{"id":322,"date":"2011-03-20T20:30:52","date_gmt":"2011-03-21T03:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/?p=322"},"modified":"2011-04-02T22:22:29","modified_gmt":"2011-04-03T05:22:29","slug":"taiwanese-kana-1900-ad-taiwan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/2011\/03\/20\/taiwanese-kana-1900-ad-taiwan\/","title":{"rendered":"Taiwanese kana — ~1900 AD, Taiwan"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Taiwanese kana aspirated "ch(a)"<\/p><\/div>\n

As a result of losing the first Sino-Japanese war, China had to cede Taiwan to Japan in 1895. The Japanese went through phases of let-the-Taiwanese-be-Taiwanese alternating with phases where they tried to assimilate the Taiwanese into Japanese culture.<\/p>\n

During one of the assimilationist periods, Japan imposed the use of Katakana<\/a> to show the Taiwainese pronunciation of Chinese script<\/a> characters.\u00a0 Unfortunately, spoken Taiwanese is more complicated than spoken Japanese.\u00a0 Taiwanese is a tonal language which distinguishes between aspirated (“breathy”) and unaspirated (“not breathy”) consonants; it also has a few more vowels and consonants than Japanese.<\/p>\n

To compensate, they decorated the syllables.\u00a0 They put marks to the right of the words (which were always written top-to-bottom) to show what tone the word should have and whether the vowel was nasal or not.\u00a0 They put horizontal bars over “s-” syllables to make “ch-” syllables; they put dots under the syllables to show aspiration.<\/p>\n

There were also some quirks in the spelling.\u00a0 If a syllable only had a consonant and one vowel, the vowel was repeated, making the initial characters almost alphabetic.\u00a0 However, if there were lots of vowels in a syllable, the first vowel would be part of the initial syllable.\u00a0 Thus, “ki” would be written with “ki”+”i” characters, but “kiau” would be spelled with “ki”+”a”+”u” characters.<\/p>\n

Pretty much after Japan got relieved of its administration of the island, the Taiwanese elected to discontinue use of Taiwanese kana.<\/p>\n

Links: Wikipedia<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As a result of losing the first Sino-Japanese war, China had to cede Taiwan to Japan in 1895. The Japanese went through phases of let-the-Taiwanese-be-Taiwanese alternating with phases where they tried to assimilate the Taiwanese into Japanese culture. During one … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,28,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-mandated","category-interesting","category-syllabaries-language-types"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/glyphs.webfoot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}