From a thread asking opinions about emoji usage.
However it happens and whomever is responsible here we are… and we’re losing ground fast. And things like emojis are leading the charge.
Should we tell them @[email protected] is responsible?
From a thread asking opinions about emoji usage.
However it happens and whomever is responsible here we are… and we’re losing ground fast. And things like emojis are leading the charge.
Should we tell them @[email protected] is responsible?
Logographic writing is an elitist construct, and the result of literacy being restricted to only those with relative wealth and connections.
Phonetic writing is a tool of proletarian liberation.
Phonetic writing is a way for the bourgeois class to keep the proles from communicating to each other while they (the ruling class) speak to each other using some foreign or dead prestige language that takes much more effort to learn than logographic writing. The average French of Spanish worker has a limited ability to communicate to eachother despite the fact that their languages are so similar that they could be considered dialects, while their ruling class can easily communicate each other via Greek or Latin or English, both of which are much harder to learn than a theoretical logographic romance language orthography (especially considering English is already partially logographic).
The idea that pre-industrial literacy rate in China was lower than Europe’s is some bazinga brain bullshit. In 1860 the Literacy rate for Spain was 41.7% and 11.9% for Men and Women respectively[0], “Education and popular literacy in Ching China” puts the Qing Dynasty’s literacy rate in the same period as “30~45%” for men and “2~10%” for women. It’s hard to find exact statistics for Pre-Qing dynasty literacy rates, but it’s generally accepted that literacy was much higher in the previous Ming Dynasty. Corroboratory Evidence is that Ming Dynasty was known for mass producing manuals on farming and construction whose audience would necessarily consists of the lower classes. I can’t find a western equivalent to for example 天工開物 (1637 manual on farming and industry distributed by the Ming Dynasty), or 營造法式(1103 manual on construction distributed by the Song Dynasty). This ties into the unfounded belief amongst westerners that somehow Chinese couldn’t be printed, when widespread use of printing in China predates that of the west by several centuries. Literacy in China was low before the revolution because it was an unindustrialized society, not because logography is somehow hard to learn.
How does that compare to Korea in the same time frame, though? Because both of the known times that an alphabet emerged from a logographic system it was a move to increase accessibility and enable more widespread literacy, and apparently even China considered a phonetic script as an option for attaining full literacy post-revolution only to decide against it and go with simplifying their logographic script instead.
The big thing that stands out, though, is that modern “phonetic” scripts have locked into irregularity and have started taking on some of the qualities of a logographic script as a result, and that the standard for what constitutes “literacy” varies wildly on context so while pure phonetic scripts may be the most accessible in allowing anyone to start being able to sound out words well enough to comprehend written language with minimal training, what actually constitutes full literacy in a language is massively more involved than that and may not actually differ significantly between modern “phonetic” scripts and logographic ones since both entail years of education and heavy practical use.
Or to put it another way, in English a small child can “read” and “write” phonetically with only a few weeks or months of training, but won’t be literate for another 10-15 years.
I would say the transition from Cuneiform to the Aramaic script lead to a sharp decrease in literacy in Mesopotamia. Likewise I don’t think Classical era Coptic speakers had a higher literacy rate than Ancient Egyptians. /semi serious
I would say that most transitions from logographic script to phonetic script result from a logographic writing culture being invaded by a phonetic writing culture, and usually ends with the logographic writing culture dying out completely (like the above). Likewise, The first attempt to create a phonetic script for Chinese was during the Mongol led Yuan Dynasty, which created the Phag-Pa script. All attempts to write Chinese phonetically are basically illegible and require you to write in a style that makes you sound like a lobotomite. You have to massively restrict your vocabulary and also essentially stop using any grammatical contractions.
Anecdotally iirc the PRC reformed the Yi language from a logographic script to a syllabary in one autonomous region while in another it remained as it was. The Yi script is a logographic script that is completely seperate from Chinese. IIRC literacy rates are like 2x higher in the region that didn’t do the phonetic reform.
Hangul wasn’t really used for most of its history, and only became widespread in like the 1890s. Past that Koreans seemed to have used a mixed orthography of Hangul and Chinese characters (kind of like how Japanese uses Kanji and Kana but less extreme because the korean system only used Chinese characters for Chinese origin words) until like 2 generations ago. I have a magazine published in like the 90s that still used this mixed orthography.
Also this random source I have puts overall Korean literacy in 1945 at 22%[1], which is on par with the previous mentioned Spanish and Qing literacy rates, despite this being like 50 years after the Gabo reforms (1896) when " the Hangul Korean alphabet was adopted in official documents for the first time in 1894.[26] Elementary school texts began using the Korean alphabet in 1895"[2]
That’s fascinating. I wonder if there’s been any solid work done on like average hours of education required to reach such and such a level of proficiency with different sorts of scripts, because I’ve always seen phonetic scripts portrayed as the vulgar and accessible ones while logographic systems are elite and require considerable training.
I do know that dyslexia basically only exists for phonetic writing.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0282200
This study claims that German children with dyslexia when being taught Chinese characters performed as well as non-dyslexic German children.
I straight up can’t find one about comparative hours learned, but I do remember seeing someone claim Spain spends less time teaching Spanish than the US does English and China Chinese. But also I assume for Spanish any writing before the renaissance is in Latin and most technical writing in English (I remember being really disappointed that the Cybersyn documentation was all in English), English has the challenge of teaching Germanic speaking children a bunch of Greek and Latin loanwords not used in daily life if they want full technicll literacy, and the Chinese education system will teach 8th century poetry to 8 year olds and 13th century poems to actual babies.
In my experience if you ever press anyone who claims logographic writing takes longer for evidence they’ll just throw their arms up and go “but there’s so many characters” and never produce any actual evidence.
Also now that you mention it, historically phonetic scripts have been limited to the elite in China. Phag-Pa script was basically only used by high level government officials. Manchu was something only the Manchu nobility used. Buddhists transmit their writing primarily in Chinese, with only the elite monks learning Sanskrit (which is highly phonetically regular). Chinese Muslims historically developed their own method of Islamic education that involved learning both Arabic for the Quran and Chinese to read the Chinese classics. Even BoPoMoFo was originally something that was only intended to be used by linguists. If any of these scripts were actually that much easier to use than Chinese, it surely would’ve spread to the lower classes.
The closest you get are the Dungan, who speak a language that’s like 60% Chinese 40% Arabic loanwords, who used the Arabic script. Ironically Western linguists consider Dungan a dialect even though it’s pretty much the only clear cut case of a seperate language compared to Chinese dialects they consider to be languages.
Just going to jump in here to say this is all fascinating. Thanks.
The Chinese have done well with making logographic writing accessible to the masses
While true, it’s taken a tremendous amount of effort, and from what I can find, it still takes more schooling to reach the same relative level of literacy.
The Koreans had it right in switching over.
The same relative level of literacy for knowing how to read Chinese for English would be being able to read Dutch and Flemish as well as Old English and Germanic Runes. The Chinese education system lasts exactly as long as that of any other country. Anecdotally the highest level of schooling I achieved with Chinese is gradeschool level and I can read the previously mentioned 12th century construction manuals. I don’t think an English speaker with only a grade school level of education could read even modern construction codes without a lot of trouble.
Koreans literally still have to teach their kids some amount of Chinese characters. Their ID cards has their names written with Chinese characters, scientific publications have to use Chinese characters for disambiguation. Even Korean Wikipedia has to use Chinese characters for disambiguation.[1] North and South Korea has been seperated for maybe 2-3 generations and they already have significant spelling differences due to dialectical differences. Also despite being a relatively young writing system, Hangul is already partially non-phonetic[2]. Perfectly phonetic writing does not exist. You have to force everyone to memorize one particular dialect’s pronunciations, and by the time you’ve done that it will have already drifted away so that the orthography is non-phonetic. It’s a never ending treadmill that effectively limits the ability to read primary historical documents to the elite while not actually making writing that much more accessible.