Why didn't other regions(eg: Indonesia, India) adopt Hanzi despite them being frighteningly efficient for unity? It frightens me as someone from East Asia to learn how people can learn Persian.
Because they had their own scripts and chink runes are so vast in numbers it'd crater literacy.
>>18395501But they're efficient and simple to learn comparatively to other scripts. And they can be used for a long time.
>>18395501Also literacy is a bit irrelevant. I don't think it matters and I think it leads to polarization because of people not spending their time efficiently, which could be spent working. Reading isn't very useful and the argument doesn't work because of the import of Jawi to Malaysia. People can learn irrelevant words in the West that they never use later but our languages can help across many dimensions.
They're just not good for non Chinese languages. And Chu Nom was the worst system of Chinese characters ever.
>>18395643How bad was it? Is there a similar one for Thai or Burmese?
You're Chinese and you seriously don't know? You sound Indian or Jew levels of oblivious.
>>18396731No I'm Laotian
>>18395507No they are not. They were stuck with the same problem as cuneiform, while everybody else had moved on to a phoenician writing system.
>>18395494apparently serious cultural exchange between china and india only began around the first century bc, when the brahmi script had been in use in india since the third century bcso they already had a writing system that hanzi would have had to displacehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_China%E2%80%93India_relationshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_scriptand for indonesia, it doesn't look like they had more than casual trade contact until kublai khan tried to attack them in 1293 - by which time old malay at least had been written with the pallava script for over six hundred yearshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_invasion_of_Javahttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_first_written_accounthttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kedukan_Bukit_inscriptioni gotta say it's pretty funny to me that the oldest attestation of old malay just conveniently happens to say "we did this on may 1st, 683" on it
>>18396895>i gotta say it's pretty funny to me that the oldest attestation of old malay just conveniently happens to say "we did this on may 1st, 683" on itno way this actually happened, that's awesome
>>18395643>And Chu Nom was the worst system of Chinese characters ever.coutnerpoint:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangut_script
>>18396839
>>18397815>two classes of chinese charactersdid they not want peasants to read?
>>18396867cuneiform is fucking based you retardlogosyllabic scripts are kino
>>18395643>Chu Nom>Cherokee and Turkey did similar alphabet Latin script was worse mistake.
>>18397949Vietnamese in the latin script was a mistake
>>18395507>But they're efficient and simple to learnYou never studied Chinese, have you? There's a reason the two closest cultures to China dropped Chinese characters.
>>18398266how do they even perceive the sound from over here?
>>18398266stupid meme example, I really doubt you've studied Chinese because nobody would be learning that character lmao, it's like saying you couldn't learn English because the word antidisestablishmentarianism or pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism exists.
>>18398274Those are comparatively pretty easy compared to that one? Aren't there 50,000 Chinese characters?
>>18395494>despite them being frighteningly efficient for unityI think you have this the wrong way around, Hanzi weren't good for unity, it's more that the relative unification and imperviousness of Chinese culture from the outside world is what allowed Hanzi to survive.It's not a great system, it kind of works for Chinese because there are such a limited number of morphemes that are repeated for different meanings, and having different characters for the same morphemes allows meaning to flow better, but otherwise the script requires straight up memorisation and it is so ridiculously bad at incorporating foreign words and sounds, which is why the Japanese had to invent TWO (2) entirely different scripts to supplement it.There aren't too many other cultures that could have persisted with a script that makes it so hard to engage with external influences for so long.
>>18397815I would argue that tangut script is not chinese at all, it just copies the aesthetics.
>>18398277Lol seriously have you ever studied Chinese?I don't know where you're getting the 50,000 figure from, a figure that high must include so many ridiculous archaic characters that aren't in use, it would be like including every single old English, Germanic, Norse, Latin and whatever else word as part of an English dictionary. I think most Chinese people know around just a couple thousand characters.Even your meme example character is not super difficult when you know Chinese characters, there are a whole bunch of components in there that you can discern, just like the English example words I provided (pseudo-pseudo-hypo-para-thyroid-ism). Both systems are built upon smaller recognisable components.
>>18398279Is the characters morpheme system why the Han were able to assimilate every culture beside them? Sort of makes sense
>>18398287Again, you're looking at it the wrong way around. China was able to grow unchecked for so long mostly because of stuff like geography, demographics and technology, they were the biggest, baddest country around, they grew exponentially outwards from the wide plains and large rivers in the middle of the country, the biggest threats they faced were just a bunch of roaming horsefuckers from the north, and whenever they rolled the Chinese the latter would just absorb them since they had like 100x the population.I don't actually know the specifics of how Chinese language developed, but it was used as a bridging language in so many areas, across different peoples in cultures, so it's probably more accurate to say the language developed to suit that purpose; to be easy to learn and communicate across different people. A relatively smaller catalogue of morphemes might have evolved because that was just easier for people living across China at the time.Old and middle Chinese was apparently really fucking different to modern spoken Chinese so who knows what the main drivers of its development were.And of course it goes without saying, the greatest benefit of the Characters is that it could encompass meaning across all the different spoken varieties.
>>18398292Do you know whether some of the northern barbarians kept their culture? The morpheme system sounds interesting, that's actually pretty cool. Didn't old Chinese not have tones? How'd they develop?
>>18398294>Do you know whether some of the northern barbarians kept their culture?Well Manchuria was completely wiped out, they tried to carve out a homeland when they ruled during the Qing then flooded it with Han because the Russians were taking land off them and they wanted to improve their claim to the land iirc.>Didn't old Chinese not have tonesWeirdly I think Middle Chinese also had four tones, but they completely shifted to the four tones you find in modern Mandarin. Cantonese and other southern dialect have six tones, don't know how that factors in.>How'd they develop?The weird thing you have to remember about Chinese its origins and development are so unbelievably distant from almost every other commonly used modern language, like even most Indian languages are a part of the Indo-European language, and across the rest of Europe and the Middle East there was language exchange and stuff going on so they converged towards similar ways of speaking.Now, when you look at what we know of early languages anywhere in the world they were fucking wild, you could have clicking noises, throat grunts, weird aspirations that could be used to make sounds. Over time almost all languages have dispensed with stuff like that, certainly commonly spoken ones, probably because it just isn't conducive towards good communication, but I think China took a weird deviation really early on with the tones and stuck with it. Because Chinese was so isolated and didn't have much exchange with other commonly spoken languages there wasn't any reason to change.I do wonder if other language systems never persisted with tones because it just isn't a good system, like other modern languages tend to use pitch in language across a sentence, there are ups and downs that communicate more subtle meanings in speech. Tones reduce that to a single sharp semantic meaning which can be hard to hear sometimes and frankly doesn't sound very nice (maybe that's just to my European language ears though)
>>18398294>>18398307cont'd as I passed the character limit:Wanted to add, I'm not a trained linguist so a lot of what I'm saying I'm pulling out of my ass haha, I'm just piecing together what I know from the history.What's really weird is Japan was even more estranged from international contact than China and, of course, adopted the Chinese writing system and many words, and yet never took on the tones in the same way and kept their own method of pitch and stuff. Perhaps when a language cements a non-tonal system it just won't pick up on tones again, it is definitely one of the larger barriers to learning Chinese and definitely the reason Chinese-accent English sounds so ridiculous is because they struggle to speak in a non-tonal way.I feel even less assured to explain Japanese language development tb h, it's just so weird and unique to take a writing system and so much vocabulary while maintaining the weird grammar and other stuff the way they did. There's all these theories about them descending from Central Asian/ Mongolian languages, which might have some truth but there's a lot of pseudo-science in there too.
>>18398274I have studied Chinese. There's a reason that Simplified Chinese exists. The PRC was actually very close to replacing hanzi with pinyin.
>>18398274And yes it's a cherry picked example but the Chinese script is generally unintuitive for people who don't understand Chinese or was never raised using Chinese characters. A huge part of China's current literacy rates come from language reform but even Chinese people forget some hanzi.
Logograms are the first form of writing in human civilizationEgyptian Hieroglyphs, Chinese Oracle Bone script, Mayan glyphs, Sumerian Cuneiform Chinese characters were the only logograms to survive until now because China is the only continuous civilization from ancient times>>18395494non east asians are too low IQ and lack the spatial intelligence to properly learn chinese characters>>18396867dumbass it's not a "problem" to be "stuck" with Hanzi, the visual semantic anchor of logograms provide a visual dimension to the strictly phonetic dimension of other scriptsThis allows information density to shoot up 2-5x, you'll often notice the exact same text written out in Chinese is 3x shorter, and stuff written in classical chinese is 5x shorter compared to english, and allows for the reader to "parallel process" information along along the visual axis and in the case of classical chinese, whereas for something like English it's strictly beginningThe Xuanji Tu is the perfect example of this> Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.> Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.> The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.https://substack.com/@arnaudbertrand/note/c-186894602
>>18398307>>18398313SMART anon i think there are a bunch of tonal languages across south east asia too. apparently they developed in vietnam or laos? japanese not having tones is strange to hear.. do you think china will get rid of them eventually? isn't most chinese speech dependent on context?
>>18398366Average Chinese high school graduates can read LaoTzu and Confucius in the exact classical chinese that they wrote in using HanziCan the average westerner read Plato and Socrates in the original ancient Greek? or Virgil in the original Latin? English language folks can barely understand Beowulf written barely 1000 years ago, like come onModern Chinese dialects sound different from the Vernacular spoken in those times, like all other languages, and yet Hanzi provides a direct link to the foundational texts of the civilization due to its visual semantic anchor, skipping the problem with phonetic drift completelyThis is the problem with phonetic scripts, when you read and pass it down you have to "translate" it twice -> read it left to right linearly to form sound in your head -> translate sounds to meaning, which is such a cringe way of reading honestly because you're two steps removed FOR EVERYTHING you read in your life it's honestly crazy
>>18398377I actually tried to read an old Chinese text as a novice and I understood 90% of it. Unironically the only characters I had no clue on were ones that were ancestors of modern ones.
>>18398319https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia Compounding to this>>18398318There was a second wave of standardization but it had apparently failed because of the instability during Mao's cultural revolution.
>>18398279> this dumbass is trying to "memorize"learn the radicals dumbassIf the written script is the hardware, and the spoken language the software, Hanzi can just as easily be used for other languages in a kind of "hardware abstraction"The oracle bone script was developed for sinic language so it's most "hardware native" like Mac and iOS, but it can just as easily be used for, say English, in combination with the latin alphabet like Japanese with Kanji and its own alphabetsActually ancient japanese scholars just read and wrote classical chinese without any alphabets, by its lonesome, but read it aloud using japanese. This meant that the entire sinosphere, at least the scholarly classes, despite not being able to understand or speak each others' language, can sit down and have a conversation with each other perfectly with some ink, a brush, and some paperNowadays the sound of the reading of the Kanji differs based on contexte.g. in English 水 can be read as "water" by its lonesome (might be called the saxon reading), but in context of 水-power, read as "hydropower" (this might be called the greek reading), and in the context of 水-marine, read as "aquamarine" (this might be called the latin reading)>>18398366> while for something like English it's strictly beginning to end>>18398377btw by "vernacular spoken in those times" I don't mean confucius times because classical chinese was the spoken vernacular, I mean hundreds of years later after grammatical and phonetic drift in the spoken language
>>18398377there's some schizo theory on the chinese internet that the reason westoids get fooled and led astray by wordcel jews so easily is because they hijack the middle in this two-step translation process (in a kind of supply chain attack kek), instead of reading the meaning directly, allowing for all kinds of sophistry to be injected
>>18398423that's amazing, do you happen to know more about it?
>>18398431it's been a while so not too much, something about audio triggers
>>18398414can people in korea and vietnam grasp chinese? what would be the android of languages? why are there rarely many chinese dialects?
>>18398451not sure the exact numbers but I think the older korean generation can read some chinese, viets unfortunately abandoned hanzi during the french colonial period (an astoundingly culturally destructive move)majority of their high culture words are all sino loan words. The majority of both korea and vietnam's history their classics were written in classical chineseolder generation in korea can still read hanzi (hanja), nowadays they're sounding the alarm due to constriction of vocabulary in younger generations that have no exposure to hanja, because those who grew up with hangul (korean alphabet) cannot differentiate between similar sounding words because they don't know the hanja roots, so they have to tack on sounds to differentiate homophones, which is equally destructive because that's just going the way of cringe phonetic scriptshopefully the pedagogical reforms work out and there's a revival of hanja> why are there rarely many chinese dialectswdym there are a lotyou mean nowadays for education? that's due to state centralization and lingua franca
>>18398307>I do wonder if other language systems never persisted with tonea great shitload of tonal languages exist in africa, papua new guinea, australia etc. there's some good indication sumerian was tonal. it's not unique to chinese at all.
>>18398279>it kind of works for Chinese because there are such a limited number of morphemes that are repeated for different meaningscould you elaborate on that?when you say they get "repeated for different meanings," is that just in reference to multi-character compound words, or do you mean something else?>>18398292>[...] it was used as a bridging language in so many areas, across different peoples in cultures, so it's probably more accurate to say the language developed to suit that purpose; to be easy to learn and communicate across different people.an academic linguist would most likely tell you that there's not really any such thing as "developing to be easy to learn for different people"imagine if five hundred years from now japan somehow replaced all its middle chinese loanwords with cooler newer english ones - english learners of japanese would have way more shared vocabulary than they used to, but then chinese learners of japanese would have way lessor imagine if french developed tone somehow - english learners of french would have one more incomprehensible alien thing they have to grapple with, but chinese learners of french would have much less of a problem>Old and middle Chinese was apparently really fucking different to modern spoken Chinese so who knows what the main drivers of its development were.grammatically classical chinese and modern standard mandarin are actually not all that differentphonologically i have to post the baxter-sagart consonant chart because it's fucking derangedand generally the main drivers of linguistic change are "random chance" and "outside influence"
>>18398532i love when there are threads like these with words i've never before like "baxter-sagart consonant chart"
>>18398307and i honestly don't mean to sound combative but most of this last paragraph is nonsense>The weird thing you have to remember about Chinese its origins and development are so unbelievably distant from almost every other commonly used modern language"chinese (modern standard mandarin)" is very different from "chinese (the sinitic branch of the sino-tibetan language family)"modern standard mandarin is not at all "distant from almost every other commonly used modern language;" the sino-tibetan family is gigantic and the map of its main branches and subbranches looks like a jackson pollock paintingand the sinitic branch of the sino-tibetan family is not "distant" from the rest of humanity either; lhasa tibetan and burmese are two members of the sino-tibetan family outside the sinitic branch, and they have 1.2 million and 42.9 million speakers, respectivelyand as far as "development" goes, the sinitic branch at least shares a laundry list of features with the other language families of its area (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainland_Southeast_Asia_linguistic_area) and in fact grew measurably more similar to them when it developed tone and simplified its syllable structure going from old to middle chinese>Now, when you look at what we know of early languages anywhere in the world they were fucking wild, you could have clicking noises, throat grunts, weird aspirations that could be used to make sounds.there's really no scholarly consensus at all about what the first spoken languages were like; some people speculate essentally "they might have had clicks because clicks are from africa" but there's not any real evidence for or against that - or for or against anything else, really"what we know of early languages" only goes back about ten thousand years or so, out of the hundred thousand years or so that humans are believed to have had spoken language, because the comparative method can only look back so far and written attestations can only be so old
>>18398307>Over time almost all languages have dispensed with stuff like that, certainly commonly spoken ones, [...]as a matter of fact the proportion of languages that have phonemic tone is actually probably around fifty percent, if not higher: https://wals.info/chapter/13and languages gain tone all the time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_(linguistics)#Tonogenesisit may say something that the term "tonogenesis" to mean "development of phonemic tone" was coined first, and the term "tonoexodus" to mean "loss of phonemic tone" was coined after it and by analogy with it>probably because it just isn't conducive towards good communication, [...]it's definitely good enough for the billion-plus speakers of standard chinese, and the ninety-seven million speakers of vietnamese, and the fifty million speakers of yoruba!>but I think China took a weird deviation really early on with the tones and stuck with it. Because Chinese was so isolated and didn't have much exchange with other commonly spoken languages there wasn't any reason to change.it did change - from non-tonal to tonal, gaining one of the features common to the area around it, just like its neighboring vietnamese and hmong did, by dropping final consonants and maintaining the distinctions between syllables that otherwise would have merged by pronouncing them with different tonesand it did this within recorded history, as part of the transition from old to middle chinese in the mid-to-late first millennium>[...] like other modern languages tend to use pitch in language across a sentence, there are ups and downs that communicate more subtle meanings in speech. [...]intonation plays this role in tonal languages as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intonation_(linguistics)#Mandarin_Chinese
>>18395494Even the Chinese are abandoning Hanzi and functionally using pinyin with younger generations forgetting how to write characters manually because they only ever type
>>18398307>Tones reduce that to a single sharp semantic meaning which can be hard to hear sometimes and frankly doesn't sound very nice (maybe that's just to my European language ears though)that's definitely a matter of perspective, and of what you're familiar withi'm sure there are plenty of chinese people talking online just like we are, who are saying things like "how can westoids understand each other when any word can have any tone over there?">>18398313>[...] Japan [...] never took on the tones in the same way and kept their own method of pitch and stuffi was going to say something like "fascinatingly, old japanese didn't have pitch accent; that only happened during middle japanese, due to chinese influence"but i checked and found out that's completely wrong; the japonic languages have had pitch accent as far back as reconstruction can show usi don't know where i got the idea they didn't>Perhaps when a language cements a non-tonal system it just won't pick up on tones againnope! that can shift back and forth just like anything else:proto-indo-european had pitch accent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_accentproto-germanic did not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Germanic_language#Phonologyand now modern swedish has it again: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Prosody
>>18398274>>18398266the biang biang noodles Hanzi is a joke character that was probably made by some noodle seller who was bored to troll people>>18398380it failed because people hated it and didn't want it>>18398283it kind of is though, Tangut was a Sino-Tibetan language and they used Hanzi until the Xi Xia ruler ordered some monk to create the Tangut characters
>>18398970how easy is pinyin to learn
>>18398318>The PRC was actually very close to replacing hanzi with pinyin.biggest retard on /his/ award goes to you, congrats>>18398319>A huge part of China's current literacy rates come from language reformfucking hell you just keep digging the retard hole further and further.How do you explain full literacy in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong that use the traditional script?It's not even a huge difference between traditional and simplified, the biggest advantages are just reduced strokes for a lot of common words, it makes writing faster. Simplified just codified a lot of common shorthands for characters.>but the Chinese script is generally unintuitive for people who don't understand Chinesegee who'd have thought people who don't know a language find it unintuitive.Seriously what point are you trying to make here lmfao
>>18398472>>18398944I understand there are technically a lot of languages that still use tones and have weird things going on, my point is more that well developed, common languages that cover large areas and peoples have generally dispensed with that.You can't really take the overall number of languages that have or still exist and treat them all equally, I think like 1/6 of all recorded languages come from New Guinea or something crazy like that, a lot of them are only spoken by thousands, many just hundreds of people, that level of insularity is what allows them to maintain a bunch of weird shit that evolved out of widely spoken languages because they're impractical across a much wider community.>>18398723>modern standard mandarin is not at all "distant from almost every other commonly used modern language;" the sino-tibetan family is gigantic and the map of its main branches and subbranches looks like a jackson pollock paintingBut this is my point, Sino-Tibetan is a very isolated language family, it had very little contact with Indo-European languages. There was a brief period of cultural influence from Northern India into China and that's seen in the spread of Buddhism (even that is evidence of poor intelligibility because the Buddhism practised in China and where it spread from there is very different). And there was a bit of influence from Central Asian languages but not a lot, and I already made the point that China tended to subsume those peoples so you can imagine how that translates to linguistic relationships.Myanmar is the only other "major" country speaking a Sino-Tibetan language and it's a shitshow, it never had the heavyweight cultural impact found across most civilisations of Europe and Asia.Yes there's some cool history and ruins there but relevancy wise, and in terms of how influential and connected it was to the wider world it's almost mesoamerican tier.
>>18399940>How do you explain full literacy in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong that use the traditional script?how were business deals made in the past in China? did they write them or orally ask peopleactually how are signatures in hanzi like
>>18399956traditionally they used stamps for that kind of thinghttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seals_in_the_Sinosphere
>>18400344did they reproduce them for each instance? are they all unique
>>18398944How often are tones lost with languages?
>>18401573i can't think off the top of my head of any languages i know that developed, then lost, a complete tone system altogether, though i'm sure it has happenedlate middle chinese apparently had eight tones - three contour tones plus the checked tone, each with a higher- and lower-pitched version - and the four contour tones of modern standard mandarin (as an example) are a result of mergers of these eight tonesbut if you consider pitch accent a type of tone system, then>proto-indo-european had it; proto-germanic did not>proto-slavic had it; modern russian does not>sanskrit had it; modern hindi does not>old japanese had it; modern fukushima japanese does not>middle korean had it; modern seoul korean does notetc.
>>18401637What the hell happened for Korean and Japanese to abandon them? Seems a lot of older languages seemed to have some form of them. How did we even figure them out?
>>18398366>This allows information density to shoot up 2-5xThis is not a good thing.
>>18401678It's mostly context driven?
>>18401669apparently in korean the pitch accent distinction evolved into just a vowel length distinctionand then the vowel length distinction disappeared too and now they're evolving contour tonedon't know what the deal with fukushima japanese is
>>18395494It's a dog shit writing system and it's baffling the retarded chinks and japs still use it. At least the gooks had some sense to drop it.
literally hieroglyphics btw
>>18399582It's just Latin Alphabet Chinese so I assume not as hard a chinese characters.
Hanzi defenders when I tell them about the 10000 hanzi that have yet to be translated and how there are still hanzi not simplified and that there is no way to type those hanzi except by cangjie because pinyin is still in development
>>18398472are tonal languages intelligible between each other? are tones in each tonal language similar?
