1. Linguistic Variety: a glimpse across time and space
2 Brief description of language families
3 Historic mobility of people and languages:
3.1. Main cultural influences
3.2. Tracing alphabets (re)creation in the ancient world
3.2.1. The kanji expansion: East Asian cultural sphere.
3.2.2. The southern belt.
3.2.3. The open northern corridor
3.3. In and out. Language exchanges: translations and loanwords.
3.3.1. Buddhist translations and vocabulary loanwords into China
3.3.2. Vocabulary loanwords in the outer circle: Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean
4. Writing systems in East Asia: China and Chinese domain
4.1. One language in China: Tibetan
4.2. Two Writing Systems from the first circle: Japanese and Korean
4.3. Three current scripts from further south: from Thai to Bahasa
5. Literature and sources
The changing uses of writing systems in the east of Asia
by miquelangelcastillo
ONE. Linguistic Variety: a glimpse across time and space.
Interested in language diversity and familiar with the historic developments in European languages, I have been puzzled by a contradiction related to the Asian writing linguistic landscape. I would like to dive with this paper into the dozens in use in modern life in East Asia focusing on how they evolved, who took part in such a huge task and some common mindset affinities of the area.
After looking up miscellaneous sources I came across a perfect introductory sleek book to my search: the Atlas of Languages (see sources). I will spin the tale of my quest. In this website http://www.proel.org/traductores.html the reader can find a table with a very detailed tree of alphabets of the world. Not a very satisfying one related to our specific interests. I found another one easier to follow in www.ancientscripts.com . By far, and concerning my research interest (as I told you in my first mail) I still consider the best display of writing systems the introductory chapter of an excellent classic such as Le monde chinois by Jacques Gernet. Dealing with Language systems in Asia, I found a couple of plates showing the great diversity of writing systems in China itself (page 37) and a clear account of the main writing systems in Eastern Asia and their origins (pages 38-39) that I display below:
A mere glance at an Asian linguistic map is an eye-opener to avoid thinking of China as a monolithic country. China expanded itself from the north and suffered foreign influences. In addition to its Sino languages, China also has some 160 smaller languages, many of them with just a few thousand speakers. All these languages fall into four families, which differ greatly in their geographic distributions. Besides the compact Sino-Tibetan languages the other three families are scattered all over (to epitomise the intermingling, languages of all four families are spoken in Laos). As a matter of comparison www.ethnologue.com offers a database with spoken languages. If you go to the ibero-romance subfamily you will surprisingly get an incredible high number of them, 38; if you click in any Asian family, the number escalates
With its vast area and long history of settlement, China ought to have hundreds of distinct languages and cultures. In fact, all the evidence indicates that it once did. Coming from a modern uniform Europe I ponder, what happened to them all? Two thousand years ago the southern parts of the country were variously inhabited by speakers of Miao-Yao, Austroasiatic, and Tai-Kadai languages until they were largely replaced by their Sino-speaking northerner neighbors. An even more drastic linguistic upheaval appears to have swept over tropical Southeast Asia.
From the beginnings of literacy in China over 3,000 years ago, it has had only a single writing system. This is a clear connexion between the Chinese world and its area of loanwords influence towards the south. On the north east we still have the current coexistence of Chinese characters in the life of Korean and Japanese languages.
TWO. Brief description of language families
I am aware that when I consider the language universe of China I am dealing with Chinese language(s) and some others. This etcaetera group is very heteregenous. To start with, their numbers are small compared to Chinese but they cover a large spectrum of families. I will use data from Katzner, K. The Languages of the World most of the time. To better explain the issue in tropical Southeast Asia I can start with these words:
Multilingualism is a way of life, and as a result there has occurred much remarkable linguistic covergence. In south-east Asia several language families have mingled in the shadow of China. <2>
Most languages have SVO word order and belong to the isolating type (most words consist of a single syllable). One distinctive feature of all Sino-Tibetan languages is that most words consist of a single syllable. On the Tibetan side the main languages are Tibetan and Burmese. This family amounts for some 40 million speakers. Burmese is spoken by two-thirds of Myanmar population (28 million). Tibetan speakers number over 6 million in China. The other three families have broken distributions, being spoken by islands of people surrounded by a sea of speakers of Chinese and other languages. The 6 million speakers of the Hmong-Mien (Miao, Yao) family are divided among five languages. Their speakers live in dozens of small enclaves scattered over half a million square miles from southern China to Thailand.
The number of speakers varies depending on the taxonomy we follow for the languages in the Austroasiatic family, which include the Munda languages of northeastern India and the Mon-Khmer languages such as Khmer (or Cambodjan), which are also scattered across the map. Austroasiatic languages are characterized by an enormous proliferation of vowels, which can be nasal or nonnasal, long or extrashort, creaky, breathy, or normal, produced with the tongue high, medium high, medium low, or low, and with the front, center, or back of the tongue. Khmer is spoken by 8 milion people (1 million in Vietnam and Thailand respectively). Indonesia and Malaysia share many features of their national languages: Bahasa indonesia & Bahasa melayu. The first one is the native language of 35 millions but understood by 160 millions <3>. The second one is spoken by half of the Malays (10 million as their first language, 8 more as second language, plus 1 million in Thailand).
The 120 million speakers of Tai- Kadai are scattered across south-east Asia –in southern China this language family goes up to 50 million people with Zhuang registering the largest number of speakers (around 14 million). Outside they are distributed southward into peninsular Thailand and west to Myanmar (Burma). Thai is spoken by over 85 % of Thailand population (50 million), and is very close to Lao (18 million in Laos and neighbour Thailand) &Tagalog (15 millon). In Tai-Kadai languages, as in most Sino-Tibetan languages, a single word may have different meanings depending on its tone or pitch.
Besides, inside China there are two other families: one distinguished member from the Altaic family, the Mongolic language and the Tadjick from Indoeuropean family with a tiny small number of speakers. There are three languages unclearly related: Japanese, Korean, which are perhaps distant relatives of the Tibetan family and the Vietnamese that may go on the Austrasiatic one <4>. Their numbers are the following: Vietnamese is spoken by 65 milions in Vietnam, Korean by 65 million plus 2 in China and 700.000 in Japan and over a half a million in US. Japanese is spoken by some 125 million people.
THREE. Historic mobility of people and languages: main cultural influences
3.1. Main cultural influences
My account in this chapter wants to do justice to the changing picture of the East area in Asia. No matter how backwars we plunge ourselves into Chinese history, up to 2000 years, the sinification of the adjacent cultures suffered the great presence of her neighbourgs. We can refer to three main areas of developments to display the Sinification of tropical Southeast Asia: mobility of peoples and languages, agriculture and arts; the systems of writing; and finally linguistic borrowings.
Nowadays the 30-million estimate Chinese overseas are a very influent minority that makes an important source of financial muscle in countries such as Singapur (3 millions), Thailand (6 milions =10 % who stand for a large part of the GDP: 50 % banking sector and 80 % business), Malaysia (12 millions =35%, with 70% of family businesses); Indonesia (6 millions =3% with 70% of private economy) and Vietnam (1 million). But when we move some millenia backwards we meet an interesting picture. I will follow the outline given by Jared Diamond’s Empire of uniformity (see sources). Diamond states:
With the Chou dynasty the people of the Huan-ho Basin started to move southwards and this produce a large scale migration of the peoples that were catched in between. China's Chou Dynasty, from 1111 B.C. to 256 B.C., describes the conquest and absorption of most of China's non-Chinese-speaking population by Chinese-speaking states. To summarise the province of Yunnan shows today a perfect patchwork of many ethic populations living side by side. That should have been the situation at the Han times.
All the Indo-china populations were put under great strain and the populations of the area (today the remains of these peoples can be found in Andaman islands and the shores of New Guinea) had to cope with the invaders from the Yang-tze region. The studies of Cavalli-Sforza <4> showed that this southern population had more in common with their cousin from the bordering states (Laos, Cambodja, Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia and Vietnam) than with their northern couterparts, which in turn were more related to Mongol, Tibetan and Nepali groups. For instance, even if we look inside the sino-family itself, in this case, in the relatively well studied Hakka minority <5> some modern biological studies indicate that Hakka are primarily from a southern Mongoloid group, not northern groups, as all the genetic trees and maps demonstrate that the Southern Chinese group is distant from the Northern Chinese. All these modern peoples appear to be recent offshoots of their southern Chinese cousins <6>. Today the modern inhabitants of Indonesia and the Philippines are fairly homogeneous in their genes and appearance and resemble southern Chinese.
Regarding farming Jared Diamond wrote:
The most important animals were water buffaloes (since they were used for pulling plows), as well as silkworms, ducks, and geese. Familiar later Chinese crops include soybeans, hemp, tea, apricots, pears, peaches, and citrus fruits. So far as a wave to the Philippines, then the islands of Indonesia, were accompanied by gardening and by China's livestock trinity (pigs, chickens, and dogs).
Two different directions were accounted for. What entered? For instance, western contributions to ancient China's economy were wheat and barley, cows and horses. From the south came especially iron smelting and rice cultivation. But the predominant direction of spread seems to have been the other way. From northern China came bronze technology, Sino-Tibetan languages, and state formation.
In the first outer circle, Korea and Japan adopted rice from China in the second millennium B.C., bronze metallurgy in the first millennium B.C. As for languages contacts, Vietnam and Korea had to accept their warring neighbour from the time of the Han empire, becoming tributary areas. When looking into accounts of linguistic interference, Ifound that the earliest extant records in lexicography and language variation were recorded by Yang Xiong (53 B.C. – 18 A.D.) in his work Fang yan (‘region’ and ‘speech’ –in modern time ‘Fang yan’ stands for “dialect”) <7>.
The northern cultural dominance shows its clearest action in writing. To summarize, literate civilized Chinese states absorbed or were copied by the preliterate barbarians. This classification remained vivid until the modern era, and can come back. I will bring an anthopological example: burning the scapula of an animal then prophesying from the pattern of cracks in the burned bone. This distinctively forerunner Chinese method for reading the future, scapulimancy, appears progressively in the whole region. From the earliest known appearance of oracle bones in northern China, archeologists have traced scapulimancy's spread throughout China's cultural sphere.
As I will show in 4.2, Vietnam, Korea and Japan adopted Chinese writing around the first millennium A.D.; the tones of Vietnamese seem to have been developed relatively recently. (For translation works, close vocabulary links and alike mindset see 3.3).
3.2. Tracing alphabets (re)creation in the ancient world
I already stated in the introduction that one of the many things that left me in bafflement at the time of studying the first unit was the divergence of alphabets.Languages are not writing systems: the first ones are the software, the second ones the hardware. When something is printed you have a material thing. A cultural construct if you like. The transmission of these civilizised artifacts indicates the craftmanship of the human race. The main direction in Southeast Asia was the dominance of Chinese features, and Buddhism in the other direction. The southeast was caught in the middle of those trends. Basically every kingdom wanted an appropriate system to transfer their language to the written records. Here I will show some of the main developments in the historical times following mainly www.omniglot.com .
3.2.1. The kanji expansion: East Asian cultural sphere.
Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese were originally complete 'strangers' belonging to different language families. Roughly 2,000 years ago, the less developed Vietnamese and Japanese cultures came into China's orbit, whether willingly or unwillingly, creating what might be termed an 'East Asian cultural sphere'.
Kanji were the sole form of writing used in Japan for a few hundred years after their introduction in the 4th or 5th century. Kata-kana (‘kata’ means ‘side’) developed out of the phonetic use of Kanji to be read next to a Kanji text <8>. In the early days of Kanji use, to write the names of people and places, the Japanese used Kanji for their sounds, ignoring their meanings. This method of writing was certainly brought to Japan from Korea. From the Manyogana, some characters were simplified and used phonetically. As this was regularized a phonetic syllabary came into being: kana.
Korean King Sejong and his scholars in the XV century probably based some of the letter shapes of the Korean alphabet on other scripts such as Mongolian and ’Phags Pa, and the traditional direction of writing (vertically from right to left) most likely came from Chinese, as did the practice of writing syllables in blocks.
Vietnamese (Việt-ngũ) was originally written with a Siniform (Chinese-like) script known as Chữ-nôm or Nôm. During the 17th century, Alexander de Rhodes, a Frenchman with Sephardi ancestors, introduced a Latin-based orthography. Roman Catholic missionaries developed the use of written language for Vietnamese, Quốc Ngữ (national language), which has been used in parallel with Chữ-nôm. Today only Quốc Ngữ is used.
To read more about the JKV group see 4.2. Indeed, the influence of the Chinese culture is still so great that Japan has no thought of discarding its Chinese-derived writing system despite its disadvantages for representing Japanese speech, while Korea is only now replacing its clumsy Chinese-derived writing with its wonderful indigenous Hangeul alphabet.
3.2.2. The southern belt.
When we directed our attention at the tropical Southeast Asia the direction of writing influences came from India, where the Indian goddess Sarasvati was credited with the invention of the writing and the alphabet. The Sanskrit (meaning “purified”) language from the Indoeuropean family was typically written in the Devanágarí script (“script of the city of gods” – 'deva' being related to “divine”). In this section I will track the directions of expansion and their sylalbic alphabets representatives.
In the Tai-kadai family, the Khmer syllabic alphabet is descended from the Brahmi script of ancient India by way of the Pallava script, which was used in southern India and South East Asia during the 5th and 6th Centuries AD. The oldest dated inscription in Khmer dates from 611 AD. The Khmer alphabet closely resembles the Thai and Lao alphabets, which were probably developed from it. King Ramkhamhaeng (1275-1317) claims to have created an alphabet for the Siamese language in 1292, which later developed into the Thai alphabet. After the unification of the Lao principalities (meuang) in the 14th century, the Lan Xang monarchs commissioned their scholars to create a new script to write the Lao language. The scholars adapted an early version of the Thai script, which was developed from the Old Khmer script, which was itself based on Mon scripts. In the Tibetan sub-family, the Burmese script was adapted from the Mon script, a distant relative of the Brahmi script of ancient India. The earliest known inscriptions in the Burmese script date from the 12th century. When the mongols destroyed the area in their invasions at the end of the XIII century the intellectual landscape languished.
3.2.3. The open northern corridor
When we consider the peoples inside the mainland of current China we can find the origin of different alphabets. From the early times China had contacts with the western Asian powers. To cite an example, one of the kushan kings, Kanishka was the earliest and most famous <9> and one of his chaplain work was translated into chinese by An-Shih-Kao, a Persian. From the steepe came a pool of influent tribes with different languages between the X and XIV centuries: the Khitan, Tangut, Jurchen and Mongolians.
The Khitan people, who dominated a large chunk of Manchuria between 916 and 1125 AD, used two different scripts - the "large script", which came into use in about 920 AD, the "small khitan script", which was reputedly created in about 925 AD by the Khitan scholar Diela, who was inspired by the Uighur alphabet. The Tangut logographic script was modelled on the Chinese and Khitan scripts. It was apparently devised by one 'Teacher Iri' in 1037 and was used for the translation of Buddhist texts from Sanskrit and other languages. It was was until the 16th century. The Jurchen script (also known as Jurchi, Jurchin or Southern Tungusic) was created by Wanyan Xiyin in 1120 and officially introduced in 1145. It was modelled on the Khitan script and contains a large number of characters from Chinese, many of which were modified or distorted.
The Mongolian alphabet was adapted from the Uighur alphabet in the 12th Century. The Uighur alphabet was a derivative of the Sogdian alphabet, which ultimately came from Aramaic. Between the 13th and 15th Centuries, Mongolian was also written with Chinese characters, the Arabic alphabet and a script derived from Tibetan called Phags-pa. In 1269, Khubilai Khan commissioned a Tibetan Lama called Matidhvaja Sribhadra (1239-1280) to create a new syllabic alphabet for Mongolian. At that time, Mongolian was written with the Uighur alphabet, which wasn't really suitable for the task. Khubilai wanted the new alphabet to reflect the sounds of Mongolian more accurately, and also hoped that it would help to unify his vast, multilingual empire and could be used to write other languages. Sribhadra created a new alphabet based on the Tibetan alphabet. Inspite of being actively promoted by the Mongol government, the Phags-pa alphabet was not adopted by the Mongolians or the Chinese. The most recent example of Phags-pa writing dates from 1352.
3.3. In and out. Language exchanges: translations and loanwords.
Chinese regarded all things foreign with disdain. To gain respectability, Buddhist thought had to get a layer of Taoist, or Confucian, terms and Buddhist practices changed to conform to Chinese customs.
In the next passage I provide an account of these early translators from India, Nepal, Persia ans China itself. We can bear in mind that the daunting task of these middlemen was two-folded in Koerner’s words:
to provide the pronunciation associated with a given character (known as the du ruo, or ‘read as’ method). New words developed a new approach: the fan qie method which broke down the syllable represented by a character into two component parts, namely (a) the initial consonant and (b) the syllable final element and the tone <10>.
3.3.1. Buddhist translations and vocabulary loanwords into China
I will follow www.buddha.net here. Those were the earliest contacts: First arrival of monks, Kasyapa Matango and Dharmaraksha, in Han Dynasty China under Emperor Ming. 148 CE: An Shih-Kao, a master from Persia, arrives and begins translating and teaching the dharma- translating Indian Buddhist texts, initially causing many Chinese to believe that Buddhism was another version of Taoism. His Ssu-ti-ching had 3620 characters, with no concept transliterated.
5th century CE: Kalayasas arrives in China from Central Asia and translates Sutras. Buddhabhadra (359-429), born in Nepal, arrives in China along with Kumarajiva (344-413) from Central Asia, both who translate sutras and teach the Dharma. Kumarajiva was an Indian Buddhist scholar and missionary <11> who had an epoch-making influence on Chinese Buddhist thought, because he did much to clarify Buddhist terminology and philosophical concepts. His translation was distinctive, possessing a flowing smoothness that reflects his prioritization on the conveyance of the meaning as opposed to precise literal rendering. Because of this, his renderings of seminal Mahayana texts have often remained more popular than later, more exact translations.
The next wave of exchange starts in 520 CE when Indian Master Bodhidharma travels as a Buddhist missionary to China, being the forefather of Ch'an and Zen Buddhism which emphasized meditation. Also, Bodhiruci, Ratnamati, Buddhsanta, and also Paramartha arrive in China and translate sutras. Later, Sikshananda, who arrived from Central Asia, translated the Avatamsaka Sutra. Master Hsuan Tang (596-664) makes pilgrimage to India in 641 as an envoy from the Chinese emperor and established the first Chinese diplomatic relations with Harsha-vardhana (606-647). He returns to China with hundreds of scriptures and images, and ushers in a new era in translations. From this time we have the word for ‘sutra’ in Chinese (related to our “sutura”, and translated the eymological sense: ‘enfilall’). As late as this century, he wrote in the Ta-t’ang His-yü-chi:
Sanskrit words should be translated. One must make an effort to keep the original form. Take the pattern of the orthodox textbooks, infern and then discourse about them. I fear to pervert the truth <12>.
3.3.2. Vocabulary loanwords in the outer circle: Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean
Chinese characters stood as a visible symbol of the dominance of Chinese culture in East Asia. With Chinese characters came huge numbers of Chinese loanwords, which are still an important part of the vocabulary of East Asian languages. Chinese characters, Hanzi, are called ‘Hancha’ in Korean and ‘Kanji’ in Japanese which, incidentally, all three use the very same two Chinese characters. Since the end of World War II, the new phenomenon has been the borrowing of words from European languages.
In the fifth century Buddhism is established as the state religion in Korea <13>. Two centuries later, many Chinese schools were introduced. Around the seventh century, emissaries from the Korean Paekche kingdom began to introduce Chinese characters, Buddhism, and Confucianism into Japan. Koreans adopted Chinese as their written language –as Latin in Medieval Europe. Their highest cultural output was the Tripitaka Koreana <14>. Educated Koreans, then, spoke in Korean but wrote in classical Chinese. The educated upper classes until the end of the XiX century continued to write in Chinese, which naturally resulted in the adoption of a great number of Chinese loanwords: well over half of all modern Korean vocabulary consists of words either directly borrowed from Chinese or derived from Chinese characters. To this date numerous words that have Chinese origins are used along with words from Korean origin. Even if Koreans still include some Chinese scripts in the newspapers and publications, those Chinese characters used in Korean and Chinese are similar in meanings, but they differ sometimes in shapes and always in sound. Since the adoption of these words was almost exclusively through the medium of writing, this led to the formation of "a standardized Sino-Korean pronunciation" for Chinese characters used in Korean. For centuries, the demand for new Korean words was met almost entirely through this process, and, in fact, is still going on. Since 1945 however, the importance of Chinese characters in Korean writing has waned significantly and in 1949, they were abolished in North Korea.
From an early date Japanese borrowed a large number of Chinese words, to a great extent as a matter of deliberate policy. Chinese words which have become an integral part of the Japanese lexicon have a particular role as expressing abstract concepts. However, after the early burst of borrowing from Chinese there was a renewed active borrowing of Chinese words in the Meiji period. A study of the use of native Japanese and loanwords in newspapers in 1971 showed: Native Japanese words 26.6% to 43.9%; Sino-Japanese words 50.7% to 65.3%; and Foreign loanwords 12.0% to 12.7%.
Per donar un parell d’exemples, aquests dos caràcters diferents he trobat això de tres llengües (xinès, japonès i coreà) de tres famílies: Caràcter 1 Caràcter 2
Writing systems: Chinese, Japanese Korean Chinese, Japanese Korean
Latin transcription: zì / ji / ja shū, ka(ku)/sho, seo/sŏ
Pronunciation: [ ʤ̥ ] / [ ʤa ] / [ ʤa ] [ ʂu ], [kaku/ʃo ], [ sʌ ]
Meaning: character, letter,word writing, book, to write, letter, document, script
Vietnamese was originally written with a Siniform (Chinese-like) script known as Nôm since the XIII century at least. Till then they wrote in Chinese. At first most Vietnamese literature was essentially Chinese in structure and vocabulary. Later literature developed a more Vietnamese style, but was still full of Chinese loan words. Finally, Vietnameses, who were for the longest period under Chinese orbit, adopted beaurocracy exams system in 1554 but ended their particular relationship turning their backs on the characters and adopted an alphabetic writing system severing the close connections with their Han neighbours.
4. Non- Chinese Writing systems (see them at www.omniglot.com)
In the introduction was stated that the language universe of China comprised a large etcaetera group. In this chapter we will rapidly visit several living languages and three old scripts. As we could find some mentions to some writing systems in the learning material due to space problems I focused here on other information I gathered <15>.
4.1. One language in China: Tibetan
The southern belt of China displays many writing systems from all the families but they never got promoted into major languages outside their areas. There is a Chinese public concern to offer Latin alphabet solutions to minorities in Chima. Since the last 10 years efforts have done some headway in this direction. The real success of this initiative still remains uncertain. However, the languages of the north played a role in the last two foreign Chinese dynasties: Yuan and Ming. As for the Tibetan one the preservation of Buddhist scriptures makes it an interesting case. The relationship with the mongol is clearly explained in the material.
The Tibetan script was created early in the 7th century AD Thume Sambota was sent to India to create an alphabet for the Tibetan language <16>. The script he created script, modeled on the Devanagari or Nakari scripts, has evolved through the centuries and today Tibetan is written in few different types: the two most common are U-chen (literally: Big Head) and U-me (literally: Headless). U-chen is the script you see on Tibetan websites, books and other publications while U-me is primarily used for handwriting, although it can be seen in some modern books. The six reversed letters are sometimes referred to as the Sanskrit letters, since their purpose originally was to use in translation from Sanskrit. The first Sanskrit-Tibetan dictionary, Mahavyutpatti, appeared in the 9th century. Wood block printing, introduced from China, was used in Tibet from an early date and is still used in a few monasteries.
4.2. Two Writing Systems from the first circle: Japanese and Korean
Chinese characters are one of the most distinctive artifacts of Oriental culture. The expansion of China warlords gave those neighbouring Koreans (IV cent. AD), Japanese (IV-V cent. AD), and Vietnamese (VIII cent. AD), a new writing tool for their own tongues. Considering the fact that the respective languages belong to different families, the effort come short of nothing less than a great ordeal <17>.
The Japanese were the more resilient to Chinese presence since the aborted Yuan invasion, and the ones who still have a more clear presence of the characters in their writing six centuries later while devising a far more complex writing system mixing several sources. The Koreans kept a low-key writing system of their own until the end of the XIX century when the Japanese invasion sparked a national upsurge with the practical result of largely displacing Chinese characters in ordinary use (but continue to resemble them in their box-like shapes). Koreans, more persistently and heatedly than Chinese and Japanese, debate the use of Hancha <18>. The Korean alphabet was associated with people of low status, i.e. women, children and the uneducated. During the 19th and 20th centuries a mixed writing system combining Chinese characters (Hanja) and Hangeul became increasingly popular.
Evolution of both Writing Systems.
The Japanese writing system is certainly unique due to its 'Orthographic variation'. Japanese uses at least four different sets of graphical symbols to write the language:
Hiragana syllabary (phonetic, mainly used for grammatical endings and function words)
Katakana syllabary (phonetic, mainly used for foreign words, scientific biological names, and onomatopoeic words).
Chinese characters (kanji, used for 'content words' -- verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc., both native and Chinese based) -which may be rewritten in phonetic hiragana or katakana for simplicity, emphasis, or other effects. Kanji used phonetically for their sounds, disregarding their meanings, are called Man'yoogana (Man'yoo + kana). Not everything can be written in kanji.
Roman letters (the ‘romaji’, used mainly for symbols and some foreign words) with Arabic numerals are written from left to right.
Before the invention of a Korean alphabet, the clerical class used Chinese characters, method that created more difficulties to the invention of their own system. Writers later devised three different ones for writing Korean with Chinese characters: Hyangchal, Gukyeol and Idu <19>. These systems were similar to those developed in Japan and were probably used as models by the Japanese. The Idu system, the most important one, used a combination of Chinese characters together with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and other grammatical markers, and was used to in official and private documents for many centuries.
Korean language has three kinds of words (native, Sino-Korean, and European) as well as two kinds of scripts (phonetic and logographic). Today, Korean [in South Korea] is written in hangeul or a mixture of hangeul and Chinese characters.
The Korean alphabet promulgated in 1446 was originally called Hunmin jeongeum, or "The correct sounds for the instruction of the people", but has also been known as Eonmeun (vulgar script) and Gukmeun (national writing). The modern name for the alphabet, Hangeul, was coined by a Korean linguist called Ju Si-gyeong (1876-1914). I will mention some notable features of Hangeul.
There are 24 letters (jamo) in the Korean alphabet: 14 consonants and 10 vowels <20>
The shapes of the the consontants g/k, n, s, m and ng are graphical representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them. Other consonsants were created by adding extra lines to the basic shapes.
The shapes of the the vowels are based on three elements: man (a vertical line), earth (a horizontal line) and heaven (a dot).
In modern Hangeul the heavenly dot has mutated into a short line. Spaces are placed between words, which can be made up of one or more syllables.
Our last reflection goes to the education system. Both writing systems are certainly very difficult to learn. Nine years of school education are neede before Japanese children can read a newspaper satisfactorily. The Japanese Government recognises three levels of kanji, 881 characters called education kanji, and 1045 general purpose kanji and a third more complex. Everything could be written in kana, as it is done at the beginning of the first year of school). As for South Korea, about 2,000 Chinese characters are currently used in Korean. In South Korea school children are expected to learn about 1,800 hanja by the end of high school.
4.3. Three current scripts from further south: from Thai to Bahasa
Thai, from the Tai-kadai family, uses a syllabic alphabet consisting of 44 basic consonants, each with an inherent vowel: [o] in medial position and [a] in final position. The [a] is usually found in words of Sanskrit, Pali or Khmer origin while the [o] is found native Thai words. The 18 other vowels and 6 diphthongs are indicated using diacritics which appear in front of, above, below of after the consonants they modify. There are 8 letters which are used only for writing words of Pali and Sanskrit origin. For some consonants there are multiple letters. Originally they represented separate sounds, but over the years the distinction between those sounds was lost and the letters were used instead to indicate tones.
Tagalog (a.k.a. Baybayin or Alibata) alphabet is one of a number of closely related scripts used in the Philippines until the 17th Century AD. It is thought to have descended from the Kawi script of Java, Bali and Sumatra, which in turn descended from the Pallava script, one of the southern Indian scripts derived from Brahmi. Oldest inscriptions form year 900 AD. Today the Latin alphabet is used to write to Tagalog. This is a syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated either by separate letters, or by dots - a dot over a consonant changes the vowels to an /i/ or and /e/, while a dot under a consonant changes the vowel to /o/ or /u/. The inherent vowel is muted by adding a + sign beneath a consonant. This innovation was introduced by the Spanish.
From the Austroasiàtic family, the earliest known inscriptions in Malay were found in southern Sumatra and on the island of Bangka and date from 683-6 AD. They were written in an Indian script during the time of the kingdom of Srivijaya. When Islam arrived in southeast Asia during the 14th century, the Arabic script was adapted to write the Malay language. In the 17th century, under influence from the Dutch and British, the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet. Their main difference with Bahasa indonesia is in the spelling (due to British colonialism the first and to Dutch one the second).
5. Literature and sources
Alay, J.L., Història dels Tibetans, Lleida, Pages editors, 2000.
Comrie, B., Matthews, S. & Polinsky M. (ed.) The Atlas of Languages. The origin and development of languages throughout the world, London, Bloonsbury, 1997. A perfect introduction to my topic.
Diamond, Jared Empire of Uniformity Discover Magazine, March, 1996
http://www.huaren.org/heritage/id/082698-01.html (good cultural approach back into history)
Gernet, Jacques, Le monde chinois, Paris, Armand Colin, 1972
Koerner, E. Asher, R.E. Concise history of the language sciences, New York, Pergamon, 1995
Katzner, K. The Languages of the World, London, Routkledge, 1990
www.omniglot.com has been the most productive website for the topic, especially for the visual display of the scripts. Highly recommended to anyone interested in the topic.
Notes on all chapters:
<1> To appreciate the language variety we can compare the Romance languages we know (its numbers go up to 47!) with the Tibetan and the Tai-Kadai, with 351 and 70 respectively (sources in http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=874
<2> Comrie, B., Matthews, S. & Polinsky M. (ed.) The Atlas of Languages. The origin and development of languages throughout the world. page 56.
<3> Indonesia is a linguistically diverse region where the Indonesian language acts as a lingua franca, even though there are more native speakers of Javanese - about 75 million.
<4> L.L Cavalli-Sforza, P. Menozzi and A. Piazza The History and Geography of Human Genes, chapter 6.
<5> About the Hakka The New Encyclopedia Britannica stated: ‘group of North Chinese who migrated to South China, especially Kwangtung and Fukien provinces, during the Southern Sung dynasty (1127-1279), when North China was occupied by Inner Asian tribesmen.’
<6> As I stated in the introduction the languages spoken 2.500 years ago in South China were from the other three families: Miao, Austrasiatics and Thai. “The Tai-kadai languages were once believed to belong to the Sino-tibetan family because they share some vocabulary with Cantonese. These similarities are now seen as the result of borrowing and language shift, whereby their speakers came to adopt Chinese, bringing to it features of their original languages” in Comrie, B., op.cit. page 64.
<7> ‘Given the wide extent of the Han empire at the time and the fact that much of the population in regions toward the periphery was not Han, it could be well the case that Yang Xiong was describing different languages. This would partially explain why many of the words he lists are not found in modern Chinese’ in Koerner, E. Asher, R.E. Concise history of the language sciences, chapter III.
<8> Hiragana comes from a ‘selection of cursive forms of whole hanji, while the square katakana were created by taken parts of more formally written charactersto stand for the whole … the arrangement
<9> When Kanishka ascended the throne (AD 120), his empire consisted of Afghanistan, Sind, Punjab and portions of the former Parithan and Bactrian kingdoms. His empire extended from the north-west and Kashmir, over most of the Gangetic valley. He annexed three provinces of the Chinese empire, namely, Tashkand, Khotan and Yarkhand.
<10> Koerner, E. Asher, R.E. op. cit. page 43.
<11> From 401 Kumarajiva was at the Ch'in court in the capital Chang'an (the modern Xi'an), where he taught and translated Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. In his Samantamucha Parivarta from 2.067 characters, there were 230 Sanscrit words. Of the 80 translations only about 24 can be authenticated, but they include some of the most important titles in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Source: www.buddha.net/e-learning/history/chin_timeline.htm
<12> “A Reflection on the question of a philosophy of assimilation in Buddishm” by Kazumitzu Kato in Journal of the American Oriental Society 93.3 (Jul.-Sep. 1973) –footnote 10.
<13>Korean cultures date back to c. 300 BCE, the Korean Han, which were overthrown by Chinese refugees in 194 BCE. This in turn was overthrown by the Chinese Han dynasty. Four Chinese-controlled provinces established in northern Korea. The Korean Han tribe moved south. Later, in 918, the Koryo kingdom took over, whence the name, Korea. In modern times Korea was also caught between Chinese and Mongol invaders from the north and Japanese invaders from the east.
<14> The Tripitaka Koreana are more than 80,000 wood blocks used for printing the complete collection of Buddhist scriptures, laws, and treatises. The original set took 77 years to complete, and was finished in 1087. However, it was destroyed in 1232 by a Mongol invasion.
<15> This note will deal with it. We learned about the use of the Latin alphabet by the zhuang; the syllabic system for the Yi and pictographic for the Naxi and the changes in the case of the Uigurs or Mongolian. Other interesting ones were Miao group that split across southern borders using Chines characters in China and a Latin alphabet abroad. The Dehong syllabic alphabet was derived from the Pali alphabet and has been used the Jingpo people, who live in Yúnnán province in south-western China, since the 11th century.
<16> The great master Sambota wrote 8 different treatises on Tibetan grammar of which we have only 2 left today: Sum Chu Pa and Tak Juk. Numerous Mahayana Buddhist Sutra scriptures were translated into the newly created Tibetan script (sources: www.omniglot.com and http://www.tiblanstu.net/lessons/intrtume.htm ).
<17> Furthermore, Chinese is a Subject, Verb and Object language whereas Korean is a Subject, Object and Verb language. There are more similarities between Korean and Japanese in grammar and sentence structure (source: www.cjvlang.com/cjvkforum )
<18> It seems appropriate to include here some comments on these very distinctive writing systems.
The Korean needed ten centuries to develop their own writing. Our sources come from
http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/index.html and www.anotherscene.com/japanpm/koreaw.html. . As for the Japanese, it has done much to support the idea of Japanese as an isolated and special language (see http://www.percepp.demon.co.uk/japanese.htm
<19> The Idu system usage was largely limited to women and "members of the humbler classes" until the end of the nineteenth century. The Hyangchal system used Chinese characters to represent all the sounds of Korean and was used mainly to write poetry (source: www.omniglot.com ).
<20> King Sejon’s most original feature was ‘the treatment of the vowels. For this he had no precedent either in Chinese or hPags-pa alphabet’ (in Koerner’s Concise history of……, page 55).
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