Alternatives to the western alphabet
Today we will discuss the remaining alternatives to the western alphabet: Japanese, Korean, and Cherokee.
Japanese
Modern Japanese uses a mixture of three different scripts, all of which derive from Chinese writing.
Beginning in the 7th century, the Japanese borrowed Chinese characters to write their own langauge. Chinese hanzi used for writing Japanese came to be called Kanji (Japanese pronunciation of hanzi). Modern Japanese still uses a few thousand Kanji to write the root morphemes of their language.
The Chinese hanzi were used by the Japanese in a variety of ways.
1. At first the Japanese borrowed characters for their meaning value only, not for their sound value. Thus they came to denote entire morphemes, even polysyllabic morphemes.
a) For example, the Japanese word hito, person; or uma, horse, came to be written with a Chinese character. When Kanji are used for such native Japanese morphemes, they are said to have a kun reading. Sometimes there are several kun readings (each Chinese characters has only one reading in each dialect. (cf. native Germanic words man, husband, groom if all written with a logographic symbol)
b) However, Japanese also borrowed a huge number of words from Chinese at various times in history (just like English incorporated vast quantities of Latinate words during several periods (Roman, Early French, Norman French, Modern neoclassical compounds). In the case of borrowed Chinese words, the Kanji retained a pronunciation approximating that of Chinese. When Kanji are used to write borrowed Chinese words (Sino-Japanese words), they are said to have an on reading. There are three main periods of Sino-Japanese borrowing:
go on --mostly Bhuddhist terms borrowed before the 7th century AD
kan on--the bulk of Sino-Japanese borrowings from 7th to 14th cent.
toosoo on-- a smaller number of borrowings during the 14th cent. and associated with the arrival of Zen Bhuddhism.
(cf. English borrowings from Latin and French male, beau, written with a logographic symbol)
Since Chinese pronunciation changed over the centuries, these words are not all pronounced the same (cf. chief/chef, or dish/disk). Thus the Kanji, in addition to the native Japanese kun reading, may have a go on reading, a kan on reading, and a toosoo on reading. One has to pay attention to context know the derivation of the morpheme in order to be able to read and write the Kanji.
You may be asking why Japanese developed such a complex use of Kanji. It was due to the bureaucratic structure of medieval Japan. Scribes had no political power and little to do except elaborate the writing system. Practical considerations of teaching the system to a large number of people did not exist.
But the complexity does not end here. It was not possible to write all of the Japanese language using the meaning value of Chinese characters. This is because Japanese has many grammatical morphemes--suffixes and particles, which are entirely lacking in Chinese. (Give the example of the words man, male, masculine). Chinese is an isolating language with practically no inflections or grammatical endings. Japanese words tend to be grammatically complex, with many suffixes and particles not found in Chinese.
Thus, the Japanese needed to adapt Chinese characters to fit their language phonetically in order to write grammatical morphemes. They did so by developing the use of certain Chinese characters for their sound value alone. This was the so called man yoogana, or phonographic script. The word kana derives from the word karina, which means borrowed name. Eventually Japanese developed two phonetically regular syllabaries, the hiragana and katakana on the basis of using simplified Chinese characters to write specific syllables of sound.
Hiragana means ordinary or cursive kana. These are 46 symbols originally formed from writing a Chinese character cursively (originally used as the proper way of writing for women). Today, Hiragana are normally used to write native Japanese grammatical morphemes and suffixes.
Katakana means one sided or partial kan. They developed when Chinese characters were simplified by removing one side. Today the katakana are used to write loan words from languages other than Chinese, as well as for a type of emphasis, like italics are used in English writing. Katakana look more angular and less "squiggly" than the Hiragana.
Thus the two kanas developed in different ways and are used alongside the Kanji today each with its own special purpose. Each consists of 46 syllabemes. (Show the arrangement of the syllabary)
They also also employ two diacritical marks as representations of phonetic features: one denotes a voiced sound for k (g), s (z,j), t (d/z/j), h (b). This is a mark for a phonetic feature. A second mark, o, changes a h to p. Long vowels are written twice. Only one kana grapheme is non-syllabic: n. (Japanese is an open syllable language: all syllables end in a vowel or n).
Although every Japanese word could be written using either one of the kanas, the rules of style require the use of at least a few thousand Chinese characters. The Kanji must be used to write all borrowed Chinese roots. They also must be used to write the root morphemes of many native Japanese words. Thus the Kanji is the world's only true morpheme writing system. (The hanzi denote morphemes only 89% of the time and syllable 99% of the time)
Remember also that the relation between Kanji and pronunciation is not systematic. When used to write Chinese, each hanzi has one and only one pronunciation in each give dialect. This situation with Japanese Kanji is much more complex. A given Kanji may have several possible pronunciations--at least one for a native Japanese root (the kun reading), and up to three separate pronunciations for a Chinese borrowing (the on readings, each from a different period of borrowing). Because it is so difficult to predict how a Kanji will be pronounced, small helping hiragana called furigana, are used in textbooks for children and foreigners. A romanized alphabet called Romaji also exists.)
Modern Japanese writing thus employs a combination of three sets of symbols, each with its own function--a mixture of two very regular syllabaries and one, highly irregular morpheme writing system, the Kanji. (One must know at least 1800 Kanji to be literate in Japanese.) The same pros and cons regarding simplifying the Japanese writing system pertain as in the discussion of Chinese; cultural considerations are perhaps the strongest.
Let's look at the history of writing in Korean. Originally, Korean--like Japanese-- was also written in Chinese characters, which began to be borrowed in the 6th century AD. Korean, like Japanese, is a language with many affixes. Just as in the case of Japanese, Chinese characters were inadequate to express the many grammatical endings in Korean without a great deal of modification. In Korea, the characters were not modified into regular syllabaries such as the hiragana and katakana. Instead, something else happened.
In the 15th century AD Korea's King Sejong devised a competely new writing system, not based in any way on Chinese characters either in form or meaning. This alphabet is called Han'gul "great script" Originally, it had 28 letters, four of which are now obsolete. The shape of the letters for the most part graphically depicts the phonetic features of the phonemes. Letters grouped into syllables to resemble characters. This was designed to placate those who loved the Chinese characters (like Cyrillic was made to look like Greek for those who refused to recognized any other writing system).
Despite how well suited the Hangul is to writing Korean, and how difficult it was to write Korean in hanzi, it took centuries to get the Korean educated classes to accept Hangul in place of Chinese characters.
Why? Any discussion of writing in Korea must consider the particular relationship between the cultures of Korea and China.
China was the first civilization to emerge in East Asia. Neighboring peoples, such as Koreans, Viet., Jpn. looked toward China culturally, much like the nations of Renaissance Europe looked toward Classical Greece and Rome. But the cultural influence of China was far more complete and intense than that of classical culture on Europe. In Europe, classical civ. had died out long before the borrowing occured and had been replaced by the completely different influence of Christianity from Western Asia. The mind set of Greece and Rome differed sharply from the Christian tradition borrowed by Europe from the Near East. Rivalry existed and exists in the western mind between the two systems.
In East Asia, cultural or spiritual alternative existed which could compete with the influence of China. Even Bhuddism was introduced to Korea and Japan through the cultural medium of China. A huge portion of Korean vocab, inc. most place names were borrowed directly from Chinese (perhaps 80%, more than English borrowed from Latin and Norman French.). To replace Chinese characters in Korea was as difficult from a cultural point of view as it would have been for the Medieval English abandon the Latin alphabet in favor of a completely new writing system.
In the 15th century, during the reign of King Sejong, the prestige of Chinese characters was extremely strong and no one who had taken years to learn them was willing to abandon them. This was true even though the Chinese characters were very poorly suited to Korean and very few people could master them to the point of functional literacy. Therefore, Sejong had to go to great lengths to get his country to accept his alphabet. (Tell the story of the leaves.)
After his reign, Sejong's alphabet was actually suppressed, not greatly used until 1880, then suppressed again by Japanese who controlled Korea from 1910-1945. Only in the last decade has Han'gul come to be used almost universally in both North and South Korea.
Hangul was originally written vertically, now left to right. In many ways the Korean Hangul represents the best of both worlds: there are few units to learn--an asset possessed by an alphabet; and yet, since the syllable is used as the frame, there are a very large variety of distinctive shapes. (Give example of English written with a syllabic frame.) But this causes difficulties in printing. Han'gul movable type must depict entire syllables, printer must have several hundred of them. Computers are solving this difficulty.
Cherokee
Finally, let us look at the writing system adopted for use by the Cherokee tribe in 1828. It was invented by Sequoya (by 1821, a Cherokee who did not know how to speak, read, or write English.)
Let's take a look at this writing system. Sequoya's alphabet is actually a syllabary--and a phonetically regular one, since each letter except for one (s) denotes a syllable, either a vowel or a consonant + vowel combination. Unlike Ethiopian, in Cherokee writing there is no systematic way of adding vowel sounds to consonants. One must learn each of the 86 Cherokee graphs as a totally independent form.
Here is the story of the invention of the Cherokee writing system.
Before 1800 no native American language north of Mexico had ever been written by the native speakers. Pictographs had been used as mnemonic devices (wampum belts, totem poles, wood carved glyphs), but never as sound or language symbols.
Sequoya was born about 1760. His mother was a Cherokee; his father a Dutch trader who abandoned the family before Sequoya was even born. In the early 1800's Sequoya, who did not speak English and never learned English his whole life, began to notice how much information could be stored in the talking leaves of the white people's books. He felt that this was the source of the whites' strength. He became afraid that Cherokees would all learn the whites' language and abandon Cherokee. Therefore, he resolved to write down Cherokee words so that Cherokees would have their own talking leaves.
At first he tried to carve a picture of each word or idea on a piece of birch bark or wood--in other words, Sequoya was trying to create a logographic writing system. He kept the wooden pictures in an old shed where he spent his time, year after year carving more and more of them. He was inventing a series of pictographs for Cherokee concepts, each symbol had no connection to the sounds of the Cherokee language. He spent several years at this task and began to neglect his family and farm. His wife and neighbors began to think he was possessed by a witch. One afternoon when he was away his wife burned down his shed and all his carvings.
This loss depressed him greatly but the shock caused him to begin to hear the Cherokee language in a way he had never heard it before. He noticed that words seemed to be composed of a small number of recurring sounds and hit upon the idea of drawing pictures for these sounds and not for the meanings, which were of far greater number. Soon his syllabary was ready. He taught his 8 year old daughter, Ayoke, who had learned to read some English, to read and write his symbols. When she succeeded he took his idea to the tribal council and asked them to adopt it as the tribe's writing system. At first they laughed at him, but when his daughter read a letter that one of the tribal members dictated to Sequoyah--and didn't make a single mistake in reproduction the information therein, the council adopted the syllabary. Within months most Cherokees had learned the syllabary. Within a few months nearly the whole Cherokee tribe was literate--a greater rate of literacy than the Scots-Irish settlers around them.
Contrary to many sources, Sequoya didn't pattern his symbols on any existing symbols--English or otherwise; he was unable to speak or read English. The original forms of the Cherokee letters were not at all like English letters. In 1828, he and another Cherokee, Elias Boudinot, acting on the advice of the tribal council changed the shape of the letters to be more like English so they could be printed more easily with a printing press.
The Cherokees still use the syllabary today for Christian religion as well as for reading shamanistic formulae at Nighthawk festivals. And several other native peoples have been inspired to create their own writing (Cree and Inuit).
This fairly recent invention of writing in the form of the Cherokee syllabary stands out because the series of trial and error methods used by its inventor--the Cherokee Indian named Sequoyah-- almost exactly mirrors the first development of writing in Mesopotamia, China and Mexico. Sequoya went from pictograms to a syllabary during the course of the short span of his own lifetime. Earlier inventions of writing apparently took many generations.
Sequoya and King Sejong stand out in history as the only people to have invented a highly phonetic system of writing from scratch in a very short time. Fortunately, Sequoya lived to receive praise for this rare feat. Sequoya had become a hero to his tribe as well as to the white Americans. After his death in 1842 a species of huge evergreen tree discovered in California was named after him.