Comment by DiogenesKynikos
2 years ago
Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it.
However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something that only little children use (as an aid to learn the characters). Once you've put in the effort to learn the characters (as about a billion people have), it's very difficult to accept their replacement by what is viewed as a script for children.
The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
I’m not sure how much evidence there is for that either — a Chinese friend couldn’t believe that I could just look at a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it was about; she, despite her fluency in written English, thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid comprehension.
It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute pain at first, then very comfortable.
I don't think (for me) chinese or english reading is particularly different. In both cases you're scanning whole blocks (words, phrases) at a time. Sometimes I feel like I read Chinese slower purely because of how dense it is.
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> information density of writing
I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
I was reading a Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.:
was translated into
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> However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters.
How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?
They are not comparable. The Chinese script was tailor-made for Chinese languages, while it was simply adopted by the Koreans, which arguably was a bad fit because it’s 1) agglutinative and 2) not even a Sino-Tibetan language. Even then hanja is still part of the national education curriculum today (look up 한문 교육용 기초 한자).
Prewar Korean written script used Japanese style Kanji for nouns intermeshed between Hangul phonetics. Postwar, under US influence they transitioned into all-Hangul phonetic language, but IMO it looks a big regression in their communication ability due to resulting arrays of pure homonyms.
They rely purely on context to distinguish {"apples", "apologies"}, {"mayor", "market"}, {"stomach", "ship", "pear", "double"}, {"acting", "delays", "smoke"} so on and so forth if what I'm scrolling is right. There's no tonal or character distinction. That surely isn't great.
Pure Hangul was used for a long time before then, just not in any kind of official capacity after Sejong. But e.g. most "women's literature" would be written in it.
And back when it was first introduced, it certainly did wonders for literacy. Although it should be noted that original Hangul was more phonemic wrt its contemporary Korean, and the letter shapes were a bit simpler as well.
I don't know where you got the idea of "under US influence", but mixed Korean/Chinese character writing was common in South Korea well into 1980s, long after Korea became its own country. For example, in 1987, the newly founded Hankyoreh newspaper made a splash by deliberately writing all articles in pure Korean script, which was not the norm until then.
Gradually more books and newspapers followed suit, because pretty much everybody found that writing everything in Korean letters actually make communication less ambiguous and easier to understand. If your phrase is ambiguous between whether someone's offering apples or apologies, then you just change the word or add additional context to make it clear which one is being offered. It's no different from how English speakers deal with bear/bear, tear/tear, arm/arm, ground/ground, and so on.
Here is wonderful article by John DeFrancis on the topic:
The Prospects for Chinese Writing Reform (2006)
https://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp171_chinese_writing_re...
It is cited frequently.
Almost all digital communication is written using pinyin, which today is almost all written communication
This is an extremely mainland-centric view. Cangjie is the dominant IME in Hong Kong.
That's why I said almost all
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Why shouldn't it be mainland-centric? Mainland China is 99.5 percent of the population of China. That's like refuting a claim about Americans by calling it "a very non-Pennsylvanian view".
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Pinyin is used as input to select characters, but the final text that's used to communicate is composed of characters.