Nushu — 1300 AD?, China

Posted on March 14, 2011 by ducky

Nushu “sa”

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 and developed their own script.  They actively hid it from the men, which had the effect of preventing the men from learning it.  The women hid it so well, in fact, that the outside world did not learn about it until 1983.

The script is clearly derived from Chinese script, but clearly different.  The characters are half-width, with significant simplifications.  More than that, however, is that only about 100 characters are logograms; the other characters are syllabic.

Some of the changes in the script have the effect — deliberately or not — of making it easier to embroider.

Alas, the last “native writers” of Nushu died recently. That, plus the secretive nature of the script, mean that little is known of its history.  There isn’t even agreement on how many characters there are in the script: estimates vary from 600 to 1500.  This makes it difficult to date, but some of the simplifications in the script are similar to simplifications common in Chinese script since the 1300s, so scholars feel it cannot be from earlier than then.

Recent documentaries and a popular novel featuring Nushu have led to a mini-revival, although there is concern that it will be distorted by tourism.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot, The World of Nushu

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

Chu nom "three" (word)

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 one syllable, and there aren’t a lot of changes in the word form (like adding “-s” for plural, for example).  This meant that Chinese script worked better for Vietnamese than for Japanese or Korean.

However, Chinese script wasn’t perfect, and as a result, they created their own symbols for some words.  If the Vietnamese word had been clearly borrowed from the Chinese, they would just use the Chinese character.  (Imagine if French had a logographic writing system that English had borrowed: we would probably use the French character for “chateau” as is.)  If the word had come from Chinese, but a long enough ago that it was considered a Vietnamese word, they would use the Chinese character, but with a small tick mark in the upper right.  (Continuing the analogy from above, this would be like using the French character for “independence”, but with a tick to show that you should use the English pronunciation.)

Unlike e.g. Khitan, they didn’t just make up new characters for Vietnamese words.  For native Vietnamese words, they would either smoosh together two Chinese characters or modify a Chinese character (usually by deleting some of the strokes).

When they smooshed two characters together to make one new character, they sometimes combined two characters for their semantic meaning.  For example, Chinese script “heaven”+”above” became one Chu nom symbol for the word that meant both “sky” and “heaven”.

More often, they picked one symbol for meaning and one symbol for sound.  The glyph above, for example, combines the sound “ba” with the symbol for “three”, to mean the word “three” which is pronounced “ba” in Vietnamese.  Note that the pronunciation syllable frequently used the Cantonese pronunciation and not the Mandarin, as Vietnam is geographically closer to more Cantonese speakers than Mandarin speakers.

The script didn’t fully catch on.  Almost all governmental writing was in Chinese script (except for the seven years 1400-1407).  A lot of popular literature and poems were written in Chu nom, but writing in Chu nom still required knowing a lot of Chinese script, but most of the more formal writing was still in Chinese script.

Vietnam has also been under the rule of China or the French for significant periods; both occupiers banned Chu nom for some or all of their reign, cutting Vietnam off from large segments of its pop cultural history, and in the case of the French, from their governmental and high literature history as well.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot, very nice Vietnamese Writing

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

Hangul — 1446 AD, Korea

Posted on March 12, 2011 by ducky

Hangul "h"

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 AD, the king published a new alphabet; the alphabet was so cool that that day is still celebrated today.

The alphabet was truly masterful.  Not only did its sounds match Korean of the time very well, it was the first alphabet to encode the mechanics of vocal sound production into its characters.  For example, the base shape of consonants were good mnemonics for how teeth and tongue needed to be positioned.  For example, there was one visual element for “teeth together”, one for “tongue on the roof of the mouth”, and one for “tongue against the front teeth”.

There are also sometimes specific strokes added to the characters to make a consonant plosive (e.g. b->p), nasal, fricative (“hissiness”), and/or aspirated.  (Aspiration is “breathiness”, which is almost unknown in English.  My mother aspirates the first consonant in “whale” to distinguish it from “wail”; I believe I do not.)

The glyphs for vowels are based on a simple vertical line and horizontal lines, which makes them visually very distinct from the consonants.

They also used a system for grouping up to three characters into syllables that was much like the Khitan technique: the alphabetic characters (called jamo) for consonants, vowels, and consonant clusters are grouped into little blocks, one block per syllable, with relative spacing between the blocks in much the same proportions as people use with Chinese characters.

Each syllable block could have up to three characters: a leading consonant or consonant cluster (which was a special null symbol if there was no vowel), a medial vowel, and an ending consonant/consonant cluster. (Hangul has many characters for consonant clusters, but that is not completely unusual.  Japanese Katakana and Hiragana have a character for “tsu” and even English has a character for “ks” (x).)

Because the glyphs encoded features of the sound production, because the characters matched the language well, and because the glyphs were quite visually distinct, the writing system is very easy to learn.  The saying was that a normal person could learn it in a morning and a stupid man in ten days.

One might imagine that men who were accorded high status as a result of spending years learning how to read might not take kindly to an advance that allowed just anybody to read in under two weeks.  Indeed, the king’s scholarly advisers shortly advised him that this newfangled alphabet was a bad idea.  They had three principal rationalizations errr concerns:

  1. It’s different, it must be wrong.
  2. Ditching Chinese characters would look like Korea was dissing their biggest, baddest neighbour, which is not usually a smart move.
  3. Only barbarians (like the Mongols, Jurchen, Japanese, and Tibetians) use phonetic systems, unlike the civilized Chinese.

King Sejong basically listened politely and told them sorry, the alphabet stays.

Unfortunately, he was not immortal, and one of his later successors was nervous about unwashed masses reading, so banned Hangul in 1504 AD.  There was a revival about 100 years later, and a lot of popular literature (especially by and for women) was produced.  It wasn’t until 1894 AD, however, that the first government document was written in Hangul.

The Japanese took over Korea in 1910 AD, and although Japanese was the new official language, Hangul was taught in schools (which they also made compulsory for kids) from 1910 to 1938AD.

After Japan was defeated in WW2, Hangul roared back.  In the South, Chinese characters were still used (although less and and less all the time); in the North, Chinese characters were abolished.  It is possible that the North outlawed Chinese characters in part to separate the Koreans from their historical literature.

In 2009, Hangul was been adopted to write the Cia-Cia language of about 80,000 people on an island in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

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 "hol"

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 on to make the text more understandable for Koreans.

Unlike in Idu and Hyangchal, which used the standard Chinese characters “as is”, in Gugyeol, they frequently used a simplified character for the extra, Korean-specific characters (much in the same way that Hiragana and Katakana were simplified forms of the Manyogana glyphs).

Links: Wikipedia, A History of Korean Literature, Gugyeol glyphs, The Korean Language

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

Hyangchal — 950? AD, Korea

Posted on March 9, 2011 by ducky

Hyangchal “tul”

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 Hyangchal which show that it was a strict syllabary, i.e. with no use of logograms.

Links: Wikipedia, A History of Korean Literature, The Korean Tradition of Translation: From the Primeval Period to the Modern Era

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

Idu — 1390? AD, Korea

Posted on March 8, 2011 by ducky

Idu "go"

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 tried was Idu script, a slightly modified form of Chinese characters.  They took some of the Chinese characters and used them to represent meaning (which they would pronounce as the Korean word), used some other Chinese characters to represent sounds (which they would pronounce as the Chinese word), used a few other special symbols for grammatical inflections/declensions, and invented some characters (primarily for names).  They generally used Korean word order.

This script was mostly used to help Koreans understand official government documents, which were written in Chinese with Chinese script.

Links: Wikipedia, A History of Korean Literature, The Korean Tradition of Translation:
From the Primeval Period to the Modern Era

CORRECTION: It appears that Idu actually came after Hyangchul.  It’s a bit confusing because the term “Idu” is used both for a specific script used in 1390ish, and for the class of pre-Hangul scripts.

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 "fire"

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 so).  There are characters that are in Kanji but not in Chinese script, there are some whose meanings have diverged,  Japan did not participate in the 1956 AD simplification of Chinese characters that the People’s Republic of China did, but the Japanese government periodically does change (usually simplifying) the approved orthography for Japanese.

By using the Chinese logograms, the Japanese set themselves up for a conundrum early on: how would they pronounce the characters?  Should they pronounce them like the Chinese word for what they represent, or like the Japanese word?

English-speakers might have a similar conundrum when encountering the word “nation” in an English-language piece of writing about Quebec nationalism: is the italics for emphasis or because it is a foreign word?  Should it be pronounced “NAY-shun” like in English or “nah-see-OHN” like in French?  However, I had to work hard to come up with that example, while it is trivial to come up with examples in Japanese.

The vast majority of Kanji characters have (at least) two pronunciations, the Japanese (or “kun“) and the “Chinese” (or “on“) pronunciation.  (To be more precise, as Wikipedia puts it, the “on” pronunciation is “the modern descendant of the Japanese approximation of the Chinese pronunciation of the character at the time it was introduced.”)  Figuring out which pronunciation to use is based on what the surrounding words are, context, and personal judgment.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

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

Katakana "ta"

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 similar to the use of italics in English for bons mots from other languages.)  It is also used for “sound effects”, technical terms, and occasionally for emphasis.

Like Hiragana, Katakana glyphs are sub-elements of Manyogana glyphs, but Katakana appears to have come from a more angular variant while Hiragana comes from a more cursive variant.  There is a one-to-one correspondence between Hiragana and Katakana characters.

Vowel duration is semantically meaningful in Japanese, unlike English.  (“Boooooooooriiiing!” might have a different emotional connotation than “Boring!”, but not a semantic one in English.)  While in Hiragana, vowels with a longer duration are marked with another vowel (so “taa” would be “ta”+”a”), Katakana uses a symbol (bouten) which looks like a hyphen (so “taa” would be “ta” + “-“).

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Script, Omniglot

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

Hiragana — ~800 AD, Japan

Posted on March 4, 2011 by ducky

Hiragana "za"

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 kept the idea of Manyogana, but used slightly different versions of the glyphs.  It was probably easier to make simpler versions of the glyphs than more complex ones, and that’s what they did.  Hiragana was the result; the Hirigana glyphs are generally a sub-element of the corresponding cursive Manyogana glyphs.

At first, Hiragana was mostly used by women, who were not taught Chinese characters.  Eventually, the guys figured out that it was a lot easier to use Hiragana than Manyogana.  Today, Hiragana is widely used in Japan for Japanese words that don’t have logograms, pronunciation, and Japanese inflections (i.e. “sounds stuck onto words to change their meaning slightly”, like “-ing”, “-ed”, or “-s” in English).

Just as people used several different glyphs in Manyogana to represent the same syllable, people used to use several different glyphs in Hiragana to represent the same syllable.  In 1900 AD, the government rolled out some spelling reforms that included one approved glyph shape per syllable, but you still see it some glyph variants (called Hentaigana) used from time to time to evoke tradition.

Hiragana has two decorations for its syllables which change its consonant in predictable ways.  The first is the dakuten, which looks like a double-quote (visible on today’s glyph), which changes the consonant from unvoiced to voiced.  (The difference?  You can put a musical note on a voiced consonant, but can’t on an unvoiced; you can whisper an unvoiced consonant but not a voiced one.  “S”, “k”, and “t” are unvoiced, for example; “z”, “g”, and “d” are their voiced counterparts.)  The other decoration — a small circle — changes the sound from a “h” to a “p”.  These decorations became standard somewhere between 1600-ish and 1800 AD-ish; before then, Japanese did not distinguish between the sounds.

Links: Wikipedia, Ancient Scripts, Omniglot

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

Manyogana — 450 AD, Japan

Posted on March 3, 2011 by ducky

Manyogana "ta"

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 suited for the Japanese language.  In spoken Chinese, there aren’t a lot of meaningful grammatical variants of words, while in Japanese (like English), there are.

To make a rough analogy with English, it was as if we tried to write “slaughtered goats smell after three days” with a writing system that only had single characters for “slaughter”/”slaughtered”/”slaughtering”, “goat”/”goats”, and “smell”/”smelly”.  Your sentence could be interpreted as “slaughter the smelly goat in three days”.  This kind of ambiguity would be bad in legal documents or warning signs!

To deal with that, Japanese co-opted some Chinese characters for use as syllables, and would tack them on to the Chinese characters to modify them.  (We do this to a slight extent in English, tacking on phonetic endings to logograms for numbers, e.g. “1st”, “2nd”, etc.)  This secondary script was called Manyogana, and while it was perhaps better, it was confusing in a different way: when reading, you sometimes couldn’t tell if a glyph represented a word or if it represented the sound of a syllable.

There were also different glyphs used for the same sound.  In some cases, the sounds might have been distinct in the past but are no longer distinct, but it is clear that in some cases, different people just chose glyphs from different homophones.  (In English, it would be as if one person used the glyph for “two” and another used the glyph for “too”.)

Thus, Manyogana was not an ideal script for Japanese.

Links: Wikipedia, Omniglot

Posted in previous script didn't quite work, Rating: 5 "Whoa!!", Syllabaries | 3 Comments