Professional Documents
Culture Documents
I already stated in the introduction that one of the many things that left me in
bafflement at the time of studying the first unit was the divergence of
alphabets.Languages are not writing systems: the first ones are the software, the
second ones the hardware. When something is printed you have a material thing.
A cultural construct if you like. The transmission of these civilizised artifacts
indicates the craftmanship of the human race. The main direction in Southeast
Asia was the dominance of Chinese features, and Buddhism in the other
direction. The southeast was caught in the middle of those trends. Basically
every kingdom wanted an appropriate system to transfer their language to the
written records. Here I will show some of the main developments in the historical
times following mainly www.omniglot.com .
Kanji were the sole form of writing used in Japan for a few hundred years after
their introduction in the 4th or 5th century. Kata-kana (‘kata’ means ‘side’)
developed out of the phonetic use of Kanji to be read next to a Kanji text <8>. In
the early days of Kanji use, to write the names of people and places, the
Japanese used Kanji for their sounds, ignoring their meanings. This method of
writing was certainly brought to Japan from Korea. From the Manyogana, some
characters were simplified and used phonetically. As this was regularized a
phonetic syllabary came into being: kana.
Korean King Sejong and his scholars in the XV century probably based some of
the letter shapes of the Korean alphabet on other scripts such as Mongolian and
’Phags Pa, and the traditional direction of writing (vertically from right to left)
most likely came from Chinese, as did the practice of writing syllables in blocks.
3.3.2. Vocabulary loanwords in the outer circle: Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean
Chinese characters stood as a visible symbol of the dominance of Chinese culture
in East Asia. With Chinese characters came huge numbers of Chinese loanwords,
which are still an important part of the vocabulary of East Asian languages.
Chinese characters, Hanzi, are called ‘Hancha’ in Korean and ‘Kanji’ in Japanese
which, incidentally, all three use the very same two Chinese characters. Since
the end of World War II, the new phenomenon has been the borrowing of words
from European languages.
In the fifth century Buddhism is established as the state religion in Korea <13>.
Two centuries later, many Chinese schools were introduced. Around the seventh
century, emissaries from the Korean Paekche kingdom began to introduce
Chinese characters, Buddhism, and Confucianism into Japan. Koreans adopted
Chinese as their written language –as Latin in Medieval Europe. Their highest
cultural output was the Tripitaka Koreana <14>. Educated Koreans, then, spoke
in Korean but wrote in classical Chinese. The educated upper classes until the
end of the XiX century continued to write in Chinese, which naturally resulted in
the adoption of a great number of Chinese loanwords: well over half of all
modern Korean vocabulary consists of words either directly borrowed from
Chinese or derived from Chinese characters. To this date numerous words that
have Chinese origins are used along with words from Korean origin. Even if
Koreans still include some Chinese scripts in the newspapers and publications,
those Chinese characters used in Korean and Chinese are similar in meanings,
but they differ sometimes in shapes and always in sound. Since the adoption of
these words was almost exclusively through the medium of writing, this led to
the formation of "a standardized Sino-Korean pronunciation" for Chinese
characters used in Korean. For centuries, the demand for new Korean words was
met almost entirely through this process, and, in fact, is still going on. Since 1945
however, the importance of Chinese characters in Korean writing has waned
significantly and in 1949, they were abolished in North Korea.
4.2. Two Writing Systems from the first circle: Japanese and Korean
Chinese characters are one of the most distinctive artifacts of Oriental culture.
The expansion of China warlords gave those neighbouring Koreans (IV cent. AD),
Japanese (IV-V cent. AD), and Vietnamese (VIII cent. AD), a new writing tool for
their own tongues. Considering the fact that the respective languages belong to
different families, the effort come short of nothing less than a great ordeal <17>.
The Japanese were the more resilient to Chinese presence since the aborted Yuan
invasion, and the ones who still have a more clear presence of the characters in
their writing six centuries later while devising a far more complex writing system
mixing several sources. The Koreans kept a low-key writing system of their own
until the end of the XIX century when the Japanese invasion sparked a national
upsurge with the practical result of largely displacing Chinese characters in
ordinary use (but continue to resemble them in their box-like shapes). Koreans,
more persistently and heatedly than Chinese and Japanese, debate the use of
Hancha <18>. The Korean alphabet was associated with people of low status, i.e.
women, children and the uneducated. During the 19th and 20th centuries a
mixed writing system combining Chinese characters (Hanja) and Hangeul
became increasingly popular.
Evolution of both Writing Systems.
The Japanese writing system is certainly unique due to its 'Orthographic
variation'. Japanese uses at least four different sets of graphical symbols to write
the language:
• Hiragana syllabary (phonetic, mainly used for grammatical endings and
function words)
• Katakana syllabary (phonetic, mainly used for foreign words, scientific
biological names, and onomatopoeic words).
• Chinese characters (kanji, used for 'content words' -- verbs, nouns, adjectives,
etc., both native and Chinese based) -which may be rewritten in phonetic
hiragana or katakana for simplicity, emphasis, or other effects. Kanji used
phonetically for their sounds, disregarding their meanings, are called
Man'yoogana (Man'yoo + kana). Not everything can be written in kanji.
• Roman letters (the ‘romaji’, used mainly for symbols and some foreign words)
with Arabic numerals are written from left to right.
Before the invention of a Korean alphabet, the clerical class used Chinese
characters, method that created more difficulties to the invention of their own
system. Writers later devised three different ones for writing Korean with Chinese
characters: Hyangchal, Gukyeol and Idu <19>. These systems were similar to
those developed in Japan and were probably used as models by the Japanese.
The Idu system, the most important one, used a combination of Chinese
characters together with special symbols to indicate Korean verb endings and
other grammatical markers, and was used to in official and private documents for
many centuries.
Korean language has three kinds of words (native, Sino-Korean, and European) as
well as two kinds of scripts (phonetic and logographic). Today, Korean [in South
Korea] is written in hangeul or a mixture of hangeul and Chinese characters.
The Korean alphabet promulgated in 1446 was originally called Hunmin
jeongeum, or "The correct sounds for the instruction of the people", but has also
been known as Eonmeun (vulgar script) and Gukmeun (national writing). The
modern name for the alphabet, Hangeul, was coined by a Korean linguist called
Ju Si-gyeong (1876-1914). I will mention some notable features of Hangeul.
• There are 24 letters (jamo) in the Korean alphabet: 14 consonants and 10 vowels
<20>
• The shapes of the the consontants g/k, n, s, m and ng are graphical
representations of the speech organs used to pronounce them. Other consonsants
were created by adding extra lines to the basic shapes.
• The shapes of the the vowels are based on three elements: man (a vertical line),
earth (a horizontal line) and heaven (a dot).
• In modern Hangeul the heavenly dot has mutated into a short line. Spaces are
placed between words, which can be made up of one or more syllables.
Our last reflection goes to the education system. Both writing systems are
certainly very difficult to learn. Nine years of school education are neede before
Japanese children can read a newspaper satisfactorily. The Japanese Government
recognises three levels of kanji, 881 characters called education kanji, and 1045
general purpose kanji and a third more complex. Everything could be written in
kana, as it is done at the beginning of the first year of school). As for South
Korea, about 2,000 Chinese characters are currently used in Korean. In South
Korea school children are expected to learn about 1,800 hanja by the end of high
school.
4.3. Three current scripts from further south: from Thai to Bahasa
Thai, from the Tai-kadai family, uses a syllabic alphabet consisting of 44 basic
consonants, each with an inherent vowel: [o] in medial position and [a] in final
position. The [a] is usually found in words of Sanskrit, Pali or Khmer origin while
the [o] is found native Thai words. The 18 other vowels and 6 diphthongs are
indicated using diacritics which appear in front of, above, below of after the
consonants they modify. There are 8 letters which are used only for writing words
of Pali and Sanskrit origin. For some consonants there are multiple letters.
Originally they represented separate sounds, but over the years the distinction
between those sounds was lost and the letters were used instead to indicate
tones.
Tagalog (a.k.a. Baybayin or Alibata) alphabet is one of a number of closely
related scripts used in the Philippines until the 17th Century AD. It is thought to
have descended from the Kawi script of Java, Bali and Sumatra, which in turn
descended from the Pallava script, one of the southern Indian scripts derived
from Brahmi. Oldest inscriptions form year 900 AD. Today the Latin alphabet is
used to write to Tagalog. This is a syllabic alphabet in which each consonant has
an inherent vowel /a/. Other vowels are indicated either by separate letters, or by
dots - a dot over a consonant changes the vowels to an /i/ or and /e/, while a dot
under a consonant changes the vowel to /o/ or /u/. The inherent vowel is muted
by adding a + sign beneath a consonant. This innovation was introduced by the
Spanish.
From the Austroasiàtic family, the earliest known inscriptions in Malay were found
in southern Sumatra and on the island of Bangka and date from 683-6 AD. They
were written in an Indian script during the time of the kingdom of Srivijaya. When
Islam arrived in southeast Asia during the 14th century, the Arabic script was
adapted to write the Malay language. In the 17th century, under influence from
the Dutch and British, the Arabic script was replaced by the Latin alphabet. Their
main difference with Bahasa indonesia is in the spelling (due to British
colonialism the first and to Dutch one the second).
5. Literature and sources