China Develops an Alphabetic script...China smash?

[Brunaburh]

Objectively speaking, alphabetic scripts are superior to logograms. They require much less study in order to obtain competence, and therefore facilitate the transmission of knowledge. Let's imagine China either adopts an Indian script, or phoneticises its own alphabet.

What do we think are the implications? My personal view is that if this happens prior to about 500 AD, we see a much greater Chinese influence on World culture. OTL, Chinese ideas faced a serious barrier moving west as their writing system is exceptionally difficult to learn and therefore very little of what was written in China got translated into other languages. This did not work both ways, knowledge of Indian scripts and their translation into Chinese was common in China.

This will also mean wider, earlier mass literacy in China, but also the quicker diffusion of Chinese innovations westward, and a reciprocal refinement of technology developed in the various cultural centres of Eurasia. I strongly suspect technology would be far advanced of OTL, to the extent we might see moon landings a century earlier.

So, thoughts, ideas, objections? I'm particularly interested what effects people think this would cause in China itself.

 

[Mark E.]

Such a system would need to evolve at a time when regional scripts differed and standardization was still needed. I would think that was several centuries BC. So if trade brought earlier influence from the Greek or Indian writing systems, and I'm not sure how likely that would be, the Chinese would recognize the superiority of phonetic writing. The timing for Japanese might be easier to rationalize.

Early technology, anywhere, can most easily accomplished by short-circuiting the Dark Ages with knowledge and education. There are many threads on this forum that address the issue, and this is another reasonable one.

 

[James Ricker]

Big problem is the Mandarins (civil service) were able to keep their power due to being literate in the current version of Chinese. A simpler version of Chinese would mean more literate people and that could be a threat to their power. Given that the mandrins would be in charge of implamenting the introduction of a new form of Chinese , I can see resistance.
Problem two there are two Chinese languages Mandarin and Cantonese they sound different but are written the same. Using an alphabetic script they would be written differently.

 

[Optical_Illusion]

I'm not so sure alphabetic scripts are a *huge* aid to spreading ideas, or that ideas were advantaged along an alphabetic->non-alphabetic axis. Who in the Middle Kingdom had read The Republic?

The main barrier seems cultural, and I would think that would be about the relatively low importance some of these ideas had across the Sea of Grass, where some groups had traditions where Islam and their Buddhist thought dominated the institutional centre and others were at a pretty simple level. As to why this was so, I would have to go with Confucian and Daoist thought being somewhat hard to translate outside the mileau of a sedentary civilization? (Confucianism stereotypically to me is very much about the concerns of how best to govern a sedentary society, and moral behaviour within that society.)

Within China, I think you get higher literacy earlier and printing of the European type (rather than the single cut woodblock form favoured in China) tends to become more likely. Though people will disagree on whether European style printing actually even mattered (in terms of ease and volume of book production and consequences to that).

I'd also think you *might* see more preservation of language fractionalization in China, within Sinitic, and you might also see more language shift, even involving non-Sinitic languages, in situations (which happened with fair frequency) where non-Chinese speaking groups are in a position to migrate to China en masse and impose culture on China. Language fractionalization might lead to cultural fractionalization and identity shifts, and less unitary Han identity, which might be an advantage in some ways and a disadvantage in others.

 

[Tom Colton]

Chinese texts would wind up being like 5-10 times longer because of how densely packed information is with logograms, so bear in mind the ecological disaster you're unleashing here.

 

[Augenis]

Chinese texts would wind up being like 5-10 times longer because of how densely packed information is with logograms, so bear in mind the ecological disaster you're unleashing here.

The lower information density of alphabetic Chinese would mean the Chinese would just write shorter books, then.

At least that's what my logic suggests

 

[dontfearme22]

Im just going to say this, but I highly doubt in 5000+ years of Chinese civilization that A: the idea of a alphabet was never natively conceptualized, and B: that the Chinese never encountered foreign alphabets and thought about the implications.

Hell, even before 500 AD there was no doubt knowledge of greek and greek derived scripts from Central Asia. My point is, if alphabets and phonetic scripts (which honestly, describes every writing system ever made...), are objectively superior - the Chinese would have probably noticed between the neolithic and the modern era. There's even native syllabaries in China (Yi) that weren't adopted outside that ethnic group.

Also I think some people don't understand that a Chinese logogram just represents a word. It doesnt mean some intricate, ultra-dense concept as @Tom Colton seems to suggest - Chinese isn't the .ZIP format of scripts. A single character corresponds to a single word / words (multiple words are the exception, not rule). Chinese texts would be longer, but not because the information density changed that drastically. Chinese words are already pretty short, and usually monosyllabic / bisyllabic (monosyllabic is much more common in more tonal Sinitic languages). There is additional information about word type and aspects of the words characteristics in many characters, but thats not included in actually saying the words - its just part of the characters well, character. You wouldn't put that on a page. You actually lose information like this in transferring characters to a alphabetic script, like pinyin. Its just not information that changes the way you would say the sentence.

Lastly, @James Ricker: Theres more than two Chinese languages, theres hundreds. Mandarin and Cantonese are just major varieties. Mandarin and Cantonese are grammatically and phonologically different, and when we talk about a Mandarin speaker being able to write to a Cantonese speaker but not speak to them, thats because they both choose to use a standardized variety of 'Classical' Chinese characters - if a Cantonese speaker would directly transfer their colloquial words to their own characters and so forth, the sentences between the two speakers would be very different. Its almost like Modern Standard Arabic vs. Moroccan Darija and Levantine Arabic etc.

I'm not sure how history would change in China with a alphabetic script. I just think that Chinese seems especially prone to wild misconceptions being such a apparently exotic language and script family, and that's unfortunate and unnecessary. It doesn't help that Chinese is a difficult language for westerners to learn on multiple levels (characters entirely aside, phonology can be intimidating for any variety).

 

[Brunaburh]

snip

Objectively, as a technology, alphabets are superior. They allow literacy with minimal training, requiring many thousands of hours less practice. Inertia, tradition and the protection of privilege in a system probably played a part in logoraphs' retention, as others have said. Also political factors. English spelling is absurd compared to most languages, yet we retain it as its correct use is associated with being educated and it is difficult to choose a replacement that would be dialect-neutral.

You are right to say the Sinitic languages are often mystified, but I don't think people are doing so in this thread.

 

[GauchoBadger]

In case Wang Mang of Xin somehow manages to estabilish a lasting dynasty with more "populist" ideological overtones, could we see a simplification of the Chinese alphabet as a means of weakening the aristocracy, if the "complication for social segregation" theory is to be believed?

 

[dontfearme22]

Objectively, as a technology, alphabets are superior. They allow literacy with minimal training, requiring many thousands of hours less practice. Inertia, tradition and the protection of privilege in a system probably played a part in logoraphs' retention, as others have said. Also political factors. English spelling is absurd compared to most languages, yet we retain it as its correct use is associated with being educated and it is difficult to choose a replacement that would be dialect-neutral.

You are right to say the Sinitic languages are often mystified, but I don't think people are doing so in this thread.

My root point is that were it that obvious (and I think you are right in that they are easier to learn), that the Chinese would have historically adopted a alphabet. That they didn't means that while, one aspect of a logographic script is that it is more complex, that it might have some reasons for use that a comparative alphabet might not, beyond tradition. Think of extra information one can convey in a unique character for a concept that is lost with a string of letters, for instance. A character's meaning can also remain consistent over time even as pronunciation changes. While that can be true to a extent in a alphabetic script, I think you would agree its more difficult in the latter scenario than simply repeating the same symbol.

I think people are absolutely mischaracterizing characters here. Not out of maliciousness of course, just because thats how Chinese is discussed usually. But saying for instance, as one person has here that Chinese has two languages that are written the same, is a fundamentally flawed mischaracterization (if rooted in truth).

I mean, Chinese characters were adopted by most to all cultures in the broader East Asian region, a geographic area that's larger than Western Europe so its not like the difficulty of characters made them only usable in a highly restricted area, they just were spreading north and south, not west.

 

[Max Sinister]

Would China fall apart? At the moment, Mandarin and Cantonese speakers are still connected by using the same writing. But without?

 

[mosodake]

Just because a language uses an alphabet doesn't necessarily mean the writing system is particularly efficient or conducive to literacy. If you look at China's neighbors that have historically adopted alphabetic scripts (not counting those that have recently adopted alphabets like Vietnamese) with Korean being the only exception, writing systems tend to be based on Indian scripts. Other than that, the thing Tibetan, Mongolian, Cham, Burmese, Thai, and Khmer writing systems have in common is that they are extremely conservative and horrendously complicated. Fewer things to memorize than Chinese for sure, but definitely not particularly easy to read or write.

Tibetan and Burmese are the most widely spoken of the Sino-Tibetan family that are written with alphabets, and they have maintained in their writing the complex consonant clusters that have been lost in the spoken language. Like with standard written Chinese, the conservative nature of these writing systems allow speakers of different dialects to (mostly) understand each other in writing. I would expect a Chinese alphabet to do the same and make the historical spelling of French and English look like child's play.

If an alphabet is adopted early enough, it could impact the development of tones in Chinese as tones may have originated from the merging of Old Chinese consonant clusters.

 

[Timaeus]

I have a PoD in mind for this: Alishanda the Kingslayer passes through China leaving destruction (and the Hellenic alphabet) in his wake! It'd also fragment China, but such is the price of establishing alphabets in China.

 

[galileo-034]

That would require a pod at least back to the time of the invention of writing in China.
For the view I got in the few lessons of Mandarin I got, I'd think the mindsets underpinned by alphabetic and ideogram writing are incompatible. It's one thing to see Ataturk switching from perso-arabic script to the latin one as it was about exchanging an alphabet for another, but changing a writing system for another is a completely different thing.
Even using pinyin that can be seen as a phonetic transcription of the spoken language cannot be even remotely considered as an alphabetic substitute. Taking a single word I hear, even if get the tone right, I couldn't give the right ideogram among many that are spoken the same way or translation without the context due to very frequent homophones (just try "mà").
Now, that's a view of modern Chinese language, but I surmise that we would have to go back a long time to have an alphabet appearing naturally instead of inventing one with highly complicated orthographic rules to distinguish homophonic words from one another, something I deem especially more difficult due to the very monosyllabic nature of Chinese language (as spoken I mean), unless inventing a very long alphabet but with letters sounding the same to be able to differentiate. I guess that would involve moving to a more polysyllabic language back at least in the second millenia BC.

EDIT:

 

[mosodake]

Now, that's a view of modern Chinese language, but I surmise that we would have to go back a long time to have an alphabet appearing naturally instead of inventing one with highly complicated orthographic rules to distinguish homophonic words from one another, something I deem especially more difficult due to the very monosyllabic nature of Chinese language (as spoken I mean), unless inventing a very long alphabet but with letters sounding the same to be able to differentiate. I guess that would involve moving to a more polysyllabic language back at least in the second millenia BC.
[/MEDIA]

Tibetan, Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Lao, and Hmong are all just as, if not more monosyllabic than Mandarin, which has a large number of disyllabic words, yet they all manage to write with alphabets. The first three overcome homophones by using historical spelling - like the Chinese languages, older forms of those languages had more sounds and words that are homophones today were not in the past. Yet Lao is quite similar to Thai and its writing system is much less complex, indicating that historical spelling probably isn't necessary for comprehension.

 

[Jerry Kraus]

Objectively speaking, alphabetic scripts are superior to logograms. They require much less study in order to obtain competence, and therefore facilitate the transmission of knowledge. Let's imagine China either adopts an Indian script, or phoneticises its own alphabet.

What do we think are the implications? My personal view is that if this happens prior to about 500 AD, we see a much greater Chinese influence on World culture. OTL, Chinese ideas faced a serious barrier moving west as their writing system is exceptionally difficult to learn and therefore very little of what was written in China got translated into other languages. This did not work both ways, knowledge of Indian scripts and their translation into Chinese was common in China.

This will also mean wider, earlier mass literacy in China, but also the quicker diffusion of Chinese innovations westward, and a reciprocal refinement of technology developed in the various cultural centres of Eurasia. I strongly suspect technology would be far advanced of OTL, to the extent we might see moon landings a century earlier.

So, thoughts, ideas, objections? I'm particularly interested what effects people think this would cause in China itself.

A very interesting question that I've often considered myself, but, I'm not entirely sure your initial premise is entirely accurate. Are alphabetic scripts, objectively superior to "logograms"? Also, is Chinese script most accurately described as logograms, or as pictograms?

I prefer the term "pictographic" for Chinese script, because, actually a good deal of visual information quite relevant to word meaning is contained in the image itself, in a great deal of cases. So the symbol for man is 人, the symbol for woman is 女. Surely that's obvious enough, visually?

So, one of the reasons for the superiority of Chinese culture historically may be the pictographic script itself, which is extremely expressive and powerful visually, much more so than purely verbal scripts. Also, this visual script is universal, and can be used to represent any verbal language at all. It provided a ready bond for all nations subsumed within the Chinese Empire. For example, currently, English could be, quite accurately, described as a Chinese dialect, since English words can be represented just as well as Mandarin or Cantonese words in Chinese pictographic script.

Also, the very fact of the difficulty of writing Chinese script has resulted in useful innovations. Chinese printing developed early specifically because it was so very difficult to write Chinese script.

Rather than saying that alphabets are superior, let's say they're different. And, as usual, there are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.

The Japanese, of course, combine the two systems quite elegantly. They have an alphabet for Japanese words -- Hirgana -- an alphabet for foreign words -- Katakana -- and they use Chinese Kanji to represent many Japanese words, according to convention. This may tell you something, you know.

 

[Indicus]

I have a PoD in mind for this: Alishanda the Kingslayer passes through China leaving destruction (and the Hellenic alphabet) in his wake! It'd also fragment China, but such is the price of establishing alphabets in China.

I mean, Alexander didn't result in the Hellenic alphabet displacing the native ones in Persia, Phoenicia, or India, and as usage of Greek fell, so did use of the Hellenic alphabet. The only places where it did emerge to widespread use were in Bactria and in Central Asia, which were far more sparsely populated and largely backwaters. Even India, which had an extremely weak tradition of writing and instead saw massive focus placed on techniques used to memorize extremely long holy texts with all the proper pronunciations, used its pre-Greek script. So, I doubt Hellenic script would displace the Chinese script.

 

[Timaeus]

I mean, Alexander didn't result in the Hellenic alphabet displacing the native ones in Persia, Phoenicia, or India, and as usage of Greek fell, so did use of the Hellenic alphabet. The only places where it did emerge to widespread use were in Bactria and in Central Asia, which were far more sparsely populated and largely backwaters. Even India, which had an extremely weak tradition of writing and instead saw massive focus placed on techniques used to memorize extremely long holy texts with all the proper pronunciations, used its pre-Greek script. So, I doubt Hellenic script would displace the Chinese script.

Hm.

What if China were even more Buddhist-oriented?

 

[RousseauX]

Hm.

What if China were even more Buddhist-oriented?

At its maximum extent Buddhism was like 50% of China's population

it could have turned into China's christianity analogue if history went a bit differently

 

[Vuu]

Objectively speaking, alphabetic scripts are superior to logograms. They require much less study in order to obtain competence, and therefore facilitate the transmission of knowledge. Let's imagine China either adopts an Indian script, or phoneticises its own alphabet.

What do we think are the implications? My personal view is that if this happens prior to about 500 AD, we see a much greater Chinese influence on World culture. OTL, Chinese ideas faced a serious barrier moving west as their writing system is exceptionally difficult to learn and therefore very little of what was written in China got translated into other languages. This did not work both ways, knowledge of Indian scripts and their translation into Chinese was common in China.

This will also mean wider, earlier mass literacy in China, but also the quicker diffusion of Chinese innovations westward, and a reciprocal refinement of technology developed in the various cultural centres of Eurasia. I strongly suspect technology would be far advanced of OTL, to the extent we might see moon landings a century earlier.

So, thoughts, ideas, objections? I'm particularly interested what effects people think this would cause in China itself.

The main reason why this never occured is because there for the most of history there was no such thing as a Chinese language. The "dialects" are ludicrously distant lexically, but with logograms, the words are pronounced different, but still written the same so people can understand each other.

So for an alphabetic Chinese you need to either make them very homogenous early on, or never unite. They do have Bopomofo as an unused alphabet (used for learning pronunciation). Do you think that anyone would use such a way of writing without good reason? The Egyptians didn't use hieroglyphs all the way down you know. As for the "many words sound the same" - that's unironically no excuse. How do you tell apart when spoken, then?