WI: Chinese Hangul

A prestigious and inquisitive Ming or Qing gentleman from Suzhou is shipwrecked by mishap in the foreign land of Chaoxian where he is introduced to a strange script. He appreciates the qualities of this script, which represents sounds quite well, and on his return he learns more about this strange script and decides to adopt it for his Suzhounese dialect. It will be good for children or women who have difficulties memorizing the sounds of characters, and after all there is some precedent such that squiggly writing the Hui use to write Chinese or the "women's script" he has heard of being used in some faraway county. Seeing that this script does in fact help children learn pronunciation more quickly, as well as being better for quick informal notes, the Jiangnan gentry join in.

And so a modified version of Hangul becomes a pinyin analogue.

What happens now?
 
A prestigious and inquisitive Ming or Qing gentleman from Suzhou is shipwrecked by mishap in the foreign land of Chaoxian where he is introduced to a strange script. He appreciates the qualities of this script, which represents sounds quite well, and on his return he learns more about this strange script and decides to adopt it for his Suzhounese dialect. It will be good for children or women who have difficulties memorizing the sounds of characters, and after all there is some precedent such that squiggly writing the Hui use to write Chinese or the "women's script" he has heard of being used in some faraway county. Seeing that this script does in fact help children learn pronunciation more quickly, as well as being better for quick informal notes, the Jiangnan gentry join in.

And so a modified version of Hangul becomes a pinyin analogue.

What happens now?

chinese is mildly easier to learn for foreigners. The writing system itself might have influenced neighbouring countries such as vietnam. Litteracy might have improved to a certain extent.

The later could have an impact on the middle class that the upper lass might not appreciate.
 
I'll look back and curse this guy for not making it easier.

Seriously.

When I study simplified Chinese, I still get frustrated with Mao for not making Chinese even more simple for my sake. That's even when I'm also learning Traditional, so I can see all the ways to write a word...

I'm amusingly petty when it comes to learning Chinese characters. Even if there was an even more simple Chinese language, I'll be like "why can't it be even more simple?"
 
I'll look back and curse this guy for not making it easier.

Seriously.

When I study simplified Chinese, I still get frustrated with Mao for not making Chinese even more simple for my sake. That's even when I'm also learning Traditional, so I can see all the ways to write a word...

I'm amusingly petty when it comes to learning Chinese characters. Even if there was an even more simple Chinese language, I'll be like "why can't it be even more simple?"

I never really understood that either. I can see that adopting either the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet might have been politically unpalatable as bowing to western ways but you would think that a accented phonetic system would have been desirable to improve literacy and allow a break with the past.
 
I'll look back and curse this guy for not making it easier.

Seriously.

When I study simplified Chinese, I still get frustrated with Mao for not making Chinese even more simple for my sake. That's even when I'm also learning Traditional, so I can see all the ways to write a word...

I'm amusingly petty when it comes to learning Chinese characters. Even if there was an even more simple Chinese language, I'll be like "why can't it be even more simple?"

You've heard about the second set of simplified and merged characters right? Didn't work out, because nobody wanted to learn new characters because the Communist Party told them to. Many of the simplified characters already existed as informal characters, to use a European comparison it would be like the government ordering "though" to be changed to "tho" and so on.

ETA: Many, not most. Corrected for accuracy
 
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You've heard about the second set of simplified and merged characters right? Didn't work out, because nobody wanted to learn new characters because the Communist Party told them to. Almost all the simplified characters already existed as informal characters, to use a European comparison it would be like the government ordering "though" to be changed to "tho" and so on.

So it was more of a campaign of standardizing already-made easy characters instead of creating 'newish' characters?

And there was a second set? I didn't learn the history of simplification...
 
They did make up and exterminate a _lot_ of characters but many of the important changes were already in use, which is why Japanese shinjitai often has the same characters.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_round_of_simplified_Chinese_characters

Oh, I see. Perhaps the second round of simplified characters might have gotten some through if it was earlier, when more people were illiterate. That way, it wouldn't change their lifestyles as much.
 
A prestigious and inquisitive Ming or Qing gentleman from Suzhou is shipwrecked by mishap in the foreign land of Chaoxian where he is introduced to a strange script. He appreciates the qualities of this script, which represents sounds quite well, and on his return he learns more about this strange script and decides to adopt it for his Suzhounese dialect. It will be good for children or women who have difficulties memorizing the sounds of characters, and after all there is some precedent such that squiggly writing the Hui use to write Chinese or the "women's script" he has heard of being used in some faraway county. Seeing that this script does in fact help children learn pronunciation more quickly, as well as being better for quick informal notes, the Jiangnan gentry join in.

And so a modified version of Hangul becomes a pinyin analogue.

What happens now?
I think this idea requires more effort than its worth. Hangŭl might be good at representing the sounds of Korean, but it would be a poor fit for the Suzhou dialect. It looks like modern Korean (I didn't look at Korean during the Ming/Qing eras) has nine vowels and twenty-two consonants, and the modern Suzhou dialect has twelve vowels and twenty-seven consonants, not to mention seven tones that Korean doesn't have. And the vowels and consonants the two languages do have don't necessarily overlap. And then there's the fact that once Hangŭl is adapted to one Chinese language (say, the Suzhou dialect), it would need to be modified once again for the rest of the Jiangnan dialects (of Wu Chinese), and modified once again before it could be used for Mandarin speakers south of the Yangzi. I don't think somebody could just visit Korea and come back with a way of adapting the Suzhou dialect in hangŭl, unless that person was actively seeking a way to write a Chinese language using a foreign method.

However, if you aren't so concerned with adapting hangŭl for the Wu dialects, you could look at zhongyinzi and hanyinzi as ways people have tried to write Mandarin using hangŭl.
 
I think this idea requires more effort than its worth. Hangŭl might be good at representing the sounds of Korean, but it would be a poor fit for the Suzhou dialect. It looks like modern Korean (I didn't look at Korean during the Ming/Qing eras) has nine vowels and twenty-two consonants, and the modern Suzhou dialect has twelve vowels and twenty-seven consonants, not to mention seven tones that Korean doesn't have. And the vowels and consonants the two languages do have don't necessarily overlap. And then there's the fact that once Hangŭl is adapted to one Chinese language (say, the Suzhou dialect), it would need to be modified once again for the rest of the Jiangnan dialects (of Wu Chinese), and modified once again before it could be used for Mandarin speakers south of the Yangzi. I don't think somebody could just visit Korea and come back with a way of adapting the Suzhou dialect in hangŭl, unless that person was actively seeking a way to write a Chinese language using a foreign method.

I don't know if Suzhou Wu does this, but Shanghainese has lost so many tonemes (it has two tonemes, and they're word tones, not syllable tones) that it only has a few hundred unique syllables, so it uses polysyllabic words to distinguish meaning. Spoken Mandarin does this too, but to a lesser extent, and it still likes to associate individual syllables to characters, whereas to my understanding Shanghainese has completely given up. So for Wu, a hangeul-like system would be well-suited, whereas for Mandarin, keeping the characters around is more useful.
 
At one point Old Mandarin was written using Phagspa, the traditional script of the Mongolian and Manchu peoples (and comes from the same family as Tibetan script); as it has been theorized by some that hangeul is derived from Phagspa with some minor modifications here and there, the concept is not as far-fetched as it sounds. Indeed, Old Mandarin data written in Phagspa has been very useful for linguists trying to reconstruct the history of Chinese. It also turns out that phonologically and grammatically Modern Mandarin (including its dialects) is still very similar to Old Mandarin, so that helps out quite a bit. All that is needed in that case is making it both systemic and natural, at least for Mandarin. Not too sure about the southern Chinese regionalects, however.
 
At one point Old Mandarin was written using Phagspa, the traditional script of the Mongolian and Manchu peoples (and comes from the same family as Tibetan script).
Err, Phagspa was also unsuccessful in Mongolian; maybe you're talking about the variation of Old Uygur script, a descendant of Sogdian alphabet.
 
I think this idea requires more effort than its worth. Hangŭl might be good at representing the sounds of Korean, but it would be a poor fit for the Suzhou dialect. It looks like modern Korean (I didn't look at Korean during the Ming/Qing eras) has nine vowels and twenty-two consonants, and the modern Suzhou dialect has twelve vowels and twenty-seven consonants, not to mention seven tones that Korean doesn't have. And the vowels and consonants the two languages do have don't necessarily overlap. And then there's the fact that once Hangŭl is adapted to one Chinese language (say, the Suzhou dialect), it would need to be modified once again for the rest of the Jiangnan dialects (of Wu Chinese), and modified once again before it could be used for Mandarin speakers south of the Yangzi. I don't think somebody could just visit Korea and come back with a way of adapting the Suzhou dialect in hangŭl, unless that person was actively seeking a way to write a Chinese language using a foreign method.

However, if you aren't so concerned with adapting hangŭl for the Wu dialects, you could look at zhongyinzi and hanyinzi as ways people have tried to write Mandarin using hangŭl.
Middle Korean had tone marks, and it's possible to make up new glyphs for non-Korean sounds.

Suzhou is the Jiangnan prestige dialect so it doesn't really have to be modified everywhere.
 
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