Why didn't they ever adopt an alphabet?

why didn't they ever adopt an alphabet?

to confuse foreigners

They actually have an alphabet called Hiragana and another one that I forget the name of. I'm pretty sure the alphabet is used for computers and shit like that.

as a flip, I'm jealous the chinese still have their own script.

Because the script is actually more useful than an alphabet?

The uniformity of the script allowed different groups of Chinese to write letters to each other and communicate, even though they spoke mutually unintelligible dialects.

>Be Ancient China.
>Rule over vast Empire filled with different ethnocultural groups speaking different languages.
>A centralized empire to boot.
>You want your imperial decrees understood by your subject niggas.
>Now what is easier: force these groups to speak one language? Or create a system of logographs that everyone agrees will mean a word or a concept.
>Take into consideration a lot of your Non-Han subjects don't even have their own fucking writing systems.

>what is pinyin

Chinese script existed before the unification of China.

And it remained in use till today for the reasons given.

A pronunciation aid.

>Create a system of writing so universal and applicable to so many languages that it becomes the de facto writing system of every ethnicity in the region.

There was no need

Its actually kind of nice to have a non phonemic writing system. I think most alphabet writing systems are phonemic but Chinese is not.

Chinese languages are very diverse and they differ quiet a bit. From region to region and city to city even. Most different "dialects" of Chinese are actually different languages all together.

There is however just one written language system in China and this has been the case for 2000 years. This makes administration, trading and communication much easier.

>muh script

Spanish speaking zone is twice the size of China

That's Japanese, and it isn't a replacement for kanji.

>Hiragana (&katakana)
>China

Pick one.

>There is however just one written language system in China and this has been the case for 2000 years.

>what is tibetian, manchu, mongolian just off the top of my head
>there are are entire libraries of manchu documents containing things not found in traditional chinese

i love when Veeky Forums talks about shit they dont know aobut, it makes them cute in the same way a retarded puppy looks cute.

Yeah, and that "Spanish speaking zone" was created over the span of 400 years.

China is 5000 years old.

>China is 5000 years old.

Prove it.

Prove that the Spanish speaking zone exists.

You don't need the script to make different groups of people over a large terrority to speak the same language and to use the same writing system.

That is the point of my post .

The point isn't that you need it. The point is that that is how it evolved.

Yes today's border are not a actuate representation of China's past border. The borders also shifts through time.

Still written Chinese was standardized through a large geographical area. The main area of population in the Yellow and Yangtze river basin all had one written language .

whatever nerd

And how is it more useful than alphabet?

A guy from Mexico can have a chat or phone conversation with a guy from Chile without any problem.

Yeah, and if you actually read my posts you would know what the difference is you moron.

Mexicans and Chileans speak the same language.

People from Guangzhou and Beijing do not. But they use the same script.

>But they use the same script.

And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.

And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Again, what is the advantage of script over alphabet?

>And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.
>And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Stop trolling faggot.

If you know you don't know what you are talking about, why take the time to post proof of it?

Now do that in 500 bc

Look, I use the Latin alphabet , not Chink script, to chat with you, and both of us still understand what each other said.

Despite differences in ethnicity, country...etc. That means the Chink script you flattered so hard is just a meme.

...

>You don't need the script to make different groups of people over a large terrority to speak the same language and to use the same writing system.

Yeah, you need virulent disease to genocide the majority of the people there, and then export large quantities of your own people to replace the native population.

>And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.
>And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Are you dumb enough to imply that people need to learn Mandarin in order to understand the Script?

Literally ancient emoji.

One does not need to know a specific language to decipher it, although SVO languages may help.

Tibetan/Mongol languages aren't considered Chinese language tbqh. They're Tibetan/Mongol language as they have their own well defined cultural borders.

It's not like Chinese have ever had much problem slaughtering each other.

Probably more people died in the course of Chinese history than the entire colonization of the New World and yet not unified language.
Sad.

>implying you don't learn Hanzi to know what those logograms mean

Are you dumb enough to imply you can understand Chinese script simply by looking at it and that you don't need to learn it's quarter million characters or whatever the obscene number is, to know what they mean?

Wew this has to be bait

Maybe that had something to do with China having the most people in the world for 4000+ years.

An user being absolutely ignorant about the subject he posts about?
Sad.

>Probably more people died in the course of Chinese history than the entire colonization of the New World

Is this bait?

He probably just forgot to drop some of the zeros off.

>Person A speaks language C, but learns Chinese script
>Person B speaks D language, but learns the same Chinese script

How the fuck is this so hard to understand you mongoloid?

>You need to learn the characters to understand what those characters mean

Do you know what you are talking about?

>China is 5000 years old
I like this meme.

>Person A speaks language C, but learns language E
>Person B speaks D language, but learns the same language E


Try harder, Bao

>He doesn't even know the difference between spoken language and written

I mean, only on Veeky Forums could someone be this fucking stupid.

It's not that unfeasible because China is apparently the oldest and most populated civilization in the world, that more people would die in it's conflicts over thousands of years than a colonization exercise that lasted a few hundred.

So this is not the written? ,

> " hello, you dumb fuck" .

This is the language E

>china is oldest civilisation
what is this shit meme

I know you're trolling, but seriously educate yourself.

You're just making a fool out of yourself.

>He's clinging to pedantry out of autistic pride

Only someone who has never spent time learning hanzi would claim that learning it is a simple solution to mass communication across cultures.

Holy fuck user

Written Chinese and Spoken Chinese are not the same language.

>Roman Empire uses Latin, written phonetically
>it all just collapses into the various Romance languages and unity of culture is lost
>Chinese Empire uses a shitload of mutually unintelligible languages mostly descended from Old Chinese and Middle Chinese
>they can all be written with the same script that allows them to understand each other despite being mutually unintelligible verbally, unity of culture is preserved throughout the periods of division

I never said it was a "simple solution to mass communication across cultures".

I said it was *a* solution.

If X character means the same in Guangzhou as it means in Beijing, but it is pronounced differently in speech, you don't need to speak the same language to communicate.

I am Singaporean Chinese and I can read all the traditional (and most simplified) Chinese posted here but I wouldn't understand a thing spoken in Beijing.

Please don't talk about what you clearly don't know

Hanzi is not required

>muh troll

>muh Y-you must learn X to know X

That applied to any language, logogram or phonogram.

>I am Singaporean Chinese and I can read all the traditional (and most simplified) Chinese posted here but I wouldn't understand a thing spoken in Beijing.
Don't you guys learn Mandarin down there or are you one of those old people who only speaks Hokkien or Cantonese?

>that more people would die in it's conflicts over thousands of years than a colonization exercise that lasted a few hundred.

The bait part was the fact this low IQ mouth breather somehow thinks that gross deaths matters more than the rate of death as percentage of your total population when it comes supplanting an entire culture and people with your own.

Only some learn Mandarin

Many speak Cantonese languages though in the home.

Likewise, many Cantonese in Guangzhou don't know any Mandarin. We perfectly understand what is on Weibo or a government report though. There are some exceptions of course, especially among the elderly.

Yes you're a baitlord.

>Only someone who has never spent time learning hanzi
>Pea brain couldn't handle learning characters because his tiny brain couldn't handle it.

You can literally read the script in English you fool.

I think it's important to understand that all of the thousands of larger complex characters are made from a much smaller set of simple ones.

Example: 木 is considered an individual character, but so is 林 and 森. Even though it's just reusing one single character in an increasing amount.

So it's similar to taking letters and building words, just instead of writing them all next to each other sequentially, they're assembled in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

That being said, it is not phonetic, but that wasn't what was important, as others pointed out. They wanted to be understood by multiple readers across languages.

What we are using now is the written form of a language.

And?

You don't pronounce "language" when you read it like the French do, even though it's a French word.

OK, here's an example.

If I wanted to tell the time, and I only speak Hokkien.

The time is 9:25.

In Hokkien you would say "kau diam gor lei ji"

In Mandarin it is "jiu dian wu ge zi"

Spoken, we can't understand each other. But in writing form, both are written as 「九點五個字」。 We can communicate.

/thread

Okay.

Let me make this clear for you since you don't seem capable of reading wikipedia or watching a youtube video about Chinese.

Written Chinese looks like this 葉

It represents a single idea.

"Spoken Chinese" is a Western-invented term to describe the 57+ Chinese spoken languages.

They are roughly similar to the difference between English and Upper German.

In England and Germany, people use the Latin Alphabet. The Germans used to have a runic alphabet though.

In China they don't use an alphabet. They use what is essentially a separate written language formed by these characters 雑. The pronunciation of each character depends on your spoken language, but the idea represented by each character is the same.

Therefore a Cantonese Chinese like me can understand the character and tell my blind father about it via pronouncing it in Cantonese, but he will only know the actual written character's shape if I take care to express the full idea it represents.

It's not like using the Latin Alphabet between Germans and English. It's like using a solely written language to communicate, and translating it into our own spoken language.

ohhhhh

Oh, I thought it was your government policy for all races to have to learn their race's mother tongue in school, meaning Mandarin for the Chinese. Guess I heard wrong. paiseh paiseh

They should just use Zhuyin DESU

Of course the system isn't perfect since each "dialect" has its own peculiarities of grammar, vocabulary, and so on, they aren't exact ciphers of each other. But they are still close enough to be intelligible via the writing system, especially when using Classical Chinese aka Literary Chinese which has an extremely stripped down grammar structure and laconic form.

>Cantonese languages
But hokkien is the largest dialect group in Singapore.

That's nice, and entirely irrelevant to my point that the supposed advantage of cross-cultural communication it affords is outweighed by it's significant disadvantages.

And yet we use the Latin alphabet to write these comments, not your Chinese script, and still pretty much understand. Kinda ironic, huh?

Remembering hiragana only words is harder than words with kanji. Using only bopomofo or pinyin only would be even more painful.

The advantage is that the system is more resistant to languages diverging and becoming unintelligible, which is important when you are working across such a massive geographical territory. Look at what happened to Vulgar Latin.

>missing the point
Written Chinese is a fascinating language for autists but it is simply obsolete in comparison to the more efficient Latin alphabet system.

Because the world as it is today is conducive to everyone learning and maintaining English as a lingua franca. Conditions were different in ancient China when people don't travel around or communicate very much beyond their immediate surroundings.

Oh yes more efficient which is why the Roman Empire collapsed and fell to pieces, and everyone started speaking different languages which evolved from Vulgar Latin and identifying as different people; whereas in China the empire could fragment and reunite as much as they liked and they all still maintained a unity of culture through written language.

Learning Mandarin alongside English wasn't all that hard. There's only around 214 radicals that form the rest of the characters. You can infer meaning and pronunciation from the characters most of the time. It's not so inefficient that it's worth getting rid of. It would be akin to getting everyone to switch from English to Esperanto because it's "more logical".

...

i don't know what the meaning of most radicals mean, i just learned the intuitive combination of radicals and their equivalent english meanings.

Native learners don't memorise radical meanings, but from context and knowing other characters that use the same radical you can guess.

>Native learners don't memorise radical meanings

that's bullshit. i've been to an elementary school class and saw a teacher teach radicals.

>simply obsolete in comparison to the more efficient Latin alphabet system.

Once again your tinyness of your mind is staggering. You do realize that the way we process words in a Latin alphabet system is the same as a logographic system? That we simply collate letters into a general shape, and then tether than shape into an idea? It's why we misread things, and insert words where there are none. From a brain power standpoint there is 0 difference.

You're the only one bringing brainpower into this chum.
:3

I might come from a place of bias but it really seems logical to me that an alphabet of 26 characters that is (more or less) phonetic is far less complex, and therefore easier to master, than the chinese script with its several hundred radicals

There is a point to Chinese characters being harder to learn. Both Japan and Korea adopted Hanzi for their written system due to Han/Tang influence, however, both languages reformed by adding a phonetic system, which later superceded hanja/kanji as the primary writing system.

China itself has done the same thing with Pinyin, and I don't think it's implausiable that Hanzi itself becomes depreciated in the far (>100 yr) future.

Not him, but this is wrong.

MRI studies of dyslexic kids from alphabetic or logographic regions show that the two have no relation (a person dyslexic in English may not be dyslexic in Chinese, and vice versa), and reading in the two languages occupies different parts of the brain.

In alphabetic languages one decodes shapes into sounds; in logographic, shapes into ideas.

I wouldn't say kana are primary writing systems.

Pinyin is not a writing system. It's a phonetic aid.

Are they not? My exposure to Japanese documents and literature gives the impression that they are mostly kana based, and the more recent and less official the document, the more kana it has and less kanji. I can read older japanese documents easier due to greater prevalence of kanji from knowing Chinese.

Japan adopted kanji because too many homophones in their language.

Context in incredibly important with spoken and hiragana written japanese. Otherwise you get confused.

the world for bridge and chop stick is written the same way, and even sounds similar. depending on where you stress the word, changes the meaning. though half of japan flips the meanings. so you can say the word identically in two parts of japan and the people in those parts will think of different items.

Well the point is that pinyin is a phonetic aid now, but I can see pinyin becoming more and more important, to the point of potentially supplanting hanzi. This is accelerated by keyboard input of text, which is predominantly pinyin. Modern urbanized Chinese input far more text by keyboard than handwriting, to the point that the handwriting skill atrophies rapidly for college graduates now that they don't have to take paper tests anymore.

I grew up in HK. I'm not going to lie, although I can still passively understand it when spoken, my command of written Cantonese is pretty lousy, but I cannot imagine reading a substantial text written in pinyin. As an aid for reading the hanzi, sure, but on its own, no chance. Sounds like it would be completely illegible.

Because Chinese language stayed around along with Chinese characters.

Almost all proto/original writing script starts logographic and stayed ideogram. e.g.: hieroglyph, oracle bone, sumerians cuneiforms.
i.e. all original character comes with associated sound, meaning, and graphic.

The languages that came along with all these script is fucking dead except chinese language.

The reason europe and elsewhere using phonetic script is because you're all using stupidified knockoff writing script.

Consider the following degrees of adopting writing system:
1) Take in the foreign characters along with the accompanying language as a whole. Example: coastal niggers in pre modern era around China (JapKorViet) all wrote and record history exclusively in classical chinese, a foreign language to them. Consider a fictional England where the plebs speaks english but couldn't bother to learn to write a shit, and the patricians would rather write documents in Latin/French than in Aenglisc.

2) Use the foreign characters along with the associated meanings and sounds, treat them as sort of loanword or root word and incorporate them into local language. Example: Kanji in modern Jap.

3) Use the foreign characters to purely denote sounds. Example: Phoenician and shits.

And this is a strength of the somewhat arbitrary English spelling system as well. At this point any attempt to make it more phonetically exact is a waste of time due to the wide variety of dialects.

God damn, English really is the perfect lingua franca, the love child of Germanic and Latin Europe. Frenchies, eat your heart out.

It is much more than that.

>Japan adopted kanji because too many homophones in their language.
I'm pretty sure they adopted kanji because they are located next to China.