5 ms·

Orthographic reforms are usually associated with a revolution of some kind, some recent examples are the introduction of Simplified Chinese (http://en.wikipedia

by Jun8 13y ago

Orthographic reforms are usually associated with a revolution of some kind, some recent examples are the introduction of Simplified Chinese (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Chinese_characters), the change in Russian orthography (http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/culture/orthography.shtml, although this started earlier than the Bolshevik Revolution) and the Turkish Spelling Reform. In these cases the new regime sees the change as a way to cut ties with old one. The ones that don't have the hard-core backing of an autocratic government generally don't succeed, e.g. the very recent one that was attempted in Germany in 1996. It is interesting to compare Japanese and Korean writing systems: Both of these started with borrowing Chinese characters, due to the immense cultural prestige of the Chinese Empire. These languages show striking similarities to each other (and Turkic languages of Central Asia; although they are usually considered language isolates this may stem more from a cultural bias). Although the Chinese logographic writing system seems hopeless to an outsider, it is uniquely suited to the to tonal Chinese language. The problem is that Korean and Japanese are very different from Chinese (i.e. Mandarin and its "dialects" spoken in China which are part of the Sino-Tibetan family). Koreans have solved this problem cleanly in the 15th century by inventing Hangul while the Japanese approach was to create an extremely complicated writing system with different characters, including many Chinese ones. Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable or perhaps its feudal structure (i.e. the regional daimyo) and a weak emperor did not have the clout of a ruler like King Sejong in Korea. Maybe someone with knowledge of Southeast Asian history care to comment on this.

anonymous 13y ago
The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous. On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. When you need to carry around a book on how to write your own language because it has way too many complicated glyphs for everyday people to learn to 100%, maybe it's time for an orthographic reform.
- auctiontheory 13y ago
  a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. Wow. I write fiction, but this is one of those cases where truth is so much weirder than anything I'd feel comfortable "inventing."
- srunni 13y ago
  > The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous. I explored this concept in this Reddit comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednesday_ama_i_am_asiaexpert_one_stop_shop_for/c7bqdkq http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednes...
- maaku 13y ago
  > On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. From my experience this is more of a cultural thing than linguistic...
- enko 13y ago
  > a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them I am not at all surprised to hear that. I have family in Japan and have observed many times an inability to remember how to write a certain kanji eg. when filling in a form. Typically people will then type the word phonetically on a cell phone or computer, which prompts them with matching kanji, jogging their memory. There is a strong reliance on these technologies or, I suppose, dictionaries, which are also organised phonetically. It is of course the case that English speakers occasionally forget words - I've looked up "diarrhoea" more than once in my life! But it's not an everyday thing like I've seen with my japanese relatives.
tokenadult 13y ago
The Wikipedia article about the hangul script points out that people who were literate in Chinese characters resisted a simpler writing system that would broaden literacy, and thus threaten their social position. The same happened in Japan (where kana syllabaries were derided as fit only for women) and in China (where a brief period of using Chinese characters for sound only, rather like Japanese kana, occurred at the beginning of the Han dynasty, but was suppressed by scholars). The Chinese case of early sound writing was only recently rediscovered by history, as archeology in sites from that period showed how many writings there were that used Chinese characters strictly for sound value, in violation of etymology. Chinese development might have been very different if broad literacy had occurred two millennia earlier.
- Jun8 13y ago
  Thanks for pointing out the early Chinese phonetic effort, I remember reading it about in the excellent The World's Writing Systems by OUP. Resisting efforts to broaden literacy for the masses is also cites as the reason why the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not evolve much over the vast time period (first inscriptions around BCE 2800, last inscription dated to CE 394, that's more than 3,000 years!). Specifically, although they did have 24 uniliteral signs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Uniliteral_signs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Unili...), which they could have used as an alphabet they never did so.
- dgabriel 13y ago
  Even now, knowledge of classical Chinese is considered an important part of an elite Korean education.
nyc640 13y ago
Korea, Japan, and China are not part of Southeast Asia.
srunni 13y ago
> Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable I don't think this is true. By "Middle Ages", I'm guessing you're referring to the period from 1185 to 1600 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japan_.281185.E2.80.931573.2F1600.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japa...). I've been working on translating two classical Japanese texts on my blog (http://www.kakekotoba.com/ http://www.kakekotoba.com/), one from the 1830s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-umegoyomi.html http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-...) and one from the 1100s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-monogatarishu.html http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-mo...). If you look at the texts, there's a huge difference in the writing style, which is partially due to the nature of the content and the target audience. As more people became literate, there was a marked shift in how Japanese was written.
Tobias42 13y ago
Why do you think the German spelling reform of 1996 didn't succeed? Of course some people, especially older ones, didn't make the switch in their own writing, but basically all newspapers, magazines and books use the new spelling nowadays.
yongjik 13y ago
Well, to be fair, many Korean bureaucrats resisted using Hangul for centuries, and Koreans kept three different writing systems: scholarly works and government documents in classical Chinese, lower-level bureaucrats using Idu (a system of writing Korean words using Chinese characters with the same sound), and Hangul. I think the move to write everything in Korean only happened in 20th century. Even then, most documents contained a liberal amount of Chinese characters to write Sino-Korean words (maybe due to Japanese influence?), which could be seen well into 1980s. (And these days Koreans decided to put English vocabulary in the position of literary significance, and some would write sentences which are just strings of English words connected by Korean suffixes. Grrrr.) * Also one of the reason modern Korean spelling is so regular is that it's totally revamped in 1930s thanks to the heroic work of Korean scholars who considered the work as means of preserving Korean culture under the oppressive Japanese regime. It involved discarding four letters, adding a horde of new letter combinations to represent underlying forms, and a drastic shift from purely phonemic to morphophonemic script. (Something like English always using "-ed" to mark past tense even though they sound different in parted, picked, and seemed.)
bane 13y ago
Some thoughts: - To an outsider, Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) aka Bopomofo, c 1912 seems like an obvious and easy solution to the problems of the Chinese system. Yet it wasn't adopted during the simplification movement of the 1950s. Why is that? I think the reasons are complex and largely have to do with strong cultural biases towards logographs and a cultural comfort with education being the same as memorization, but other, more practical reasons may have contributed. For example, the very large number of homophones in spoken Chinese -- which are partially resolved via tones and context and unambiguously resolved by referencing the appropriate written character (do you mean this character or this one when you say that?) Chinese speakers on HN will probably be familiar with this kind of conversation clarification style. - Korean, which has a very large number of Chinese loan words (한자어, 漢字語), but doesn't have tones to help resolve homophones, and Hangul (한글) doesn't even have different written forms, ambiguity can become problematic. Koreans will also often reference the Chinese written forms to resolve this! It's not uncommon, in formal Korean writing, to see a bit of Chinese written in parentheses next to the Hangul form to clarify the meaning. The same kind of conversation, referencing the appropriate Hanja (한자, 漢字) to sort out ambiguous homophones is also probably familiar to Korean speakers on HN. - Knowledge of written Chinese is a social prestige marker in Asia, like knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, and later French used to be prestige makers in the West. Men, traditional holders of most of the prestige positions have cared about these kinds of markers more, and spending lots of time and money educating girls in useless (for women) prestige things like reading/writing wasn't traditionally important. Using Chinese characters in Korea and Japan was important for social standing, and using "simple" non-Chinese systems might have been viewed as a shameful mark against...not too unlike Westerners, with perfectly fine native languages, writing to each other in French or Latin instead. For example, Isaac Newton, who I assume was perfectly capable of writing in English, wrote Principia in Latin. - Hangul, though a 15th century invention, wasn't widely used except as a feminine script until Korean Nationalist and Identity movements in the late 19th century, intended to help cultural resist Japanese annexation pushed Hangul into prominence. During the occupation, writing in Hangul was considered a form of protest and resistance against the attempted cultural dominance of the invaders. Only Japanese was officially allowed during most of the occupation and downtown Seoul looked like a Japanese city with all of the Hiragan and Katakana on the street signs. - Old letters in Hangul are almost exclusively written between women, or between women and men who were close to one another http://imgur.com/a/IZpqn http://imgur.com/a/IZpqn - Hangul underwent a number of orthographic reforms, modern Hangul is a bit different the original, losing quite a few letters, some spelling formalization and a modernization movement in the 20th century establishing many rules that school children learn today. 15th century Korean written in Hangul is about as readable to a Korean today as 15th century Chaucer written in the original English is to a native English speaker. This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.

by Jun8 13y ago

anonymous 13y ago

The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous. On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. When you need to carry around a book on how to write your own language because it has way too many complicated glyphs for everyday people to learn to 100%, maybe it's time for an orthographic reform.

auctiontheory 13y ago
a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. Wow. I write fiction, but this is one of those cases where truth is so much weirder than anything I'd feel comfortable "inventing."
srunni 13y ago
> The way I've heard it explained is that Japanese has too many homonyms and simply writing things by sound would be too ambiguous. I explored this concept in this Reddit comment: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednesday_ama_i_am_asiaexpert_one_stop_shop_for/c7bqdkq http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/14bv4p/wednes...
maaku 13y ago
> On the other hand, a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them. From my experience this is more of a cultural thing than linguistic...
enko 13y ago
> a friend who spent a year in Japan remarked that, e.g. policemen carry dictionaries with them I am not at all surprised to hear that. I have family in Japan and have observed many times an inability to remember how to write a certain kanji eg. when filling in a form. Typically people will then type the word phonetically on a cell phone or computer, which prompts them with matching kanji, jogging their memory. There is a strong reliance on these technologies or, I suppose, dictionaries, which are also organised phonetically. It is of course the case that English speakers occasionally forget words - I've looked up "diarrhoea" more than once in my life! But it's not an everyday thing like I've seen with my japanese relatives.

tokenadult 13y ago

The Wikipedia article about the hangul script points out that people who were literate in Chinese characters resisted a simpler writing system that would broaden literacy, and thus threaten their social position. The same happened in Japan (where kana syllabaries were derided as fit only for women) and in China (where a brief period of using Chinese characters for sound only, rather like Japanese kana, occurred at the beginning of the Han dynasty, but was suppressed by scholars). The Chinese case of early sound writing was only recently rediscovered by history, as archeology in sites from that period showed how many writings there were that used Chinese characters strictly for sound value, in violation of etymology. Chinese development might have been very different if broad literacy had occurred two millennia earlier.

Jun8 13y ago
Thanks for pointing out the early Chinese phonetic effort, I remember reading it about in the excellent The World's Writing Systems by OUP. Resisting efforts to broaden literacy for the masses is also cites as the reason why the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not evolve much over the vast time period (first inscriptions around BCE 2800, last inscription dated to CE 394, that's more than 3,000 years!). Specifically, although they did have 24 uniliteral signs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Uniliteral_signs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Unili...), which they could have used as an alphabet they never did so.
dgabriel 13y ago
Even now, knowledge of classical Chinese is considered an important part of an elite Korean education.

nyc640 13y ago

Korea, Japan, and China are not part of Southeast Asia.

srunni 13y ago

> Maybe Japanese writing was more culturally ingrained by the Middle ages in Japan compared to Korea to make such a sweeping reform unthinkable I don't think this is true. By "Middle Ages", I'm guessing you're referring to the period from 1185 to 1600 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japan_.281185.E2.80.931573.2F1600.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Japan#Medieval_Japa...). I've been working on translating two classical Japanese texts on my blog (http://www.kakekotoba.com/ http://www.kakekotoba.com/), one from the 1830s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-umegoyomi.html http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/08/introduction-to-shunshoku-...) and one from the 1100s (http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-monogatarishu.html http://www.kakekotoba.com/2012/11/introduction-to-konjaku-mo...). If you look at the texts, there's a huge difference in the writing style, which is partially due to the nature of the content and the target audience. As more people became literate, there was a marked shift in how Japanese was written.

Tobias42 13y ago

Why do you think the German spelling reform of 1996 didn't succeed? Of course some people, especially older ones, didn't make the switch in their own writing, but basically all newspapers, magazines and books use the new spelling nowadays.

yongjik 13y ago

Well, to be fair, many Korean bureaucrats resisted using Hangul for centuries, and Koreans kept three different writing systems: scholarly works and government documents in classical Chinese, lower-level bureaucrats using Idu (a system of writing Korean words using Chinese characters with the same sound), and Hangul. I think the move to write everything in Korean only happened in 20th century. Even then, most documents contained a liberal amount of Chinese characters to write Sino-Korean words (maybe due to Japanese influence?), which could be seen well into 1980s. (And these days Koreans decided to put English vocabulary in the position of literary significance, and some would write sentences which are just strings of English words connected by Korean suffixes. Grrrr.) * Also one of the reason modern Korean spelling is so regular is that it's totally revamped in 1930s thanks to the heroic work of Korean scholars who considered the work as means of preserving Korean culture under the oppressive Japanese regime. It involved discarding four letters, adding a horde of new letter combinations to represent underlying forms, and a drastic shift from purely phonemic to morphophonemic script. (Something like English always using "-ed" to mark past tense even though they sound different in parted, picked, and seemed.)

bane 13y ago

Some thoughts: - To an outsider, Zhuyin Fuhao (注音符號) aka Bopomofo, c 1912 seems like an obvious and easy solution to the problems of the Chinese system. Yet it wasn't adopted during the simplification movement of the 1950s. Why is that? I think the reasons are complex and largely have to do with strong cultural biases towards logographs and a cultural comfort with education being the same as memorization, but other, more practical reasons may have contributed. For example, the very large number of homophones in spoken Chinese -- which are partially resolved via tones and context and unambiguously resolved by referencing the appropriate written character (do you mean this character or this one when you say that?) Chinese speakers on HN will probably be familiar with this kind of conversation clarification style. - Korean, which has a very large number of Chinese loan words (한자어, 漢字語), but doesn't have tones to help resolve homophones, and Hangul (한글) doesn't even have different written forms, ambiguity can become problematic. Koreans will also often reference the Chinese written forms to resolve this! It's not uncommon, in formal Korean writing, to see a bit of Chinese written in parentheses next to the Hangul form to clarify the meaning. The same kind of conversation, referencing the appropriate Hanja (한자, 漢字) to sort out ambiguous homophones is also probably familiar to Korean speakers on HN. - Knowledge of written Chinese is a social prestige marker in Asia, like knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek, and later French used to be prestige makers in the West. Men, traditional holders of most of the prestige positions have cared about these kinds of markers more, and spending lots of time and money educating girls in useless (for women) prestige things like reading/writing wasn't traditionally important. Using Chinese characters in Korea and Japan was important for social standing, and using "simple" non-Chinese systems might have been viewed as a shameful mark against...not too unlike Westerners, with perfectly fine native languages, writing to each other in French or Latin instead. For example, Isaac Newton, who I assume was perfectly capable of writing in English, wrote Principia in Latin. - Hangul, though a 15th century invention, wasn't widely used except as a feminine script until Korean Nationalist and Identity movements in the late 19th century, intended to help cultural resist Japanese annexation pushed Hangul into prominence. During the occupation, writing in Hangul was considered a form of protest and resistance against the attempted cultural dominance of the invaders. Only Japanese was officially allowed during most of the occupation and downtown Seoul looked like a Japanese city with all of the Hiragan and Katakana on the street signs. - Old letters in Hangul are almost exclusively written between women, or between women and men who were close to one another http://imgur.com/a/IZpqn http://imgur.com/a/IZpqn - Hangul underwent a number of orthographic reforms, modern Hangul is a bit different the original, losing quite a few letters, some spelling formalization and a modernization movement in the 20th century establishing many rules that school children learn today. 15th century Korean written in Hangul is about as readable to a Korean today as 15th century Chaucer written in the original English is to a native English speaker. This frere bosteth that he knoweth helle, And God it woot, that it is litel wonder; Freres and feendes been but lyte asonder.