai words, was not an English speaker.
- alephnerd 1y ago> No dominate written language at the time of European Colonialization Vietnamese used to be written using Chinese orthography just like Japanese. The French forcibly cracked down on this form of orthography, and following independence, later modernists attempting to copy Ataturk along with latent Sinophobia due to the Chinese colonial era meant this for of orthography has largely been relegated to ceremonial usage. A similar thing happened with Bahasa Indonesia, as Indonesia's founding leadership was more secular and socialist in mindset compared to neighboring Malaysia where Jawi remained prominent because of the Islamist movement's role in Malaysian independence.
- xvedejas 1y agoAnother factor is that literacy rates were very low before colonization, in Vietnam to read or write using Chinese characters was never a broadly known skill (outside of the elite). This is a pretty big contrast to Japan, which had double-digit rates of literacy during the same era.
- throwaway2037 1y agoOne word: Colonization
- csomar 1y agoMalay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization. I think colonization had less to do with it and more with the fact that the Alphabet is better and more practical. Same thing with modern numbers.
- boxed 1y ago> Malay culture adopted Arabic alphabet without colonization Is that just because you define "colonization" as "by western countries"?
- defrost 1y agoDo you have evidence that Malaysia was "colonized" by Arabs? There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parameswara_of_Malacca * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samudera_Pasai_Sultanate
- hearsathought 1y ago> There is evidence that Parameswara converted to Islam following his infatuation with and marriage to a girl from the Samudera Pasai Sultanate. Doesn't that seem like the silliest thing you ever read? When the infatuation ended ( like all infatuations do ), did he convert back? The only thing royals are infatuated with is wealth and power. If anything, don't you think the guy converted to get preferable treatment from the arab traders or get special access to the arab trading network? There is more to the story for sure. But I'm not buying that fanciful story.
- 1y ago
- csomar 1y agoThe same way the latin world ended up with a Latin Alphabet. It's more practical and they never developed their own. Malaysia, for example, has Jawi which is the Arabic alphabet of the their language. The short answer: the language never developed an "alphabet" and thus adopted one.
- hearsathought 1y agoThe dutch colonization of indonesia started in the 1600s and ended in 1949. So plenty of time for the locals, especially the elites, to learn dutch and the alphabet.