China Develops an Alphabetic script...China smash?

Jerry Kraus

Banned
The main reason why this never occured is because there for the most of history there was no such thing as a Chinese language. The "dialects" are ludicrously distant lexically, but with logograms, the words are pronounced different, but still written the same so people can understand each other.

So for an alphabetic Chinese you need to either make them very homogenous early on, or never unite. They do have Bopomofo as an unused alphabet (used for learning pronunciation). Do you think that anyone would use such a way of writing without good reason? The Egyptians didn't use hieroglyphs all the way down you know. As for the "many words sound the same" - that's unironically no excuse. How do you tell apart when spoken, then?

Or, if you prefer, you could simply say that Chinese pictograms ARE the Chinese language. Any verbal language can be represented, quite universally, by Chinese pictograms. That's just one of their big advantages. Chinese pictograms united the diverse dialects of the Chinese Empire, throughout history.
 

Brunaburh

Gone Fishin'
A very interesting question that I've often considered myself, but, I'm not entirely sure your initial premise is entirely accurate. Are alphabetic scripts, objectively superior to "logograms"? Also, is Chinese script most accurately described as logograms, or as pictograms?

I prefer the term "pictographic" for Chinese script, because, actually a good deal of visual information quite relevant to word meaning is contained in the image itself, in a great deal of cases. So the symbol for man is 人, the symbol for woman is 女. Surely that's obvious enough, visually?

So, one of the reasons for the superiority of Chinese culture historically may be the pictographic script itself, which is extremely expressive and powerful visually, much more so than purely verbal scripts. Also, this visual script is universal, and can be used to represent any verbal language at all. It provided a ready bond for all nations subsumed within the Chinese Empire. For example, currently, English could be, quite accurately, described as a Chinese dialect, since English words can be represented just as well as Mandarin or Cantonese words in Chinese pictographic script.

Also, the very fact of the difficulty of writing Chinese script has resulted in useful innovations. Chinese printing developed early specifically because it was so very difficult to write Chinese script.

Rather than saying that alphabets are superior, let's say they're different. And, as usual, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

The Japanese, of course, combine the two systems quite elegantly. They have an alphabet for Japanese words -- Hirgana -- an alphabet for foreign words -- Katakana -- and they use Chinese Kanji to represent many Japanese words, according to convention. This may tell you something, you know.

The superiority I refer to is in the aspects of ease to learn (indisputable) and the consequence that foreigners can understand and translate your texts (this is my own inference). Chinese script can be used for writing sinitic dialects in a way that is understandable much more readily than they would be in speaking, but it is not universal. It is still clear that one is writing Mandarin rather than Cantonese and vice versa, and it would be impossible to write an English or Turkish sentence using Chinese logograms.

There are socio-political advantages that others have mentioned, but I think that, if we consider writing as information technology, alphabetic scripts are objectively superior.
 
The superiority I refer to is in the aspects of ease to learn (indisputable) and the consequence that foreigners can understand and translate your texts (this is my own inference). Chinese script can be used for writing sinitic dialects in a way that is understandable much more readily than they would be in speaking, but it is not universal. It is still clear that one is writing Mandarin rather than Cantonese and vice versa, and it would be impossible to write an English or Turkish sentence using Chinese logograms.

There are socio-political advantages that others have mentioned, but I think that, if we consider writing as information technology, alphabetic scripts are objectively superior.
Well, ignoring the 'objective superiority' of one form or the other (I'm no linguist so I won't interject on that) but Hanzi (and its precursors) has been around for quite a while before 500 AD and the development of an alphabetic script does not necessarily mean the adoption of it. Korean Hangul, for example, was developed in the 15th century but was not made the official script until the late 19th, after Qing China's humiliation to Japan. There'd need to be a catalyst for reforming or replacing the entire written form of the language, especially one made for the language in the first place, whether it be conquest or nationalism (which wouldn't really apply here since Hanzi was Chinese made).
 

Jerry Kraus

Banned
Strictly
The superiority I refer to is in the aspects of ease to learn (indisputable) and the consequence that foreigners can understand and translate your texts (this is my own inference). Chinese script can be used for writing sinitic dialects in a way that is understandable much more readily than they would be in speaking, but it is not universal. It is still clear that one is writing Mandarin rather than Cantonese and vice versa, and it would be impossible to write an English or Turkish sentence using Chinese logograms.

There are socio-political advantages that others have mentioned, but I think that, if we consider writing as information technology, alphabetic scripts are objectively superior.

Strictly as an information technology, of course you're correct, the alphabet was a brilliant invention, historically, that made language vastly more accessible. That may well be what made the ancient Greeks so successful, their alphabet was probably the simplest and most comprehensive that had ever been developed. Up till that time, complex syllabic alphabets were used in Sumerian and Linear A and B, and the Phoenician alphabet wasn't really a comprehensive one. The reduction to bare phonemes allowed for considerable simplification.

As to "universality", I simply mean that chinese pictograms/logograms can be given english definitions just as well as Mandarin ones. A "Chinese-English" dictionary only differs from a Mandarin Chinese dictionary in that the pictograms/logograms are correlated with Mandarin words, instead of English ones. Take a look, sometime.

So if I say

人 = man in English, it's really no different from saying
人 = rén in Mandarin Chinese.
 

RousseauX

Donor
Objectively speaking, alphabetic scripts are superior to logograms. They require much less study in order to obtain competence, and therefore facilitate the transmission of knowledge. Let's imagine China either adopts an Indian script, or phoneticises its own alphabet.

What do we think are the implications? My personal view is that if this happens prior to about 500 AD, we see a much greater Chinese influence on World culture. OTL, Chinese ideas faced a serious barrier moving west as their writing system is exceptionally difficult to learn and therefore very little of what was written in China got translated into other languages. This did not work both ways, knowledge of Indian scripts and their translation into Chinese was common in China.

This will also mean wider, earlier mass literacy in China, but also the quicker diffusion of Chinese innovations westward, and a reciprocal refinement of technology developed in the various cultural centres of Eurasia. I strongly suspect technology would be far advanced of OTL, to the extent we might see moon landings a century earlier.

So, thoughts, ideas, objections? I'm particularly interested what effects people think this would cause in China itself.
how much can literacy actually go up by?

I mean China's literacy rate was already pretty high for pre-industrial civilization, does adding another 10%-15% on top of that help all that much?
 
The implications for this will be massive. It won't be pinyin; it will be like a zhuyin. But this means printing presses will be now be feasible. This will lead to a boom in literacy, innovation, social development. This will propel China to great heights.
 

Jerry Kraus

Banned
The implications for this will be massive. It won't be pinyin; it will be like a zhuyin. But this means printing presses will be now be feasible. This will lead to a boom in literacy, innovation, social development. This will propel China to great heights.

My friend, the printing press is much, much older in China than in the West. Printing in China is 2,000 years old, they needed it, because government officials found it too cumbersome to write the complex script, they might more easily engrave it in stone or wood, and mass produce it that way.
 

RousseauX

Donor
The implications for this will be massive. It won't be pinyin; it will be like a zhuyin. But this means printing presses will be now be feasible. This will lead to a boom in literacy, innovation, social development. This will propel China to great heights.
The printing press was invented in china

the problem wasn't the characters (there were ways around that), the problem was unlike in europe there wasn't a single book that you can print that everyone will automatically buy, and which everyone was encouraged to know how to read. So mass printing was never commercially viable in china

if you give china its own version of the bible that would be different
 
What about the Taoteking? Or Confucius' Analects? Is that not enough? Especially since China's population is way bigger.

But then, writing with Chinese "typewriters" is way slower than in the west. Maybe that was the reason.
 

RousseauX

Donor
What about the Taoteking? Or Confucius' Analects? Is that not enough? Especially since China's population is way bigger.

But then, writing with Chinese "typewriters" is way slower than in the west. Maybe that was the reason.
Confucianism was never an organized religion with churches the way that Christianity was though

What would work is if Buddhism gets firmly entrenched in China during the North-South period to the point where 75-90% of the population are Buddhists, then you can see the Tripika or the Tibetan Book of the dead play that role. The Buddhist clergy and monasteries can play roughly analogous role as Christian Church did in the west.
 
Or, if you prefer, you could simply say that Chinese pictograms ARE the Chinese language. Any verbal language can be represented, quite universally, by Chinese pictograms. That's just one of their big advantages. Chinese pictograms united the diverse dialects of the Chinese Empire, throughout history.
Except there aren’t enough Chinese characters to represent all the words in the Chinese languages let alone non-Sinitic languages. I speak Hokkien, a Minnan dialect, and many of the words used in everyday speech lack a Chinese character. To come up with a standardized writing system for Hokkien, the Taiwanese government had to make up new characters and repurpose obsolete ones.

Also look at Japanese, which adopted Chinese characters very early on. If Chinese characters were enough to write the language, you wouldn’t have single characters representing multiple different (though often semantically related) words. You wouldn’t have the kokuji, which are characters created to represent native Japanese words. And you also wouldn’t have hiragana, without which Chinese characters are woefully inadequate for representing the verb and adjective conjugations that Japanese has.
As to "universality", I simply mean that chinese pictograms/logograms can be given english definitions just as well as Mandarin ones. A "Chinese-English" dictionary only differs from a Mandarin Chinese dictionary in that the pictograms/logograms are correlated with Mandarin words, instead of English ones. Take a look, sometime.

So if I say

人 = man in English, it's really no different from saying
人 = rén in Mandarin Chinese.
Hmm but if you look up 蝴 and 蝶 in a dictionary you would get that both mean butterfly in English. However, 蝴 doesn’t mean butterfly in Mandarin. Neither does 蝶. Butterfly in Mandarin is 蝴蝶. Neither character exists as a word in isolation. That’s because Mandarin (and Standard Written Chinese) is largely a disyllabic (dimorphemic?) language.

Only an estimated 4% of Chinese characters are pictographic.
 

Jerry Kraus

Banned
Except there aren’t enough Chinese characters to represent all the words in the Chinese languages let alone non-Sinitic languages. I speak Hokkien, a Minnan dialect, and many of the words used in everyday speech lack a Chinese character. To come up with a standardized writing system for Hokkien, the Taiwanese government had to make up new characters and repurpose obsolete ones.

Also look at Japanese, which adopted Chinese characters very early on. If Chinese characters were enough to write the language, you wouldn’t have single characters representing multiple different (though often semantically related) words. You wouldn’t have the kokuji, which are characters created to represent native Japanese words. And you also wouldn’t have hiragana, without which Chinese characters are woefully inadequate for representing the verb and adjective conjugations that Japanese has.

Hmm but if you look up 蝴 and 蝶 in a dictionary you would get that both mean butterfly in English. However, 蝴 doesn’t mean butterfly in Mandarin. Neither does 蝶. Butterfly in Mandarin is 蝴蝶. Neither character exists as a word in isolation. That’s because Mandarin (and Standard Written Chinese) is largely a disyllabic (dimorphemic?) language.

Only an estimated 4% of Chinese characters are pictographic.

Fair enough, I'm oversimplifying, of course. But, nevertheless, there's a reason Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese television actually use Chinese subtitles for Chinese language television, quite frequently. It helps people to understand. Chinese people, that is, as well as foreigners like myself. The visual script has far more universality than any verbal Chinese dialect. The idea of using English subtitles on English television shows would simply be funny, except for the Deaf, of course.

I'm interested in your 4% figure for Chinese characters being "pictographic". What definition is being used for "pictographic", and how exactly is this figure being arrived at? Obviously, all Chinese characters are complex or simple visual images. Do you mean "pictographic" as in graphically representing an actual object, as if it were actually being drawn? I'm inclined to be a little more flexible than that, and allow for some degree of abstraction.
 
It's a bother for a language that gets as much homophones, and any Sinitic language can have these. Same goes for languages within the Chinese cultural sphere of influence. I'm learning Korean, and I've ran into a lot of homophones. South Korea uses Hanja in some cases, but not for most of these homophone examples I've run into. Meanings of sentences can get unclear.
 
Now, that's a view of modern Chinese language, but I surmise that we would have to go back a long time to have an alphabet appearing naturally instead of inventing one with highly complicated orthographic rules to distinguish homophonic words from one another, something I deem especially more difficult due to the very monosyllabic nature of Chinese language (as spoken I mean), unless inventing a very long alphabet but with letters sounding the same to be able to differentiate. I guess that would involve moving to a more polysyllabic language back at least in the second millenia BC.

If the monosyllabic nature of Chinese and the presence of homophones doesn't stop people communicating via speech, it wouldn't stop them communicating via alphabetic writing.
 

Kaze

Banned
Ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs are not alphabetical, they did quite well for a great civilization. It was not until the Persians and Alexander that the ancient Egyptians even bothered with the concept.
There would be two ways to have a Chinese alphabet:
a. a major conquest by an outside power with an existing alphabet.
b. Qin Shi Huang goes totally mad - decides to burn all the scholarly books and institutes an alphabet - because he is an utter loony.
 

Vuu

Banned
The homophome argument is also bad since this would be done thousands of years ago in a much more culturally fragmented and shifting China means that words would probably change and most homophones would be lost over time, replaced by different words (that master trolle that made a song exclusively made out of the word shi won't be able to do that)

Also homophomes aren't that much of a bother - we have a couple of those in Serbian, for example kosa, which can mean hair, slope, scythe but you'll rarely be confused because context, and if you do, it's perfectly fine to ask "as in part of the body, an part of the terrain or a tool"

The entire point is why do it - and the only way to do that is if you basically throw such a trick into the entire continent that the butterflies do away with anything you ever knew seeing how many times Asian peoples invaded Europe
 
My friend, the printing press is much, much older in China than in the West. Printing in China is 2,000 years old, they needed it, because government officials found it too cumbersome to write the complex script, they might more easily engrave it in stone or wood, and mass produce it that way.
The printing press was invented in china

the problem wasn't the characters (there were ways around that), the problem was unlike in europe there wasn't a single book that you can print that everyone will automatically buy, and which everyone was encouraged to know how to read. So mass printing was never commercially viable in china

if you give china its own version of the bible that would be different
I know the printing press was invented in China. I am sorry if I didn’t mention it, but yes the printing press is seen as the 4 classical inventions of China. But the logographic script made governments officials decide it was too cumbersome to use. Not only would this phonetic script speed up documents and bookmaking, all citizens could get the influential book that was the Analects. These Confucian writings were incredible and would have had the same effect as the Bible did in Europe.
 
Fair enough, I'm oversimplifying, of course. But, nevertheless, there's a reason Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese television actually use Chinese subtitles for Chinese language television, quite frequently. It helps people to understand. Chinese people, that is, as well as foreigners like myself. The visual script has far more universality than any verbal Chinese dialect. The idea of using English subtitles on English television shows would simply be funny, except for the Deaf, of course.
I mean, sure, Chinese subtitles for a Taiwanese Hokkien TV show do help non-Hokkien speakers understand, but what's the difference between that and using Italian subtitles to help Italian speakers understand Spanish shows?

What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that most non-Mandarin Chinese languages don't have a written standard. Most non-Mandarin speakers are literate only in Written Chinese, not the written form of their native language. Written Chinese is only universal because 1) the Chinese languages differ most in phonology, which isn't really represented by the writing system 2) literate non-Mandarin speakers learn to translate Written Chinese into their language as they read/write (like how many Romance-speakers did for Latin through much of history and how most Chinese people did/still do with Literary Chinese) and 3) most Chinese-speakers that people meet either are native speakers of or have learned Mandarin, off of which Written Chinese is largely based and therefore closer to a 1:1 correspondence between writing and speech.

I'm interested in your 4% figure for Chinese characters being "pictographic". What definition is being used for "pictographic", and how exactly is this figure being arrived at? Obviously, all Chinese characters are complex or simple visual images. Do you mean "pictographic" as in graphically representing an actual object, as if it were actually being drawn? I'm inclined to be a little more flexible than that, and allow for some degree of abstraction.
A pictograph is, by definition, a graphic representation of an actual object. Ideograms are graphical representations of ideas. Most Chinese characters are some combination of the two, hence the term logographic being applied to the writing system. Technically, Chinese is logosyllabic, since the vast majority of characters (around 90%) represent phonetic syllables along with a semantic clue, though the correspondence of the phonetic portion to how a character is actually pronounced has broken down due to sound changes between Old Chinese and modern Chinese languages.
 
I mean, sure, Chinese subtitles for a Taiwanese Hokkien TV show do help non-Hokkien speakers understand, but what's the difference between that and using Italian subtitles to help Italian speakers understand Spanish shows?

What a lot of people don't seem to understand is that most non-Mandarin Chinese languages don't have a written standard. Most non-Mandarin speakers are literate only in Written Chinese, not the written form of their native language. Written Chinese is only universal because 1) the Chinese languages differ most in phonology, which isn't really represented by the writing system 2) literate non-Mandarin speakers learn to translate Written Chinese into their language as they read/write (like how many Romance-speakers did for Latin through much of history and how most Chinese people did/still do with Literary Chinese) and 3) most Chinese-speakers that people meet either are native speakers of or have learned Mandarin, off of which Written Chinese is largely based and therefore closer to a 1:1 correspondence between writing and speech.


A pictograph is, by definition, a graphic representation of an actual object. Ideograms are graphical representations of ideas. Most Chinese characters are some combination of the two, hence the term logographic being applied to the writing system. Technically, Chinese is logosyllabic, since the vast majority of characters (around 90%) represent phonetic syllables along with a semantic clue, though the correspondence of the phonetic portion to how a character is actually pronounced has broken down due to sound changes between Old Chinese and modern Chinese languages.

Exactly this. Trying to understand Chinese through its pictographic root elements is very difficult now after 3000+ years of change and vocabulary expansion. By the time you can interpret radicals well enough to guess the meaning of many characters, you likely already understand Chinese writing well enough to communicate, so the value of these pictographic elements is largely moot for actually teaching the language.
 
Ancient Egypt's hieroglyphs are not alphabetical, they did quite well for a great civilization.
Well, they invented the alphabet.

If the monosyllabic nature of Chinese and the presence of homophones doesn't stop people communicating via speech, it wouldn't stop them communicating via alphabetic writing.
The homophome argument is also bad
Yes, it is, but that's the only one I got, though I see more under the probability angle (well, that's professional deformation from a maths guy), not when it comes to write down a word but to speak it up from a written form.
The presence of homophones is never an obstacle to conversation when there is context to give it meaning, but I was considering any word without context, the case where you write down a single word and try give it a meaning. Try writing down "horse" or "constitution" without putting them in a sentence, and I don't think you will give them that many unrelated meanings (there can be several senses, but they are more or less related, hence the 'unrelated' precision).
The probability of homophonic pronounciations for a written word under alphabetic script is much lower as the number of syllabes, and generally of sounds, decreases, given use of a finite set of letters (by finite, I mean small as in 'a few dozens'), silent or not, and accents. Otherwise, using a higher number of special symbols to specialize a word would get us back to the pictogram in terms of practical solution.
That we happen to have homophonic words with alphabetic script is a possibility, but not a so frequent occurence.
Yet otherwise, that's more about maths and I'm certainly not knowledgeable in matters of linguistics.
 
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