Would Middle Eastern and Asian countries have developed sooner if they used discrete-character alphabets? (e.g...

Interesting, although it would have been better still if they'd managed to do it without the million random pictures.

I've heard a theory that it takes a Chinese child MUCH longer to become fully literate (compared to other languages) due to the complexity of the writing system, which if true certainly would explain part of why China didn't develop.

This is quite interesting: ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3549123/

Apparently reading ability of young Chinese is declining, since they spend all their time entering text phonetically on computers (using the roman alphabet), not by hand-writing which would normally cause them to "decode" the characters into their elements.

Also, funfact: Chinese children learn the romanized system (pinyin) BEFORE learning Chinese characters (they use much easier pinyin to then teach the Chinese logograms)... which begs the question: why not just drop the Chinese characters, since they just add an extra (unnecessary?) step?

>Wew it's this outdated argument again
Just because you're too dumb and ignorant to understand their languages doesn't mean their languages are inefficient.

And to answer your westerncentric question:
No, you seem to forget it's China first developed movable press printing, not the West. China did encounter some difficulty for adapting western typewriter but it's still resolved in the end. Besides, now it's computer age, Chinese logogram actually is more efficient than phonetic alphabets(e.g. the Latin or Cyrillic) in computer typing. I've explained this countless time, I don't feel like to go through this again.

See the pic, this is what I and Taiwanese Chinese actually use.

Movable type isn't nearly as convenient when you need orders of magnitude more character blocks to print anything. (also I thought it was the Koreans who invented it, albeit using Chinese characters)

And it's still obviously much less efficient for computing. For starters you REQUIRE I high resolution display, with enough processing power and memory to store all the characters, their metadata, and the character selector software.

So, not a problem for modern desktop computers or phones, but it remains one when it comes to devices (you can enter English easily with a single button cycling through letters if needed, and display it on a line-segment display.

youtube.com/watch?v=3VVIuzbpWEs

This looks like a pain in the ass. Although I guess tonal languages don't translate well to alphabets either (see: Vietnam's absolute clusterfuck of diacritics)

It would be as if you could only type the first two or three letters of any English word, and were forced to then pick through the auto-complete list. Sounds like pure suffering.

And this one is used by Mainland China, HK, Macau.

>I thought it was the Koreans who invented it
No.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

>For starters you REQUIRE I high resolution display
No.

>with enough processing power and memory to store all the characters
No.

These are all your fucking imagination and shows your ignorance again, I've NEVER encounter these issues and I'm native Chinese speaker, and also these are not the main issues when people were developing Chinese computer typing back then.

Chinese typing is more efficient than English is because it's more condense and cost far less letters than English and most phonetic writings(which means less storing space and cpu useage), it also doesn't require "space" to write and comprehend, and it also can write with all directions. Just that simple.

Anyway, You can try as hard as you can to belittle and despise Chinese logogram. But you can't stop China's reviving and gradually overtakes the West again(not to mention the already developed regions such as HK, TW, Macau), it's also the living proof that our writing system actually has no problem, whether you like it or not.

>cunts

Back.

How does it not require a high-resolution display? I can't imagine there are line-segment displays, or flip displays, that can show Chinese (or, at least, represent any arbitrary Chinese, not just a limited subset of symbols). These sorts of displays are still widely used and useful, because they're cheaper, lower power, and more robust.

And certainly it requires orders of magnitude more computing resources to deal with Chinese. English can be fully represented in 6-bits (plus some minimal storage for the glyphs); with Chinese you'd need MASSIVELY more character spaces for all the different characters, then MASSIVELY more storage for all the complex glyphs, then to allow it to be types via pinyn you'd need all sorts of metadata (their pinyin equivalents at the least). Again, this remains an issue with simple, low-power devices.

Plus the topic of the thread is how this has held countries like China back: even if it's not such an issue today, it certainly was +30 years ago when computing resources were very limited (it wasn't uncommon for early home computers not to include lower-case English characters, since it took up too much space!)

I find western brats really have lots of opinions on things they barely know about.

>How does it not require a high-resolution display?
Because it's proved by our actual using experiences, I can type Chinese in fucking 800*600 resolution of a 4 inches screen without any problem. Also see pic.

>I can't imagine
Of course you can't, you still seem to talk from your ass without basic understanding of Chinese languages. I bet you can't write/read any Chinese, whereas I at least can speak/write/read both Chinese and English.

> the topic of the thread is how this has held countries like China back
And your assumption is biased and false. Language is not really issue, it doesn’t hold off our development eventually. China used to have lower literacy rate than Europe in 19th ~ mid 20th century is because we didn’t have universal compulsory education. By the time we planned to do it, China was in chaos again, China didn’t really have the resources and stability to enforce it until 1970s.

And now thanks to successful compulsory education, China, HK, TW…etc all have over 95% literacy rate, higher than many countries who use “discrete-character alphabets”.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_literacy_rate

>it certainly was +30 years ago when computing resources
What pointless argument. We already solved it decades ago, which is the very proof that it doesn’t hold off our development. The first Chinese typewriter is invented in 1946, Chinese computer input is invented during 1980s, around the same time computer tech was popularized worldwide.

I'm curious: how would Chinese character input work in the 80s? Presumably there wasn't a daemon searching for relevant characters as in a modern input manager? (I can't imagine how slow that've been)

ITT ignorance

>gradually overtakes the West
tell me ching fing, how exactly are they going to "take over" the west?
just because they manufacture consumer goods and have the highest number of modern day slaves?
right.

Korea would have done such great things if it wasn't always between a rock and a hard place. Sejong was a genius.

The Korean script it a masterpiece. It's at least as good, if not better than an alphabet.

>why not just drop the Chinese characters, since they just add an extra (unnecessary?) step?
I asked a Chinese linguist and he told me that essentially cultural pride forbids it.

>Chinese typing is more efficient than English
Please explain.

>because it's more condense and cost far less letters than English
Do you mean that it is more efficient because fewer characters per sentence are needed?

That sounds like saying that CISC is more inherently efficient than RISC just because fewer instructions are needed.

Arranging one block is easier than 4-8 blocks. Maybe there’s more blocks over all, but I don’t see this as a typesetting issue.

Pretty much this, but it's a very important reason.

Dropping characters means losing the ability to read classical texts, because the classical language can't be romanized (by current pinyin at least). The famous Shi poem was composed by pro-romanization linguist Zhao Yuanren to counter the more extreme pro-romanization radicals who thought they could throw away characters and romanize everything overnight.

I've read that having such a mechanically complicated script aids in arithmetic ability. Might explain why the Chinese in particular seem to be dominating STEM. That, and more familial pride.

Nobody on this board knows anything about languages, and they know even less about asian languages.

>aggressively rpijg on Veeky Forums

It is an alphabet, but the way to laid out makes it needlessly difficult to print (whether for movable type printing, typewriters, early computers).

It's not needless, it improves reading speed and information density.

Autocorrect

>Triggered
Lel

>Believing in chinese statistics
>In a country that is famous for faking them all
I bet you also believe that China actually belongs up there on the PISA test.

Bullshit, it's bad engineering.
Phonetic writing is more efficient and easier to learn.

It's like two the two different processor architectures proposed in computer science:
1- Does very few complex actions
2- Does lots of small actions

The second one has won, it is vastly more efficient.

Shit, sorry mate,I quoted the wrong one.
I meant this one

>pedantic

redditor spotted

>CIDF out in full forces
Need to work harder for that pound of rice, Chang.

How about a non-meme question:
Would medieval Europe have fared better if they had wider access to paper?

No changing the topic, Wong.
This isn`t about how Europe could have become even greater, this is about why China is a utter shithole, with the largest slave population to date.

Do you people even realize how utterly assblasted you sound? It makes it seem like you're the actual Chinese shills trying to make China critics look bad.

They have Hiragana for sounds.

Who cares, as long as I don`t have to live in the literal wasteland that is inner China

Hangul is phonetic, you mong. They use some Chinese characters, but only because of tradition. There is no need to and their usage is in decline.

I don't speak Korean, but I taught English in Korea, and some of my students (including teenagers) would use Chinese characters to clear up ambiguity when words were out of context. E.g. when looking up a translation of a word, or doing an image search.

I believe Korean is absolutely packed with homonyms since so much of the vocab is from Chinese, yet 'flattened' without the tones (so basically the pinyin problem).

China would have been enormously hindered by an alphabet instead of the Hanzi because speakers of the different dialects wouldn't have been able to communicate in writing without translation.

Japan already has two discreet character syllabary "alphabets." Both would be useless for writing Japanese without Kanji since that would take up so much more space. An actual alphabet for Japanese would be straight up retarded.

Different writing systems work differently for different languages. Languages are different. There isn't a writing system that is perfect for all of them.

Everything in this post is wrong.

>Why don't you just abandon your entire literary canon and culture and your people's unique way of expressing themselves?

It can just be transcribed, it's not like the language changes. Some shit will be lost in translation, but you have a similar problem trying to read a 19th century text in English.

No, you're wrong.

Chinese speakers in the Soviet Union did (and do) use an alphabet apparently without issue: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language

Without the retarded Chinese script, China would have developed a Koine language that would have become the standard language. That's what happened in Germany. Their character crippled their culture and inhibited linguistic unification.

Japanese cannot not be written in Kanji because of space constraints, that idea is idiotic, Kana aren't significantly bigger than western letters. The reason is that their language is poisoned with Chinese imported homonyms, like Korean.

Many things would be lost in translation. All the latent visual associations between characters would be lost, the different relations of the radicals. You would lose when an author choses a certain character because the way it looks evokes the look of another linguistically unrelated character that can still be brought to mind in the context of the work in a meaningful way. There are jokes based on the characters, like where you use the verbal reading of a character because that reading fits the sentence, but the visual meaning is different but still fits in a funny way. Imagine if you got rid of connotations in English words and only had denotations. You'd be stripping off about that much meaning from literary texts.

>Without the retarded Chinese script, China would have developed a Koine language that would have become the standard language.

t. I have no idea of Chinese history.

This is fun:

嬲 Two men around a woman = tease
嫐 Two women around a man = flirt

p.s. I have a retina Mac, and have to lean in and squint to try and make the character out. I assume it'd be impossible to read at 'standard' resolution?

>Without the retarded Chinese script, China would have developed a Koine language that would have become the standard language. That's what happened in Germany. Their character crippled their culture and inhibited linguistic unification.
Oh so all they'd need to do is develop a new language.

>Japanese cannot not be written in Kanji because of space constraints, that idea is idiotic, Kana aren't significantly bigger than western letters. The reason is that their language is poisoned with Chinese imported homonyms, like Korean.
A novel in Hiragana would have many more pages because of the multiplied characters, would be exceedingly tedious to read for an adult, and would just plain look like too much of a bother.

How does anyone read characters like this if they're not blown up to absurd sizes?

龘齉爨馕

>Their character crippled their culture and inhibited linguistic unification.
Funny how they got a 2000 year old Empire and ongoing unification that goes contrary to your opinions.

>Chinkaboos still like to pretend their current mafiocracy is somehow still historically connected to the Shang, the Tang, or even the Ming.

Korea is doing pretty well today. If they can reunify without a nuclear holocaust, after the painful reintegration of the North they could possibly outdo China economically.

First you are going to get raped by arabs and niggers from third world countries because you can't stop inviting them AND THEN China is going to clean up.

Get it?

>Shang
Noticed how I said "2000 year old" because I began my count with the Qin period, in which the concept of "China" as a state was made real. Excluding Shang and Zhou

Shang and Zhou -while significant to the cultural development of China- isn't China (understood as a state). The Shang was a Theocratic hegemony over the Protochink states and the Zhou was a loose feudal union of said states through marriage links with the ruling Zhou Kings' families.

Also no matter how much you dislike the PRC, it is still a unified Chink government.

>w-we europeans h-haven't much since A-Alexander and the Romans, just look at our multicultural paradises today.... yep truly the work of the master race!

>biang

Hahahahahahahahaha

I actually am a little big familiar with hanzi and I can't stop laughing at this

Arabic script isn't that hard to learn.
Asian logographic systems were intentionally hard to keep only an small elite literate.
Pic related; A chinese typewriter.

The Turks had a huge jump in literacy when they romanized, although I think arabic script (as they used it) was a particularly bad fit for their language.

>The Turks had a huge jump in literacy when they romanized
When they modernized.

Unlike the other examples, the Turks did have a ruling bureaucratic class that hampered literacy.

The modern meme understanding of the middle ages and lead up to the renaissance was that Europe was a barbaric backwater a la game of thrones then just randomly invented caravels and decided to be colonial imperialist assholes for the next 500 years.

The truth is Europe quickly adopted any and all technology and innovations it was exposed to from the 11th century onwards and by the 13th was easily on par with the rest of the world and contributing many innovations of their own.

Europe had figured out how to plow their heavy soils around the time of Charlemagne and relative newcomers on the stage of densely populated regions of the old world. Generally the regions were the Mediterranean coast, the fertile crescent and Persia, northern India and east Asia stretching from Northern Vietnam, across China and Korea to Japan. The northern half of Europe joined this region, being very densely populated in the area around the English Channel and to Denmark, though moderately dense from northern Spain to Russia. A huge area, all accessible to trade as Europeans built more large ships like cogs and joined to Mediterranean trade. All stimulating commerce and economic activity, ores and timber from Scandinavia and Russia could be brought to the manufacturing centers of Flanders while China never sent expeditions to do the same in Manchuria, at least not on a large scale as far as I know.

China was a shade behind Europe at the time, especially after all the Mongol shenanigans. Changing the alphabet would be largely irrelevant on the larger scale of things.

>11th century onwards and by the 13th was easily on par with the rest of the world
Except in terms of stable government lmao.