About ducky
I'm a computer programmer professionally, currently working on mapping applications. I have been interested non-professionally for a long time in the effect on society on advances in communications technology -- things like writing, vowels, spaces between words, paper, etc.
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
China was culturally very dominant in East Asia, and so educated people in Japan learned the Chinese script when writing first came to Japan. Eventually, Japanese people wanted to write in Japanese, but unfortunately, the Chinese script was not well … Continue reading →
