Bopomofo — 1913 AD, China

Posted on January 10, 2011 by ducky

Bopomofo “r-“

Because Chinese is a (mostly) logographic language, it isn’t obvious how to pronounce written characters.  To deal with that, in 1913, the government of China developed a system to write the pronunciation of characters.  Its official name is Zhuyin Fuhao, but everybody calls it “bopomofo” colloquially, after the names of the first four letters.

The People’s Republic of China abandoned it in the 1950s in favour of pinyin, a transliteration based on the Latin script, but bopomofo is still used in Taiwan.

Bopomofo “-er”

Bopomofo is not quite an alphabet (meaning separate characters for consonants and vowels, like Latin script), and not quite a syllabary (meaning that you have one character for each possible syllable, like Akkadian).  Bopomofo is a semi-syllabary, which is very unusual.  It has unique letters for initial consonants in a syllable (called onsets, which are usually consonants), but combines the rest of the syllable (called the rime) into one character.  For example, there isn’t just one character which represents “r”.  The “r-” at the beginning of a syllable is one glyph (the first sign in this post), but “-er” is a different glyph (shown to the left of this paragraph).

A friend of mine who grew up in Taiwan says that pinyin is much easier to use for computer text entry than bopomofo.  Because English is so dominant in computer technology, the standard keyboard is designed for Latin script: a 26-letter alphabet with upper and lower case.  By contrast, bopomofo has 21 onset characters and 17 rimes, with no upper/lower case, in addition to four marks for tones.  This makes it clumsy to enter on the Latin-optimized keyboards.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot

Posted in Alphabet, government-mandated, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 3 Comments

Administration: post-publication changes

Posted on January 9, 2011 by ducky

1. I made a minor change to the titles of the posts, including the (rough) date that the writing system came into existence and what (modern-day) country it appeared in.  (The country will need to be approximate.  Usually the exact latitude/longitude isn’t known.)  Note that where it appeared and where it is currently used can be very different.  Bopomofo is currently only used in Taiwan, but it was developed in the area now covered by the People’s Republic of China.

2. I have made other minor changes to posts — fixing typos, improving wording, etc.

3. I haven’t edited the posts to show that I made changes.  There is one ethos that says that in dated posts, you should always be clear about when you change it retroactively, that otherwise you are dishonestly claiming that you said X on date Y when in fact you said X’ on date Y.

In general, I agree with that for substantive changes.  However, I don’t think grammar and wording tweaks are (usually) substantive.  Furthermore, this blog doesn’t cover time-sensitive material, nor is it a highly competitive area.  This is in a blog format because it’s a convenient mechanism to dole out bits of information one-at-a-time, not because it is breaking news.  Nobody’s career is going to be made or broken if I add a paragraph to Sumerian Cuneiform a month later about what the species of reed the Sumerians used to write with.

At a more fundamental level, I don’t think anybody really cares about this blog except me.

Thus, for edits that are fixing typos, wording clumsiness, or additions, I probably won’t mark it as an update.  For edits that contradict what I said before (like if I had said that Simplified Chinese had been mandated by the Mongols who took over Egypt in 1625 AD, then fixed that), I will do my best to mark them as updated.

Posted in Administration | 2 Comments

Simplified Chinese — 1956 AD, China

Posted on January 9, 2011 by ducky

Simplified Chinese “horse”

In 1956, the People’s Republic of China promoted a simplified writing scheme, with the goal of improving literacy. Currently, Simplified Chinese is used in the PRC (except for Hong Kong), Malaysia, and Singapore; Traditional Chinese is used everywhere else.  The PRC government can fine people for using Traditional Chinese, with exceptions for ceremonial, decorative, or research purposes.

There were several techniques for simplifying the characters, including

  • Reviving simpler ancient forms of characters.
  • Making printed forms of cursive shapes that were already in use. These simplified shapes are sort of like abbreviations in Latin script, where some are totally understood and others can be guessed at.  You would certainly recognize “St” as being an abbreviation for “street”, probably would understand “abbr” as “abbreviation”, and might understand “bg” as “background” in context.
  • Merging a character into another, simpler character which has the same sound (in Mandarin, I presume).  For example, “behind” and “queen” have the same pronunciation, and in Simplified Chinese, both use  the “queen” symbol.
  • Making new characters and/or radicals (sub-elements) with fewer strokes.

Needless to say, the decision was hugely controversial.  Opponents thought that simplification tore at the foundations of Chinese culture.  Proponents thought that opponents were being overly sentimental about a very practical decision.  Both thought that their version of the script was better for reading and learning.  Proponents of simplified characters pointed out that there were fewer strokes to learn.  Opponents pointed out that the simplification often removed clues that readers could use to figure out the meaning of the word, forcing more rote memorization.  Proponents pointed out that the detail in traditional characters was more easily lost at small font sizes.  Opponents pointed out that there was more ambiguity in simplified characters (in large part due to merging characters).

Proponents point out that literacy has indeed gone up in the People’s Republic of China.  Opponents counter that many things happened in PRC since simplification, and that correlation does not imply causality.

The sheer size of the PRC is slowly advancing simplified script.  For example, while it is not required to use Simplified Chinese in Hong Kong, students find that textbooks printed in Simplified Chinese are cheaper than those printed in Traditional Chinese.  On the other hand, there is great affection for Traditional Chinese, and it frequently appears in signs in PRC.  (This is very similar to how I see frequently see Small Seal Script on restaurant signs in Vancouver.)

It is interesting to look at the progression of Chinese characters throughout time.  Below are four versions of the character for “horse” — Oracle Bones, Small Seal Script, Traditional Chinese, and Simplified Chinese.  You can see that the Simplified Chinese character looks nothing like the Oracle Bones one, but if you go step-by-step, you can see how the character evolved.

There is a very nice service over at Chinese Etymology which lets you look at the evolution of characters over time, including variants.  For example, see the (many!) results for “horse”.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot

Posted in government-mandated, Logograms, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 2 Comments

Traditional Chinese — 220 AD, China

Posted on January 8, 2011 by ducky
Traditional Chinese "horse"

Traditional Chinese "horse"

Traditional Chinese — also called “Regular Chinese” or “kǎishū”, appeared around 200 BC. There were numerous evolutionary stages between Small Seal and Traditional Chinese, including a looser, more calligraphic style called “Clerical Script”. At this stage, some of the stylistic conventions appeared that still exist today: thickness at the end of a stroke, and thickening of strokes that go down.

This was further refined in the Song and Ming dynasties (960 through 1644, with an interruption for the Mongols), when wood-block printing was popular. It is easier to carve straight lines parallel to the grain than perpendicular to the grain, and thin cuts against the grain would break. This led the carvers to make the characters with thin horizontal lines and thick vertical lines.

Just as the shape of cuneiform glyphs was influenced by the writing technology, so was Chinese. Writing material affecting glyph shape is something you will see over and over again as I go through more writing systems.

In Traditional Chinese now, there are only eight basic stroke shapes, all of which appear in the symbol for “eternity”:

This, coupled with Chinese’s open-ended character set, means that it is possible to make up nonsense characters that look plausible.  An artist named Xu Bing did just that, with a massive work that followed conventions for artistic scrolls, but which had nonsense glyphs on it.  Apparently this was profoundly disturbing to many Chinese people.  To be able to read was an important part of their self-identity as an educated person.  Being able to read standard written Chinese has — for hundreds of years — been a unifying element of Chinese culture with its many spoken languages, so reading Chinese was also an important part of those Chinese people’s cultural identity.

Those of us who can only read Latin-script languages probably cannot fully appreciate this dissonance, given as how we are used to seeing Latin-script text that we cannot understand.  (I don’t know if there is even one person in the world who reads ALL of the languages written with Latin script — English AND Finnish AND Basque AND Maori…)

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot

Posted in Evolved slowly from parent, Logograms, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", technology influenced | 18 Comments

Chinese Seal Scripts — ~800BC, China

Posted on January 7, 2011 by ducky

Small Seal "horse"

After the Oracle Bones script, there was a long period where the script changed slowly and not totally uniformly across China.  These scripts are sort of all called “Large Seal” or “Great Seal” or “Bronze Script”.

Eventually, in around 220BC, a gentleman named Li Si 李斯, acting under the direction of Emperor Qin Shi Huang, regularized the script.  That script is called “Small Seal Script”, “Lesser Seal Script”, or sometimes just “Seal Script”, and was made the official written language of the empire.  This was probably not the first time and was certainly not the last time that a government mandated the orthography of a writing system.

This script is still in use today, although its use is limited.  It is the script most commonly used on stamps used to verify identity called “chops” and where the writer wants to invoke feelings of tradition.  I see it most often in signs for Chinese restaurants or antique shops.  It has a more rounded look to it than more modern Chinese scripts, and generally uses constant-width lines instead of lines that look like brush strokes.

Links: Wikipedia

Posted in Evolved slowly from parent, government-mandated, Logograms, now ceremonial, Rating: 2 "Not all that interesting" | 1 Comment

Chinese Oracle bones — ~1500BC, China

Posted on January 6, 2011 by ducky

Oracle Bones "horse"

Written Chinese is, by some measures, the most successful writing system on the planet.  It has persisted for thousands of years and is still in use today.  While it has gone through a number of distinct changes, those changes have been evolutionary, not revolutionary; they did not change the fundamental nature of the writing system.  Akkadian, as I have discussed, was quite different from Sumerian in both the shapes of the glyphs and in the nature of what was represented (a syllabary instead of logograms).  Chinese logograms have stayed logograms for at least four thousand years.  Although the modern shapes look very different from the earliest shapes, it is possible to trace their evolution.

The Oracle Bones script existed in about 2000BC, but were lost for a while.  In the late 1800s AD, Chinese scholars discovered that medicine men were grinding up bones with glyphs on them, and recognized that those glyphs were precursors to their writing system.  Apparently people would carve questions about the future (like “when will it rain?”) on bones or turtle shells, then put the bones into a fire.  The diviner would look at how the bone cracked from the fire and (allegedly) use that information to give the questioner an answer.  (The archeologists are now digging up more of the bones, the medicine men hopefully less.)

Among the glyphs found on the bones were glyphs for an ink brush and an old-style Chinese book made from bamboo slats.  This strongly suggests that there was writing that predated the oracle bones, but which was on perishable material.  This is an argument which might bolster the status of symbols like Vinca: perhaps there was more writing on perishable media.  However, it might also damage their claims to full writing system-hood: if Vinca was actually writing, it should have had more non-perishable evidence.

In fact, there is some evidence for possible earlier writing systems in China.  The Jiǎhú script has a small number of symbols that might be a writing system which dates from 6600BC.  There are at least seven other candidates for Neolithic Chinese writing systems, but like Vinca, we will probably never know.  All of them, however, are less pictorial than Oracle Bones script, while one would expect an earlier script to be more pictorial than Oracle Bones.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts

Posted in first in its area, Logograms, probably developed by illiterate(s), Rating: 3 "I did not know that" | 2 Comments

Akkadian cuneiform — ~2300 BC, Iraq

Posted on January 5, 2011 by ducky

Akkadian "ari"

The Sumerians and the Akkadians lived near each other for quite a while, with the culture of the Sumerian city-states being dominant at first.   Eventually the Akkadians recognized a good thing, so adopted writing from the Sumerian cuneiform.  The Akkadian king Sargon conquered the Sumerians in about 2300BC, so even though the Sumerian language and writing did hang around until about 1800 BC, Akkadian became more and more important and Sumerian less and less.

The Sumerian and Akkadian languages are not at all related: Akkadian is a Semitic language, and Sumerian doesn’t have any relatives that we know of (in linguistics-speak,it is  a “language isolate”).  The structure of Akkadian was different enough that the Sumerian cuneiform was a bit cumbersome to use to write the Akkadian language.  For the Akkadians to read Sumerian logograms out loud, they needed to choose whether they were going to use the Sumerian word or the Akkadian word.  Furthermore, while Sumerian had a number of phonetic symbols, they were for the sounds of Sumerian, not for Akkadian.

(Imagine if English were written with a writing system that was partially logographic, partially phonetic, that the French had invented.  For the symbol representing flowing water, would I read out “fleuve” or “river”?  If I wanted to write down “cheek”, they best I could probably do would be “sheek”, which would sound like the French chic.  That’s sort of like the problem the Akkadians had with Sumerian, but French is much, much more closely related to English than Sumerian is to Akkadian.)

It is then perhaps no surprise that the Akkadians made major changes to the script that the Sumerians used.  It was still cuneiform, but remember that cuneiform is a writing technology (i.e. reeds and clay) and not a writing system,  in the same way that “pen and paper” is a writing technology and not a writing system.

While Akkadians still used a few logograms, they mostly wrote in syllables — there would be one syllable pronounced “ra”, one pronounced “ku”, etc.  To write a word pronounced “bakri”, then, you would write the character for “bak” and then the character for “ri”.  Syllabic writing systems (or syllabaries) are probably the most common type of writing system among all writing systems.

Here’s a way to impress your friends!  Next time you’re at a party and see some cuneiform*, you can tell people if it is Sumerian, upside-down, or a forgery.  If there are glyphs  composed of more than just the wedge shapes and the little pointy-boomerang things (called “Winkelhaken“), then it is Sumerian.  (Particularly if some glyphs are sort of shaded with lines or hash marks.)  By the time the Akkadians came along, they only used wedges and Winkelhakens, and the the wedge shapes were very rarely oriented to have the thick part on the right and the thin edge on the left.

Probably legitimate cuneiform

Probably upside-down cuneiform

Probably badly forged cuneiform

*Yeah, right.  Like that’s going to happen.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancientscripts

Posted in Logograms, previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!", Syllabaries | 7 Comments

Vinca — 5300 BC, Serbia

Posted on January 4, 2011 by ducky

Vinca symbol

There are some cases where there are symbols that experts can’t definitively agree are or are not writing.  Maybe the symbols are just decoration.

Vinca is one such script, found on pottery and figurines in modern-day Serbia and adjoining countries .  Artifacts with Vinca symbols on them have been dated to 5300BC — well before Egyptian hieroglyphics or Sumerian cuneiform.  Unfortunately, nobody knows the language and there aren’t many symbols together (think “words” or “phrases” and not “paragraph” or “pages”), so it isn’t likely that we will ever decipher the writing system — if it is writing.

Many of the symbols are on the bottom of pottery, where in modern times it is common to see manufacturer’s marks.  However, the same symbols show up over quite a large geographical range, so it’s not likely that it’s the 5300 BC version of CORELLE.  It doesn’t seem likely that it was something thanking the gods for the food, or it would go on the front.  It might be that the symbols say things like “Misha thanks Goddess Anomotoriabia for guidance in throwing this pot”, or that they are just pretty decoration.

Part of me feels that because writing is so incredibly useful, that if it were really writing, it would have persisted.  On the other hand, it might be that your society needs to have a certain level of complexity for people to care about preserving information: Bob and Joe don’t need to agree on how many sheep Joe will bring back from the market if there is no market.  Throw in war and disease, and it becomes easier to believe that writing could die out there.

A bigger objection I have is that the symbols mostly don’t look like pictures.  In the three places where writing has unarguably developed (China, Central America, and the Middle East), the first writing looked like pictures.  I can easily recognize ox heads, feet, snakes, horses, ears of corn, etc. in those scripts, while Vinca is much more abstract.  Yes, it is true that cuneiform stylized, but the stylization came AFTER writing became quite well-established.  Yes, it is possible that the Vincans developed a pictoral writing system first on materials that all decomposed, but humans are pretty egotistical, and I would have expected them to leave more permanent records of that stage of the script.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot

Posted in developed by illiterate(s), first in its area, Rating: 3 "I did not know that", Undeciphered | 3 Comments

Egyptian hieroglyphics — 3200 BC, Egypt

Posted on January 3, 2011 by ducky

Egyptian hieroglyphic

Egyptian hieroglyphics were profoundly influential and in use for thousands of years.  Like Sumerian cuneiform, the early symbols were of recognizable things.  Unlike Sumerian cuneiform, the symbols stayed recognizable: a snake stayed a snake, a foot stayed a foot.  Like cuneiform, many symbols were simply drawings of the things they represented, but Egyptian also had a much more phonetic component essentially immediately.  (Cuneiform also developed phonetic components, but it took them a while.  This is part of why I think cuneiform came before hieroglyphics.)

Egyptian hieroglyphics used a rebus principle: saying the name of the thing represented in the glyph would give you the sound of the consonant of the character.   (For example, in English if there is a black-and-yellow stinging insect portrayed, you’d say “bee” and get the consonant “B”.)  Note that the vowels were not so important in Egyptian, so they saved space or complexity by not putting them in.  (Back in the days when computers were wimpy and displays small, computer programmers would save resources by eliminating letters in their comments, usually vowels, as well.  “background colour” could easily become “bkgndClr”.  Same principle.)  Writing systems like this that do not denote most of their vowels are called “abjads”.

Egyptians developed a writing technology– papyrus — which was very widely used for thousands of years, until cheap paper displaced it.  Making papyrus was labour intensive: fibres would get lain in two sets of parallel strips — one direction on one side and 90 degrees off on the reverse — beaten together, and dried under pressure.

The edges of the papyrus had a tendency to split, so if they were glued together in rolls there would be only two edges that might split instead of three if it was in codex form (what we think of as “book” form).  This is probably why writings were almost always in scroll form for thousands of years.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

Posted in Abjad, Logograms, probably developed by illiterate(s), Rating: 4 "Huh, interesting!" | 6 Comments

Administration: external links

Posted on January 2, 2011 by ducky

I dithered a little bit about whether I should put external links into these posts.  I do want these posts to be short, something that you can feel confident that you will finish before you finish your morning coffee.  Furthermore, the links would sound repetitive: Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts.  Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts.   Wikipedia, Omniglot, Ancient Scripts.  Those three sites are by far the best resources available.

However, with some prodding from my favorite husband, I decided to go ahead and include links.  Sorry if it makes you late for work.

Wikipedia tends to be detailed and most comprehensive, but the quality is uneven and sometimes a bit dry.  Omniglot is extremely comprehensive, and almost always has links not just to further information, but where to get fonts (something that was important for me).  Ancient Scripts.com doesn’t have good links to elsewhere and there are a lot of scripts it doesn’t cover at all, but the articles it does have are pretty uniformly well-written and engaging.  Ancient Scripts is particularly good for the Central American scripts — Mayan, Aztec, Mixtec, etc.

Posted in Administration | 1 Comment