How writing has spread across the world
openculture.com
openculture.com
It's also interesting how according to this map, the entire southern and western hemisphere use latin alphabet, and that the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.
A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or brilliant neon signs on the street, you get a lot more information at a glance due to the overloaded meaning of the word being represented. Even more so in the case of compound words.
In spoken language you say のむ (nomu) - to drink, and contextually it doesn't matter how it's used. However, in writing 飲む means to drink a liquid, while 呑む means to drink alcohol. Imagine an author using the former for the latter as a particular word choice, probably to convey something like an alcoholic drinking alcohol as if it were water!
The language also has the problem of having a ridiculous amount of homophones. Deciding to use the more phonetic-like hiragana system inversely makes adult level reading even more difficult, not simpler. Texts would become longer (one character kanji vs multiple hiragana), and the implied meaning would be lost.
While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison.
The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.
But the in person context is not the same as written context. There are several elements of context, such place, people, situation, which are obvious to parse in a spoken conversation, but would have to be introduced when writing.
The import of the Chinese readings has created some homophones between Chinese words and native Japanese words and also many times more homophones between distinct Chinese words that had different pronunciation in Chinese, but which are pronounced identically by the Japanese.
Spoken Japanese has a higher proportion of native Japanese words, but written Japanese has frequently much more words that are derived from mispronounced Chinese words than native Japanese words.
Scientific and technical literature has an overwhelming proportion of words derived from Chinese, because it contains a large proportion of compound words. Most compound words in Japanese use the Chinese pronunciation of the signs, because the native Japanese words are usually longer.
Had the Japanese always used the Chinese signs only with the native Japanese readings, there would have been no ambiguities due to homophones and it would have also been easy to transition to any other writing system, if they would have ever wanted that.
As it is now, it is unlikely that the Japanese writing system could ever be simplified. The argument that changing the current Japanese writing system would disconnect the people from their cultural heritage, is much less valid than it would seem, as I have discovered when attempting to read some books written before the first World War.
Even if the simplifications in Japanese have been far less than in the transition from Traditional Chinese writing to Simplified Chinese writing, nevertheless in modern Japanese there are a large number of kanji that have been modified from their versions used one hundred years ago. Also many hiragana/katakana spellings have been modified, to reflect modern Japanese pronunciation.
So for reading Japanese writings with an age of more than one century, you need to learn much more than for reading modern Japanese, and that is true also for the native Japanese people. Reading old Japanese books is far more difficult for Japanese people, than reading a book published in 1500 AD, or a Latin bronze tablet from 2200 years ago, is for Europeans.
For instance the word "telemetry". It has the "tele-" prefix one finds in "television" and the "meter" root, so you instantly know that it has something to do with measuring something from afar.
I don't understand the "text length" argument. I can see it can be a problem - I avoid French translations of software because French is usually longer than English and it sometimes lead to text truncation or overflow bugs, but it's no big deal, really. Besides, it seems to me that Korea's Hangul shows that compromises are possible.
It's amusing to read in Wikipedia that "Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy [...] As a result, Hangul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class" [1]. This sort of reinforces my impression that the Japanese writing was made to be pedantic rather than practical.
We had that in the west until public schools were built: reading and writing was only accessible to wealthy families that could afford hiring a teacher and had a lot of free time. There's a sort of urban legend that public schools did some compromises too; the long summer break was supposedly created so that children of farmers could help with harvesting.
Japanese has barely any punctuation, and relies on non-kanji particles to set rhythm. A sentence without kanji is essentially an endless single word.
Dropping kanji and replacing it with either latin or hiragana would mean starting to use spaces and commas, which are not commonly used today.
I would expect that that has a lot to do with how long-lived China's culture is. The "choice" of writing system was made long ago and has stuck. There hasn't been a significant enough upheaval that would have allowed another choice to take hold.
And Japan just happens to go along with that because they borrowed parts of their writing system from China.
That is why the Chinese writing signs are frequently referred to as CJKV, from the main 4 countries which have used this writing system.
Unlike phonetic, logographic writing system is neither effective nor it's efficient. In software engineering processing Japanese words is still problematic until now because of their usage of logographic writing system [3]. The are several movies and drama series documenting how the Korean moved from the Chinese logographic to Hangul phonetic writing system by their King Sejong to rapidly and significantly increase their literacy rates.
[1]Đông Yên Châu inscription:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C4%90%C3%B4ng_Y%C3%AAn_Ch%C...
[2]The Cham: Descendants of Ancient Rulers of South China Sea Watch Maritime Dispute From Sidelines:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/140616-so...
[3]Sorting in Japanese – An Unsolved Problem:
Besides, even a change of alphabet creates a barrier in understanding of an existing written corpus. I once worked as a translator for a Kasakh high school student who created a program converting different alphabets used in Kasakh language. Once it was Arabic alphabet. Then came progressives and changed the alphabet to Latin. Then came Soviet communists and change the alphabet to Cyrillic. Progressives continued to use Latin though - in exile… There were interesting texts in each “encoding”, and my protege created a program for International Science Fair competition that allowed reading of all Kasakh texts in a preferred encoding.
So computers simplified the transition a bit, but the problem still exists.
In both Mainland China and in Japan the writing system has been reformed enough so that anyone who learns only the modern writing systems will have great difficulties to read any writing from before the first World War.
The reform was much more profound in Mainland China than in Japan, resulting in the Simplified Chinese writing system, so now Japan has remained with the more complex writing system.
Taiwan also uses logographic characters, and they see some limited use in Korea as well.
E.g. hn: 𓉔 𓈖.
Sure you will find some places where hieroglyphs are referred to as “an alphabet”, such as in childrens books, but we’re talking about the historical development of writing systems. We can’t do that accurately without distinguishing clearly between different types of writing systems, and this is well established terminology.
You’re probably right about emoji. Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the ‘word of the year’ in 2015.
With place names I think it's going to be Norman spellings of pre-Norman words. "-shire" for example, was always pronounced -scr.
I found a couple links that seem to confirm this. Words “receipt” have similar origins.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/why-is-debt-sp...
I happen to agree with the scholars which chose these spellings, which turn up at first in the 14th century btw, not such an eggheaded time.
I might support a hard reform to make English orthography phonemic, but that's radical change. The immense complexity of English spelling reveals the creole substrates of the language, and we have hundreds if not thousands of cases such as debt and debit where understanding the common Latin root is part and parcel.
I don't see the advantage in `dette`, basically. As long as the orthography is highly irregular, we may as well gette something outte of itte.
By replacing the Traditional writing with the Simplified writing, the Chinese have already made impossible the reading of the older writings without studying separately the Traditional writing, exactly as if they would have converted to the Latin alphabet.
The reason why Korea and Vietnam were successful in replacing the Chinese writing system, while Japan cannot do the same, is that the Korean and Vietnamese languages have been less influenced by the Chinese language than the Japanese language.
The modern written form of the Japanese language is a mixed language that uses both words from the language spoken by the Japanese before the introduction of the Chinese writing system and also a much larger number of words taken from an older form of the Chinese language.
Unfortunately, the very large number of Chinese words that have been taken together with the signs correspond to a much smaller number of Japanese pronunciations, creating an extremely large number of homophones, which cause an ambiguity in writing that is extremely difficult to avoid without the using of kanji.
An alphabetic form of Japanese writing, or writing it only with hiragana/katakana, would work only if the text would include along most words some kind of classifier sign, written with some kind of kanji or emoji, which would show the semantic class of the word, like it was done in a few ancient writing systems.
To remove ambiguities, a pretty long list of such semantic classifiers would need to be devised.
Similarly, one would write the sign for "metal tool" followed by the phonetic signs for "ken", to indicate that the meaning is Chinese "jian4" = native Japanese "tsurugi" = English "sword".
The Japanese word "ken" has many other meanings besides these 2, each being derived from distinct Chinese words, for example prefecture from xian4, ticket from quan4, and many others.
A large number of other semantic classifiers would be needed to disambiguate all meanings, e.g. "geographic place", "document" and so on.
So it is likely that even if a system with semantic classifiers would no longer need at least 2000 kanji signs, it would still need about one hundred semantic classifiers besides a phonetic syllabary or alphabet, to be able to write the Japanese language without losing information in comparison with the kanji writing.
Latin script is also very amenable to movable type printing.
(The Inca Empire was, of course, also an Empire formed by the Inca imposing their culture on other tribes.)
The interactions between him and the Incas showed he was quite a bit more knowledgeable about strategy than they were.
The Romans also had great success against the illiterate barbarian tribes, despite the latter being much larger and better armed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_Pizarro
or is it an alternate spelling used in English?
Pizzaro sounds (to an Italian) like an invented word about someone that deals with pizza's.
For something really weird check out Burmese characters.
I just can’t begin to wrap my head around it. But was Same with Thai in the beginning.
Learning to read Thai was like being blind and then having the blindfold become less and less opaque each week.
One day it just looks like something really weird and then you start to read street signs, it’s a very strange experience to start learning a language with a totally different character set than English.
*latin
I'm living here.
And since the language (a group of descendent languages) is still in use, the writing system can potentially get back into active use. The probability (and benefits) seem low though.
There are a lot of other civilization/artifacts that should have been worth more. But they don't get any highlights, so they are mostly forgotten.
Anyway, I don't think it matters that much. I checked the channel, and I came away with the feeling that it should probably not be treated as a particularly accurate or credible channel. They don't mention their sources or their credentials. It seems to be a history and cartography hobbyist channel and that's how I treat it -- as a starting point to dig deeper if I spot something interesting.
- Indonesian is based on ancient Indian (forgot what it's called)
- Germanic tribes uses Runes (Runic?)
- Turkish is based on Persian (Farsi?)
It's thought that household use of runes could have been using carvings on wood (rune shapes are made to be easy to carve, mostly), and wood doesn't survive well, except we have some medieval finds of runes on wood.
It's a funny comparison, but makes me ponder "writing spreading around the world" vs "adoption of internet around the world"
Pathetic.