[astrobe_]

You can't possibly count the third time as a real attempt. A language reform initiated by a foreigner and recent enemy at war, who burned your cities and even nuked two of them? If someone knows about successful examples, I'd be curious to hear about them.

[bobthepanda]

Latin script for Vietnamese replaced Chinese-based script under the French colonial government and were helped by the Nguyen Emperors going along with it. (Interestingly this did not take off in neighboring Cambodia or Laos.)

Hanja is also mostly gone in Korea, particularly in North Korea.

The big thing is that both shifts happened before rapid literacy growth. It's much easier to teach new writing systems when the majority of the population can't write anyways. 95% of Vietnamese could not write in 1945; only 22% of Koreans were literate in that time period.

---

One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.

[thaumasiotes]

> One interesting thing I learned while researching this comment was that a big reason Hanja disappeared was because Koreans gained literacy during the typewriting era, but before computer auto-suggested keyboards, and it was just substantially easier to make and use a letter-based typewriter.

If you look in the right places, you can find people complaining about how it's impossible to dynamically render hangul blocks, which means that a Korean font needs to define glyphs for every possible Korean syllable as opposed to just defining the elements of the system and letting a word processor assemble them as appropriate.

If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

The Chinese used typewriters by defining a typewriter code. Assuming that that was necessary for hanja, and also for hangul, why would it promote the disappearance of hanja?

If a typewriter code wasn't necessary for hangul, how did we forget how to lay out the blocks in between then and now? Hangul have been in continuous use for all that period.

[coffeeling]

> If that's true, I don't see how hangul could have had any typewriter-based advantage over hanja. From the typewriter's perspective, there's no difference.

There are mechanical hangeul typewriters that, while more complicated than Latin or katakana typewriters, are still completely usable for normal writing. The reason hangeul fonts are hard is that a hangeul syllable occupies a standard-sized block, and in eg. careful handwriting the writer would adjust the sizes and positions of the characters to be aesthetically nice. For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UenaIex_ZXY

You can see from the output in this video how the sizes of letters are very standard and somewhat disproportionate, eg. in CV type syllables the vowel lines are somewhat giant compared to the quarter-of-the-block sizeish consonants, etc.

That way you can still write by pressing alphabet buttons, with some controls as to where you want the letter to go in the block. It's a bit more complicated, but nothing compared to the nightmare that are proper Chinese character typewriters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDkR87zHdXk

[thaumasiotes]

> For example, in 해 he the ㅎ andㅐ letters are both the same size. When you write 핸 hen, see how the h especially becomes smaller? In typewritten hangeul, that first consonant is always that small, so you can use only one size of initial h and so on.

I see the opposite. As those characters render in whatever font my browser picked, the ㅎ in 해 occupies much less vertical space than the ㅐ does.

In the 핸, it still occupies less vertical space, but the difference is smaller. It's about as tall as the left-hand bar of the ㅐ instead of being significantly less tall than that.

[coffeeling]

Okay. The point is, the typewriter writes 핸-style ㅎ always. Even if it could be a bit taller, but tends to leave the vowel lines bigger.

[bobthepanda]

There are around theoretical 11,000 possible Korean blocks, which is a lot. But Unicode has ~98,000 Chinese characters.

Nine times the characters is a quaint problem for computers but a very difficult problem for a physical typewriter.

[thaumasiotes]

No, it is a problem exactly equal to the other one. No typewriter can produce 98,000 different characters. And no typewriter can produce 11,000 different characters.

With zero difference between hangul and hanja, how can the typewriter favor one over the other?

[bobthepanda]

There were Chinese typewriters but they were very large and a lot more annoying to use. Japan also used typewriting. They just look a lot different, with a giant cylinder of tiny keys to facilitate thousands of characters. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ-SHOsbH4Y

Hangul ones were a lot smaller. I misspoke earlier; they had letter-based keyboards and mostly just did compromises on the shape of the syllabic blocks; a keyset for an initial character, a keyset for medial characters and a keyset for terminal characters. If you just assume the initial character set can be tiny to fit both the characters with and without bottom terminals, then you wind up with slightly odd-looking but perfectly serviceable typed Korean.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8lfgxBj440&list=PL7HFg4f79l...

[thaumasiotes]

Thanks!

For reference, I talked about a typewriter code before, but I suspect that I was thinking of the telegraph code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_telegraph_code

[hintymad]

I've always wondered how some countries manage to drop Chinese characters, while others can’t—or just don’t want to. And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?

From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace. Sure, we don’t need them when we’re speaking, so in theory it seems like we could just get rid of them altogether. But in practice, we still rely on them a lot - especially when we’re trying to understand what a certain pronunciation means. And reading is a whole different story. Recognizing characters is just way faster than sounding out spellings. Maybe one reason is that the basic unit in Chinese is not word but morphemes, which mostly are just single characters.

Maybe we could come up with a different writing system, kind of like what Koreans did, instead of sticking with Romanized pinyin.

[bobthepanda]

One thing to note is that for non-Chinese languages, Chinese may have semantic meaning but really has nothing to do with pronunciation; and the Chinese etymology really has nothing to do with how a Korean or Vietnamese speaker independently came up with the word so this is less important.

—-

Another thing to note is that a lot of “Chinese” words in the modern day language are actually Japanese in origin, since Japan was the first country using Chinese script to modernize and adapt Western thought in science and philosophy etc., and the associated terminology. This actually provides a political impetus to replace those words with native-constructed ones since they have a negative historical relation with Japan.

—-

People who replace Chinese script with letters often have dictionaries and whatnot from the transition period to trace back words, and people also still learn Chinese in these countries if they want to, so it’s not as if it’s gone and disappeared; in the same way that modern speakers probably couldn’t read Chaucer in Middle English, or Beowulf in Old English, as it was written on a whim, but there are plenty of scholars who have studied for it. And Modern Chinese has little to do with Literary/Classical Chinese anyways.

—-

Mandarin has a phonetic system, Bopomofo, which was abandoned for political reasons in the PRC. But the problem with replacing Chinese script is political; within the PRC and ROC there are multiple mutually unintelligible languages using Chinese script, and if you pick a phonetic script then it is now Mandarin vs. everybody else.

[thaumasiotes]

The Korean writing system is not different in any sense other than the appearance of the characters from Romanized pinyin.

[coffeeling]

  > And how did Vietnam and Korea manage to understand their historical texts after they stopped using Chinese characters? And how do they create new words nowadays? I guess they just borrow words and pronunciations directly from English or other foreign languages?

The answer to all of these are the same as everyone else. It's not like Chinese people routinely read the old classics in the original, and even then they're literally taught Classical Chinese in school as a separate language, because it is. But other countries have scholars who study the old languages and also work to translate classics into modern language for wider use - I certainly can't read Greek but have Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics sitting on the bench next to me, translated into modern English.

Creating new words happens the same as it does everywhere - people genuinely coin new concepts, they loan foreign concepts as direct loans or calques, or form compound words from existing ones. "creating new words" with Chinese characters is literally just using foreign words to form compounds, something utterly routine everywhere else. It's just not treated as a magical event elsewhere.

For example, people routinely marvel at the ability to make compound words in kanji. But, may I introduce you to German, a language written with boring old non-mysterious Latin script that's famous worldwide for its heavy use of compound words.

  > From what I understand, Chinese characters carry so much meaning that they’re really hard to replace.

They're really just scribbles that point at words or morphemes of the language they're used to write, same as phonetic scripts in that regard. They do let you do some tricks that are hard otherwise, like indicating which nuance of a word you intend by your choice of character, and the common stylistic trick of writing some set of characters and then imposing completely arbitrary readings on them by writing clarifications next to the characters being abused.

For example, in Frieren, in one of the early chapters, Frieren says:

  Zorutoraaku wa hito wo korosu mahou dewa nakunatta.

In hiragana:

  ゾルトラーク は ひと を ころす まほう でわ なくなった。

The manga writes it like this, however (furigana in parentheses after the kanji):

  人を殺す魔法(ゾルトラーク) は 人を殺す魔法(ひと を ころす まほう) でわ なくなった。

人を殺す魔法 should be read "hito wo korosu mahou", ie. "magic that kills people", but the manga instructs us to read it first time as "Zorutoraaku", the name of the spell, and the second time properly, when Frieren's supposed to say its description out loud. There's no clarity issue here, it's just a stylistic trick.

For fun, the same line from the Korean translated version:

  졸트라크는 더 이상 인간을 죽이는 마법이 아니게 됐지
  Jolteurakeuneun deo isang inganeul jugineun mabeobi anige dwaetji.

[coffeeling]

J. Marshall Unger's Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan goes into details on this.

There were kanji abolitionists and pro-kanji people in both the American and Japanese administrations, and it definitely wasn't just a popularity contest. Things happened such as one pro-roumaji principal who enthusiastically took part in roumaji feasibility experiments being assigned elsewhere because he was having results, or one American pro-kanji official decreeing that roumaji publications should be published in triplicate since there were three competing romanization systems - Nihon-shiki, Kunrei-shiki and Hepburn - so they wouldn't unduly advantage any particular romanization system.

This of course also just so happened to make roumaji publishing three times more expensive. Whether fairness or limiting roumaji publishing by financial means was the real motivation is left as an exercise to the reader.

[jeroenhd]

I don't think it's that crazy for the language reform to make it through, seeing as the entire political system has been reshaped into a pseudo-American democratic structure for instance. With the emperor going out of fashion and the governance of the country being overthrown, I think it would be the perfect moment for other cultural shifts as well. Had the timing coincided with the introduction of computers (which famously struggled with languages like Chinese and most Japanese) a few decades later, I think the plan would've succeeded.

Most of Europe inherited the Latin script from Christianity, which was spread with less than peaceful means. It took more than a few short years, but it certainly altered culture.

[anigbrowl]

Japan had a parliament since the Meiji era (first elected in 1890). The Macarthur occupation changed quite a few things, but less than most people think.

[hintymad]

My understanding is that Japanese are very open to external influences, even when they come from enemies. Case in point, they embraced the legal framework and political reform that was pushed by the Americans. On the other hand, MacArthur was careful to respect Japanese culture (arguably, depending on who looked at it, I guess) when pushing his reforms. Nevertheless, Japan quickly became a pretty well run democratic country. It’s fascinating and respectable that Japanese could embrace western civilization while retaining their beautiful culture

[latentsea]

I mean... they did just get nuked prior to that. That might have had something to do with it.