Monthly Archives: March 2011

Sawndip — <689 AD, China

Posted on March 15, 2011 by ducky

The Zhuang people of southern China have been using an augmented Chinese script for over 1300 years called Sawndip.  This writing system was used extensively in popular culture (songs, poems, ceremonies, and some literature) and religion, but not governmental documents. … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 4 Comments

Nushu — 1300 AD?, China

Posted on March 14, 2011 by ducky

While Hiragana and Hangul were considered “women’s scripts”, nobody actively prevented the men from using the script as well, and eventually the men came around.  However, in China, women were actively prevented from learning Chinese script, so they went underground … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, private or secret, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", significant female influence, Syllabaries | 2 Comments

Chu nom — ~1200 AD, Vietnam

Posted on March 13, 2011 by ducky

Like Japanese and Korean, Vietnam was under the cultural influence of China for a long time and thus started out by using the Chinese script.  Unlike Japanese and Korean, however, Vietnamese is not agglutinative — most of its words are … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 1 Comment

Hangul — 1446 AD, Korea

Posted on March 12, 2011 by ducky

Chinese script didn’t work terribly well for Korean, even with Gugyeol, Hyangchul, or Idu additions.  Around 1440 AD, King Sejong the Great asked his board of scholarly advisers to advise him on a better writing system.  On October 9, 1446 … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphabet, inventor known, previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries | 2 Comments

Gugyeol — 950? AD, Korea

Posted on March 10, 2011 by ducky

Gugyeol, also transliterated as Kwukyel,  and also sometimes called Tho, was developed to help convert Chinese literature into understandable Korean.  The Chinese characters and word order were preserved, but characters for word endings, particles, and some verb forms were tacked … Continue reading →

Posted in Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 3 Comments

Hyangchal — 950? AD, Korea

Posted on March 9, 2011 by ducky

Hyangchal — literally “vernacular letters” — borrowed the shapes of Chinese characters, but used them exclusively to represent the sounds of the Korean spoken language.  There are not very many documents in Hyangchal, but there are some poems written in … Continue reading →

Posted in Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 2 Comments

Idu — 1390? AD, Korea

Posted on March 8, 2011 by ducky

As in Japan, Koreans first started writing with Chinese script, but Chinese script didn’t work well to write Korean for similar reasons that it didn’t work well for Japanese.  (Japanese and Korean are syntactically very similar.) One thing the Koreans … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolved slowly from parent, Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 3 Comments

Kanji — 600? AD, Japan

Posted on March 6, 2011 by ducky

Kanji — the Japanese adaption of Chinese script — was the first script used to write Japanese.  Kanji is very very similar to Chinese script, but unsurprisingly, the two scripts have diverged over the course of fourteen hundred years (or … Continue reading →

Posted in Evolved slowly from parent, Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | Leave a comment

Katakana — ~800 AD, Japan

Posted on March 5, 2011 by ducky

Like Hiragana, Katakana is a syllabary used in Japan.  While Hiragana is used for “Japanese-y”/non-Chinese type things — Japanese words, declensions, inflections, and pronunciation, Katakana is used mostly for transcribing foreign words and/or words with a foreign origin.  (This is … Continue reading →

Posted in Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 6 Comments

Hiragana — ~800 AD, Japan

Posted on March 4, 2011 by ducky

It was easier to write Japanese with Manyogana than with exclusively Chinese logograms, but it was still difficult because the same glyph would represent a word in one place and a sound in another. For their next attempt, the Japanese … Continue reading →

Posted in previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", significant female influence, Syllabaries | 9 Comments