WI: China used a Latin or Greek-like alphabet?

Inspired by this thread https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=180300

Instead of Chinese language emerging like it did OTL with each character meaning a word, what would happen if they developed one like the one used by The Romans or Greeks and have it evolve from there...

A few things i would like to know mostly:

First is how this would affect the Asian cultures who go their written language from the Chinese, like Japan.

Second is why this was inspired by the printing press thread, with the whole movable type blocks and such having been around for so long, would a Language more suited towards its use spark an information revolution in China?
 
Inspired by this thread https://www.alternatehistory.com/discussion/showthread.php?t=180300

Instead of Chinese language emerging like it did OTL with each character meaning a word, what would happen if they developed one like the one used by The Romans or Greeks and have it evolve from there...

Siddham, an abugida traditionally used for Sanskrit, could be used for this purpose, though with some slight modification to take into account the phonology of the language(s). In Japan, Siddham is still used, though restricted to Sanskrit - in TTL, it could also be used to represent Japanese.

A few things i would like to know mostly:

First is how this would affect the Asian cultures who go their written language from the Chinese, like Japan.

Enhances the prestige of Sanskrit greatly.

Second is why this was inspired by the printing press thread, with the whole movable type blocks and such having been around for so long, would a Language more suited towards its use spark an information revolution in China?

Not really, in my opinion.
 
Maybe this would evolve if the Chinese were exposed more significantly to civilized peoples who were not Chinese early on in their history. The pictographs* of Chinese writing aren't much good for writing anything but Chinese, but they have evolved with Chinese civilization to be effective in that context. Egyptian pictographs developed phonetic values, especially for writing foreign words--it was important to write down stuff relating to the Hittites, Babylonians, Greeks, etc, none of which used the Egyptian writing style. In Mesopotamia, cuneiform, which originally developed for writing Sumerian, was retooled into an Akkadian script--a totally different language, with the characters using mainly syllabic values, IIRC. Both paraalphabets were eventually replaced by derivatives of the Phoenician script, which took elements of the Egyptian alphabetic system for its own. If you can get the center of the Sinoglyphic sphere writing stuff other than Chinese, I can expect a development similar to what you're looking for.

*I don't think this is quite the right word. I mean a glyph-to-word mapping, not necessarily with a visible pictoral connection.
 
Maybe this would evolve if the Chinese were exposed more significantly to civilized peoples who were not Chinese early on in their history. The pictographs* of Chinese writing aren't much good for writing anything but Chinese, but they have evolved with Chinese civilization to be effective in that context. Egyptian pictographs developed phonetic values, especially for writing foreign words--it was important to write down stuff relating to the Hittites, Babylonians, Greeks, etc, none of which used the Egyptian writing style. In Mesopotamia, cuneiform, which originally developed for writing Sumerian, was retooled into an Akkadian script--a totally different language, with the characters using mainly syllabic values, IIRC. Both paraalphabets were eventually replaced by derivatives of the Phoenician script, which took elements of the Egyptian alphabetic system for its own. If you can get the center of the Sinoglyphic sphere writing stuff other than Chinese, I can expect a development similar to what you're looking for.

*I don't think this is quite the right word. I mean a glyph-to-word mapping, not necessarily with a visible pictoral connection.

To be quite honest i really do not care how it comes around but what it would do the Chinese Civilization and its neighbors... i am mostly interested in the Printing Press though
 
Korea invented one before Germany did.

you don't need a Latin alphabet to have a printing press.

I know, that is why I am interested in it.

The Chinese alphabet is not good for use in the printing press because to get the right slide to use they would need to look through thousands of different characters to just find one word, rather then what the Europeans had with their language, which was far more suited for a movable type tablet then Manderin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, or any of those laguages that have one picture equal a word.
 
I know, that is why I am interested in it.

The Chinese alphabet is not good for use in the printing press because to get the right slide to use they would need to look through thousands of different characters to just find one word, rather then what the Europeans had with their language, which was far more suited for a movable type tablet then Manderin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, or any of those laguages that have one picture equal a word.

This is what i mean:
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type

Movable type is the system of printing and typography that uses movable components to reproduce the elements of a document (usually individual letters or punctuation). The world's first known movable-type system for printing was created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng (990–1051) during the Song Dynasty; then the metal movable-type system for printing was made in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). This led to the printing of the Jikji in 1377—today the oldest extant movable metal print book.
Neither movable-type system was widely used, probably because of the enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets.
Compared to woodblock printing, movable-type pagesetting was quicker and more durable for alphabetic scripts.
 
The Chinese alphabet is not good for use in the printing press because to get the right slide to use they would need to look through thousands of different characters to just find one word, rather then what the Europeans had with their language, which was far more suited for a movable type tablet then Manderin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, or any of those laguages that have one picture equal a word.

Koreans did develop hangeul, which is mostly alphabetic. Social and cultural reasons precluded the widespread use of the printing press.

It also occurs to me that since Chinese characters are composed of radicals (simpler components that are combined in different ways to form characters). Traditionally there were around 540 of these, these days it's down to 214 post-simplification in mainland China. So if there was a Chinese information revolution spread by the printing press, they might have been able to base their printing technology on the basic radicals, so they would only have a few hundred slides to have to cope with rather than thousands.

It would likely mean that printed Chinese would appear quite different from the written, but I believe that's also true about printed Arabic.
 
Maybe this would evolve if the Chinese were exposed more significantly to civilized peoples who were not Chinese early on in their history.

They did - the Buddhists who came over with loads of writings in Sanskrit. Amongst other things. Now, all that's needed is for scribes to figure out "hmm, maybe it's easier to write the court language in 'Buddhist script' [aka Siddham, as already mentioned] in my language that in this highly inefficent syllabary" (since, at its heart, the Chinese script originally evolved into a syllabary from the pictograms, when eventually the sound correspondences between grapheme and phoneme broke down considerably). Then - presto!

Considering that Siddham originates from Brahmi - that family of abugidas that gave us that characteristic Indian script, Devanagari - and Brahmi evolved from a form of the Aramaic alphabet, which in turn is very similar to the Phoneician alphabet, there's a strong case for it to be like the alphabets of the other European languages which could be used for Chinese.
 
There may not be a unified China as we know it. The advantage of the Chinese writing system, so I hear, is that two people who speak different languages can still understand one-another through writing, and I can imagine that it would be easier to teach someone a writing system, than it would be to teach them a language. However, that doesn't mean there couldn't be one large China. Linguistic minorities exist all the time.
 
I know, that is why I am interested in it.

The Chinese alphabet is not good for use in the printing press because to get the right slide to use they would need to look through thousands of different characters to just find one word, rather then what the Europeans had with their language, which was far more suited for a movable type tablet then Manderin, Cantonese, Korean, Japanese, or any of those laguages that have one picture equal a word.

It wasn't always that way, you know. ;)
 
I can see Chinese being aided by Zhuyin for transitional/prepositional words, kind of like the subsidiary role Hiragana takes to Kanji in Japanese. But the thing about Chinese is that there are so many words that sound the same that you'd find it a massive pain to do away with characters entirely without changing the language significantly.
 
I can see Chinese being aided by Zhuyin for transitional/prepositional words, kind of like the subsidiary role Hiragana takes to Kanji in Japanese. But the thing about Chinese is that there are so many words that sound the same that you'd find it a massive pain to do away with characters entirely without changing the language significantly.

Looking at a thing on Old Chinese, you'd think that the entire language was like Arabic or something like that, since Old Chinese had sounds that the modern Chinese regionalects do not have - things like /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative and the like. Also, Old Chinese grammar was definitely not like Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese grammar. If Siddham was applied to Old Chinese, Chinese would've evolved differently than in OTL - who knows, maybe Chinese would not be tonal at all but would still be difficult for Westerners because of some sounds that would be difficult for them, not to mention a grammar that would be daunting (I'm thinking if something like the Austronesian alignment being widely used, for example). Plus, there's the task of modifying Siddham to match Old Chinese phonology - for example, the pharyngealized consonants.
 
Looking at a thing on Old Chinese, you'd think that the entire language was like Arabic or something like that, since Old Chinese had sounds that the modern Chinese regionalects do not have - things like /ɣ/, the voiced velar fricative and the like. Also, Old Chinese grammar was definitely not like Modern Standard Mandarin Chinese grammar. If Siddham was applied to Old Chinese, Chinese would've evolved differently than in OTL - who knows, maybe Chinese would not be tonal at all but would still be difficult for Westerners because of some sounds that would be difficult for them, not to mention a grammar that would be daunting (I'm thinking if something like the Austronesian alignment being widely used, for example). Plus, there's the task of modifying Siddham to match Old Chinese phonology - for example, the pharyngealized consonants.

It could, alternatively, end up being more tonal than OTL. It is believed that modern Cantonese is closer to Old Chinese than modern Mandarin, due to the fact that Old Chinese poetry spoken in Cantonese sounds more, well, poetic than when it is spoken in modern Mandarin. Consider Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den. So divergant Chinese languages are probably just as likely to end up more tonal as less.

I've raised this point before, but with the adaption of a alphabetic system and printing industry, there may be the possibility that more vernacular literature in the non-standard may be popularized in OTL. Is there any scope for Wu, Hokkien or Cantonese nationalism, or is the centralization of Chinese civilization and the primacy of the assimilationist Han identity too much to overcome?
 
There may not be a unified China as we know it. The advantage of the Chinese writing system, so I hear, is that two people who speak different languages can still understand one-another through writing, and I can imagine that it would be easier to teach someone a writing system, than it would be to teach them a language. However, that doesn't mean there couldn't be one large China. Linguistic minorities exist all the time.

That myth regarding the Chinese writing system is in fact not the case.

It could, alternatively, end up being more tonal than OTL. It is believed that modern Cantonese is closer to Old Chinese than modern Mandarin, due to the fact that Old Chinese poetry spoken in Cantonese sounds more, well, poetic than when it is spoken in modern Mandarin. Consider Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den.

Potentially. Then again, the role of tone in Old Chinese is still hotly debated - there are those who argue that tone (or, if not that, a pitch accent similar to Wu or Japanese) played an important role, and then there are those who don't believe so and thus Old Chinese was not tonal to begin with (since a lot of the tones reflect historical sound changes - for example, the loss of the original voiced consonant series creates a new tonal distinction where one didn't exist before). I've seen arguments that Old Chinese was polysyllabic to begin with; in this reasoning, the reason why some forms were monosyllabic was because of constraints imposed on them via the writing system. Something similar could be argued for Dungan - Russian loanwords into Dungan, for example, are pronounced as close to the original Russian as the phonology allows (kolkhoz, for example, would be pronounced something close to [kɐlˈxos] - actually, probably pronounced in Dungan like [kʰɔːlˈxɔːts]), whilst with characters kolkhoz would be treated like how Japanese treats English loanwords - i.e. strike as sutoraiku.

I've raised this point before, but with the adaption of a alphabetic system and printing industry, there may be the possibility that more vernacular literature in the non-standard may be popularized in OTL. Is there any scope for Wu, Hokkien or Cantonese nationalism, or is the centralization of Chinese civilization and the primacy of the assimilationist Han identity too much to overcome?

That is probably true, which could then end the charade of the "Chinese language" once and for all.
 
Why would Chinese be not tonal? Just out of curiosity.

There are Chinese regionalects which are not tonal at all - Wu comes to mind. Granted, Wu does have a pitch accent similar to Japanese or archaic forms of Korean, but it is not like the stereotypical tonal systems of other Chinese regionalects - or Vietnamese, for that matter.
 
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