Alternatives to the western alphabet

       Today we will begin discussing writing systems in use today that are not descended from the West Semitic alphabet.  The most important of these are the syllabaries used for writing Chinese and Japanese, as well as the alphabet used to write Korean.  There are also a few syllabaries which were invented fairly recently and are still used to write languages spoken by small numbers of people: the Vai of Liberia (several dozen syllabic symbols); Yi of southern China, several hundred symbols;  Cree syllabary and Inuit syllabary (few dozen symbols invented this century.), and Cherokee syllabary.

      Today we will discuss the modern Chinese; tomorrow, the Japanese, Korean, and Cherokee writing systems.

Chinese

      The various dialects of Chinese, are written with characters, called han zi: These symbols are descended from the ancient writing of Late Shäng Dynasty China (1200BC) and still contain certain pictographic forms.  Each character represents a syllable of sound. Chinese actually has only a few hundred phonetically distinct syllables. Unfortunately, each of these syllables may be written with as many as 40 different characters depending upon the meaning, or function of the syllable. Thus, the correspondence between sound and symbol is highly dependent upon semantic factors. Because Chinese characters still resemble pictures, on the one hand, and also involve specific meanings, on the other, there are several misconceptions about this writing system that need to be laid to rest.

Syllabary, not a word or morpheme writing system.

      1.) The set of Chinese characters represent a very large syllabary. In modern Chinese, 99.9% of the 30,000+ characters represent syllables (all except one 'r').

      2.) Chinese characters has been called logographic, which means word-writing, based on the widespread belief that each character represents a word.  But character only represent words if the words are monosyllabic (In English the letter a or I represent words, too, but English is hardly a logographic writing system). Only 40% of Chinese words consist of single syllables.  The remaining Chinese words are written with two or more characters, one for each syllable.  So it would only be 40% correct to call Chinese a logographic writing system.

      3.) Chinese syllabic writing has been called morphosyllabic.  But 11% of Chinese morphemes are two or three syllables long, such as putao, hudian, such morphemes are written with two characters.  Since only 89% of Chinese syllables are separate morphemes, it would be only 89% correct to call Chinese morphosyllabic.  As we have seen, it would be 99.9% correct to call Chinese characters a syllabic script.

      It is beyond question that Chinese characters represent a syllabary.  But the question remains of how Chinese characters convey the sounds of Chinese syllables.  Phonetically, there are only a few hundred different syllables in Mandarin Chinese, yet there are many thousands of characters.  Clearly the system of Chinese characters is not a regular syllabary with a one to one correspondence between sound and symbol.  Each character represents a single syllable of sound with a particular meaning or set of meanings. If the meaning of syllables is taken into account, the characters represent a highly systematic system: each character can represent one and only one meaning/sound syllable combination.

The next myth is that Chinese is a pictographic writing system.

      Although some characters still look like stylized pictures, in most cases the pictures have very little to do with the meaning.

      Only 2% have shapes with a completely random connection to the sound of the syllable they represent.  These 2% are descended from ancient pictograms and still retain an iconograph relationship between form and meaning: examples are symbols for syllables denoting such basic concepts as yi, er, san. . . .  And even these are no longer true pictographs.  (Give example of the two words for the concept two: er and liang.)

      The shape of the vast majority of Chinese Characters, 98%, contain some sort of purely phonetic marker.  These are complex characters, made up of two parts, or two simple characters molded into one.  Example: men (gate as well as the plural morpheme) vs. Ren--man; added to the symbol for the plural morpheme.  (Discuss the principle of phonetics and significs, or radicals, the incorporated iconographic elements, in modern Chinese characters, using the examples on the handout.)  The phonetic markers in most Chinese characters are not entirely predictable, yet belong to one of three possible types (mark the consonant onset, or the vowel portion, or the tone. 

      Thus, Chinese is a syllabary showing a high degree of randomness in its system of connections between symbol and sound.  However, in the vast majority of characters, phonetic and semantic radicals taken together provide clear mnemonic devices to aid in learning, recognizing and remembering the characters. Still, it takes years to master the Chinese writing system.

      For teaching foreigners the pronunciation of words, Chinese may be written with a Roman-based alphabet of 23 letters called pinyin. Tones are marked by four special diacritical marks.  It is possible to learn this system in a day.

      Chinese characters (and the Japanese Kanji which we will discuss tomorrow) represent the only system descended directly from the earliest, irregular syllabic writing systems which survives to the present day. And Chinese characters and Japanese Kanji remain the most difficult to learn of any of the world's writing systems.  Nevertheless, there are good reasons why the Chinese have maintained their characters.

      1) Chinese language is ideally suited for its special type of strongly morphosemantic syllabary-- the syllabic structure of the language is simple; morphemes tend to be one syllable long; words do not take grammatical endings.  If Eng. had word writing system, totally separate graphs would be needed for "eat, eating, eats, eaten, etc"  Abstract ideas tend to be conveyed by morpheme combinations representing two or more concrete ideas: crisis = danger opportunity.

      2) Chinese characters are visually very distinctinve. Dyslexics fare better with Chinese characters because each character is a single frame. 

      3) A person used to Chinese characters would look upon western alphabets as monotonous. cf. stick shift driving as compared to driving an automatic. Or Morse code vs. the English alphabet.

      And yet the complexity of writing and printing the characters has led to certain attempts to reform them. In 1956 the characters were simplified--the number of strokes reduced (cf. the character for "horse"). These simplified characters are used only in Peoples Republic-- not by overseas Chinese or in the Jpn Kanji. There is another problem with the simplification: it sometimes distorted inner logic of the characters.  Also, in 1985 the Chinese invented pin yin, a Latin based script with 23 phonemes and four phonemic tones (cf.: Beijing, Mao Zedong, Xian Gang,Szechuan-- Sichuan). Arabic numbers and Western punctuation have also been adopted.

Reasons it is impossible to do away with characters

      Although further simplification may be attempted there is little chance that the characters will be replaced altogether by an alphabet such as pinyin. There are several reasons why it is impossible to do away with the hanzi.

      a) dialects-- Several Chinese lang.-- Wu, Mandarin, Cantonese--bei, pak (Cant), bet, bu? As different as Eng, German, Swedish.  If characters were abolished, then these peoples would not share a common system of written communication.  Cf. English dialects are part of the reason why English spelling has not been reformed.

      b) homonyms-- qi = wife, seven, varnish, kinsman, cheat, period, roost. cf. English: which, witch,--morphosemantic writing helps differentiate homonyms, at least in print.

      c) cultural-- Last, the characters are an integral part of culture, no one would be able to read the many thousands of books from the past, nor fully appreciated much of Chinese art. Before 1800 half of all books in the world were published were in Chinese characters.  One dictionary (1716) listed 47,000 characters, several thousand needed to be literate.  To be basically literate in China today, one must know a minimum of 5, 6 thou. graphs.

Drawbacks of characters

      a) word processing, typing.  Recent and of no great consequence, witness Japan. Computer programs are actually making characters easier to use.

      b) because most characters are associated with specific meanings or functions, writing multisyllabic foreign words, as well as new or slang terms, is very difficult. ing-guo "hero country"  mei-guo beautiful country. fa-guo "the country of law."  Dickens  die2-keng1-ze1  repeatedly-change-this.  Chaikovski-- chai2-xuo4-fu3-ze4-ci1 firewood-suddenly-begin-this-foundation.