WI: Ancient Filipinos adopt Hanzi

Actually, since the Languages of the Philippines which belong to Philippine Language group are as similar as the Spoken Chinese Languages to each other, what if the Ancient Filipinos adopt Hanzi as their script like the Japanese did..how would it affect the history of the Philippines.
 
Even if Japan adopted Chinese script they still antagonized china.

Oh, quite, but there were still HUGE cultural ties between China and Japan.


Why the Philippine would adopt the Korean variant of the Chinese writing system, I'm sure I don't know.

But a stronger Chinese maritime presence (trading, earlier colonization of Taiwan, etc.), could, IMO, easily lead to a Philippines that was Sinicized culturally in a similar way to Korea and Japan, although not as thoroughly, I'd imagine.

OTOH. Once you get away from Sinitic languages, the Kanji/Hanzi/Chinese character system is inadequate to express the language. Which is why Japanese developed kana (hiragana/katakana) to express the grammatical and other bits of Japanese that Kanji doesn't work on.

If your various Philippine languages did the same, the 'glue' bits (kana-equivalent) would be different from one language to the next (although, as pointed out similar), so they'd lose the 'one writing system for multiple languages' advantage that worked so well with the various Chinese languages.
 
Oh, quite, but there were still HUGE cultural ties between China and Japan.


Why the Philippine would adopt the Korean variant of the Chinese writing system, I'm sure I don't know.

But a stronger Chinese maritime presence (trading, earlier colonization of Taiwan, etc.), could, IMO, easily lead to a Philippines that was Sinicized culturally in a similar way to Korea and Japan, although not as thoroughly, I'd imagine.

OTOH. Once you get away from Sinitic languages, the Kanji/Hanzi/Chinese character system is inadequate to express the language. Which is why Japanese developed kana (hiragana/katakana) to express the grammatical and other bits of Japanese that Kanji doesn't work on.

If your various Philippine languages did the same, the 'glue' bits (kana-equivalent) would be different from one language to the next (although, as pointed out similar), so they'd lose the 'one writing system for multiple languages' advantage that worked so well with the various Chinese languages.
Hanzi was probably inadequate to express Chinese as well, starting from the 5th century BCE or so. That's because the characters were used to write Classical Chinese, which continued to diverge from vernacular Chinese as time went on. The only way I could see hanzi being used to unite people speaking various different languages is if Classical Chinese serves as a unifying literary language. In that case, it wouldn't be spoken at all.
 
Oh, quite, but there were still HUGE cultural ties between China and Japan.


Why the Philippine would adopt the Korean variant of the Chinese writing system, I'm sure I don't know.

But a stronger Chinese maritime presence (trading, earlier colonization of Taiwan, etc.), could, IMO, easily lead to a Philippines that was Sinicized culturally in a similar way to Korea and Japan, although not as thoroughly, I'd imagine.

OTOH. Once you get away from Sinitic languages, the Kanji/Hanzi/Chinese character system is inadequate to express the language. Which is why Japanese developed kana (hiragana/katakana) to express the grammatical and other bits of Japanese that Kanji doesn't work on.

If your various Philippine languages did the same, the 'glue' bits (kana-equivalent) would be different from one language to the next (although, as pointed out similar), so they'd lose the 'one writing system for multiple languages' advantage that worked so well with the various Chinese languages.

But a common literary language could be written in Hanzi right, which will be the common language before the age of westernization.
 
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