Language Log

Compared to the previous Julesy presentation, "This might be the most hated film in Korea" (see "Hangul and Buddhism" [1/16/26]), today's video is tame, but the consequences of what she describes — the advent of a phonetic script to replace a logographic / morphosyllabic script — were profound.

Sino-Platonic Papers is pleased to announce the publication of its three-hundred-and-seventy-second issue:

“The Japanese and Their Language: How the Japanese Made Their Language and It Made Them,” by Samuel Robert Ramsey.

PROLOGUE

Travel the length and breadth of Japan, across the more than 6,800 islands in the archipelago, and anywhere you go, from the Tokyo megalopolis to the most remote and isolated village, every person you meet will immediately understand and speak Nihongo—Japanese. The accents you hear might vary from place to place. There will be odd and unexplained words and pronunciations peculiar to each of these places. But not one person among the more than 126 million citizens of Japan will have any trouble at all understanding the standard language as it’s normally spoken.

Around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, there were countless Chinese intellectuals and common citizens who perceived that their nation was in such desperate straits that something drastic had to be done or it would collapse altogether.  Many of these concerned citizens focused on the archaic script as unsuited for the purposes of modern science.  Others concentrated on the "unsayable" classical / literary language (wényán 文言) as primarily responsible for China's backwardness, which resulted in Japan's defeat of China in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894-95).  There were scores upon scores of reformers, the best minds of the country, who put forward a broad variety of proposals for language and script reform.

[This is a guest post by J. Marshall Unger]

Well, first of all, the difficulty of learning a language can only be measured relative to the language(s) the learner already knows. Japanese is easier for Koreans than for Americans; I would guess Chinese is easier for English speakers than, say, Arabic speakers. Second, language isn't writing. Learning to write Japanese or Chinese is hardly a snap even for native speakers.

The Koreans and Vietnamese got rid of them within the last century, even the Chinese — for more than a century — seriously considered abolishing the sinographs, and have simplified them until they are but a pale remnant of what they used to be.  Moreover, after WWI, when — with the help of the American occupation — Japan had a real chance to switch to an alphabet, the Japanese, on the whole, still clung to the kanji.  This is not to mention that the first great novel in an East Asian language, The Tale of Genji (before 1021 AD), which has a stature in Japan similar to that= of Shakespeare in the United Kingdom (Sonja Arntzen), was written by Lady Murasaki in the phonetic hiragana syllabary (aka "women's writing").  

The fact that the Japanese still have not abandoned the archaic morphosyllabic / logographic script is a conundrum that has puzzled me since I first learned Chinese and Japanese more than half a century ago.  Such a fundamental question about the history of East Asian writing is one that could scarcely escape the attention of rishika Julesy.  Here is her video about this thorny matter, "Why Kanji Survived in Japan (But Not in Korea or Vietnam)" (22:25).  I am confident that, as always, she will have something enlightening to say about this perplexing subject.

Why Do Japanese Still Use Kanji? Complicated Writing System…

We've been discussing simplified characters, both official and unofficial (believe you me, they're all out there).  They come and go as people find them useful or not.  This is one thing that makes characters very different from alphabets and syllabaries.  The latter two types of writing systems tend to settle down to a more or less fixed number of elements / letters / symbols (generally around 50-100 symbols for a syllabary and 20-40 or so for an alphabet, whereas morphosyllabographic / logographic writing systems tend to keep burgeoning out of control if they are a living, functioning script.

It has often been mentioned on Language Log that the simplification of Chinese characters by the PRC government did not come at one fell swoop in 1965, but was spread out over a long period of time, and had at least one additional formal stage, in 1977, that was retracted in 1986.

This has resulted in uneven acquisition of separate sets of simplified characters by students who went through primary and secondary education at different times.

How Chinese Characters Almost Died 

Once again, Julesy tells it like it is.

Letter to the editor of Taipei Times (4/29/25) by Te Khai-su / Tè Khái-sū:

Abolish Chinese characters

A few months ago, under the overhang walkway (teng-a-kha, or Hokkien architecture) of a Tainan side street, I saw a child — perhaps 10 years old — hunched over one of the collapsible tables of her parents’ food stall, writing columns of “hanzi” (漢字, Chinese/Han characters), each in their dozens.

A familiar, if rather sad sight in Taiwan — although not nearly as spectacular as Hugo Tseng’s (曾泰元) evocative account in this newspaper (“Rejuvenating ‘Chinese character,’” April 20, page 8), where he recalled the legend of Cangjie’s (倉頡) creation of hanzi, describing how “millet grains rained from the sky and the ghosts and gods wept at night.”

One of my favorite photographs shows Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938) teaching the alphabet to citizens:

Poster on a Tokyo subway, courtesy of Sanping Chen:

This is a story we've been following for well over a decade (see "Selected readings").  Improbable as it may seem that the Korean alphabet might be adaptable for writing an Austronesian language of Indonesia, there are some promoters of this idea who continue to push it enthusiastically:

"An Indonesian Tribe’s Language Gets an Alphabet: Korea’s
The Cia-Cia language has been passed down orally for centuries. Now the tribe’s children are learning to write it in Hangul, the Korean script."  By Muktita Suhartono, NYT (Nov. 4, 2024)

These fourth graders are not studying the Korean language. They are using Hangul to write and learn theirs: 

Cia-Cia, an indigenous language that has no script. It has survived orally for centuries in Indonesia, and is now spoken by about 93,000 people in the Cia-Cia tribe on Buton Island, southeast of the peninsula of Sulawesi Island in Indonesia’s vast archipelago.