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The role of a Scotsman, John Ross (1842-1915), in creating it.  Although he was a Christian missionary who spent over half his life in China, he was apparently a gigachad.

The following video is densely packed with solid information and moves rapidly, so you have to pay close attention to follow it.

En masse / all things considered / by and large / for the most part/ generally speaking, etc., what is said here about Korean also applies to Chinese and Japanese.  Hanzi/kanji/hanjaphiles may not be happy to hear me say that.

See the candid comments by speakers of Chinese and Japanese.

And this from a Swedish speaker:

I'm Swedish and funnily enough, we have the same issues with spacing that Korean does. So much so that we even have a word for it, 'särskrivning' – roughly meaning 'writing separation'. Even funnier is the fact that the very word used to describe the error or adding spaces to compound words, is frequently also the victim of the phenomenon it describes. 'Särskrivningar' is the compound of 'sär-' – meaning separate or split – and 'skrivning' – meaning writing.

If only Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760-1844) had lived a century later, perhaps his preternaturally prescient understanding of the  Sinographic writing system would have had a synergetic, beneficial effect on the development of Chinese characters, as John Ross did on the Korean writing system.

Selected readings

• "Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Vietnamese dictionaries" (2/7/22)
• "A revolution in Sinitic language conceptualization and learning" (1/7/21)
• "Dumpling ingredients and character amnesia" (10/18/14)
• "Homographobia" (9/27/10)
• "John DeFrancis, August 31, 1911-January 2, 2009" (1/26/09)
• "Vietnamese polysyllabism" (10/2/12)
• "Words in Vietnamese" (10/2/18)
• "Sinographic memory in Vietnamese writing" (4/16/14)
• "Vietnamese in Chinese and Nom characters" (5/28/13)
• "Homophonophobia" (2/7/15)
• "Sino-Vietnamese poster" (12/4/17) (note the joined syllables on the poster)
• "Prolific code-switching in Vietnamese" (4/14/16)
• "Words in Mandarin: twin kle twin kle lit tle star" (8/14/12)
• "Diacriticless Vietnamese, part 2" (10/27/18)
• "'Written Cantonese must have word segmentation'" (2/23/26)
• "Why are Japanese still using kanji?" (12/5/25)
• "Mix and match Japanese orthography" (4/17/24)
• "Differential retention of sinographs across East Asia" (12/12/25)

February 26, 2026 @ 4:44 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Parsing, Pedagogy, Writing systems

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