Plausibility Check: Usage of Chinese characters in Siberia

More specifically, what is known in OTL as the Sakha Republic or Yakutia and the remainder of Russia's Far Eastern Federal District.

Now, historically, most of this area is populated with various ethnic groups, such as Turkic peoples (like the Sakha), indigenous peoples (like the Chukchi), among others. Indeed, no one group dominated this area. If Chinese was introduced in TTL as a lingua franca, that creates some questions: do Chinese words come directly into the various languages, or would they be mediated through different languages, such as Korean (so that a Chinese word would be an approximation of a Sino-Korean word, for example)?
 
Well, the problem with that is that all the Turcic groups went down the alphabet route following mostly the Uighur and the Orkhon scripts. Even the Koreans switched eventually.

I think a pictographic writing system like Chinese almost by implication requires a whole self-sustaining educated class, which is difficult for the Steppe Empires. With the Uighur exception the educated are also nobility who are also warriors. When things go spectacularly bad for the confederation (i.e. fighting other turco-mongols), these people are the first to die.
 
Well, the problem with that is that all the Turcic groups went down the alphabet route following mostly the Uighur and the Orkhon scripts. Even the Koreans switched eventually.
Err.. IIRC, the South Koreans only dropped the 'Chinese' characters 'recently', and AFAIK, the North Koreans never did.

I think a pictographic writing system like Chinese almost by implication requires a whole self-sustaining educated class, which is difficult for the Steppe Empires. With the Uighur exception the educated are also nobility who are also warriors. When things go spectacularly bad for the confederation (i.e. fighting other turco-mongols), these people are the first to die.
Now, this is all too true.

With an alphabet, you can have a backwoods guy sounding out words on the rare occasion it's necessary. With Chinese, you need to know some 2000 characters to do ANYTHING. Probably worse, as you'd need connectors for grammar that Chinese doesn't have (which is why Japanese and Korean both had to expand beyond kanji).
 
With an alphabet, you can have a backwoods guy sounding out words on the rare occasion it's necessary. With Chinese, you need to know some 2000 characters to do ANYTHING. Probably worse, as you'd need connectors for grammar that Chinese doesn't have (which is why Japanese and Korean both had to expand beyond kanji).

I am including the possibility of phonetic symbols akin to bopomofo and kana when I'm talking about Chinese characters - after all, bopomofo and kana DID evolve from Chinese characters.
 
The problem is those languages are not phonetically suited to using Chinese characters. Chinese is a monosyllabic tone language with an isolating syntax, whereas the others are agglutinating, and multisyllabic. Even those that did use Chinese characters eventually ended up modifying them to fit their own languages.

The alphabet did make inroads into the area several different times and spread better than Chinese characters: Aramaic-derived scripts like classic Mongol, Devanagari-derived scripts like Tibetan and Phags-pa or just modified Cyrillic.

Err.. IIRC, the South Koreans only dropped the 'Chinese' characters 'recently', and AFAIK, the North Koreans never did
Actually, North Koreans have used Hangul exclusively for their existence. and South Korean used Hangul and a few Chinese characters. Hangul itself was invented in the 1400s, and was used off and on up until the present.
 
The problem is those languages are not phonetically suited to using Chinese characters. Chinese is a monosyllabic tone language with an isolating syntax, whereas the others are agglutinating, and multisyllabic. Even those that did use Chinese characters eventually ended up modifying them to fit their own languages.

Classical Chinese, maybe. For Putonghua: Vietnamese is closer to being a monosyllabic language than Putonghua, since Chinese has scores of polysyllabic words.
 
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