Thesto Neroses

Really? I was unaware of that, although it does have a ring of truth about it, knowing how colonial administrations like to work.

So the 10 were effectively collectivisations of aboriginal groups? If so, was this done by region or by linguistic group.

I haven't knowingly met any Taiwanese who claim to be from the aboriginal tribes, so my knowledge is extremely limited.

godfry n. glad

Well, Thesto, a pretty good description, but, if you don't mind, please take these minor corrections in stride....

Hiragana is used for words of Japanese origin, not Chinese. Hiragana is a lot like the block letters that we English speakers start out with; the young learners start off learning to write Hiragana characters and then change later to interspersing Kanji amidst their written sentences.

Katakana is used for foreign words and telegraphs (I'm not sure what they use for keying on the computer).

Hiragana and Katakana are the very same 48 distinct sounds with variant written forms. Ergo, they are two separate syllabaries for the same phonetic sounds. Those 48 sounds make up the Japanese language and any Kanji which is pronounced can be rendered in Hiragana or Katakana....it will consist of a combination of those phonetic sounds represented in the Japanese Kana.

Prior to 1945, the Japanese used over 10,000 Kanji characters... Some say as many as 50,000 were in use at one time. (What a bitch for a typesetter, huh?) One of the colonial reforms made by the American occupation was that of the written language. McArthur and his crowd had the Japanese limit the number of Kanji (Chinese characters) used in the Japanese language to 2,340. With that change, Hiragana (and Katakana for the huge influx of foreign words like beisubaru - baseball - that flooded in post-war) has become far more important in the written Japanese language.

godfry

Vorkosigan

Yeah, that's about right. There are about 50,000 Chinese characters listed in seriuos reference dictionaries, but lots of those are one-offs, essentially scribal errors from the bad old days. A good home-use dictionary lists between 7-10,000, and 99% of the language is expressed with the most common 3,000. So Mac could easily have reduced the language to 2,340 with very little loss of flexibility.
Vorkosigan

godfry n. glad

Actually, every last one of the Kanji could have been eliminated without losing "flexibility". Japanese is not absolutely dependent upon the Chinese characters for their written language; it doesn't even need the duplicate variant syllabary of the Katakana. It could reform to a Hiragana-only writing basis and survive just fine, although written sentences would be considerably longer in print (but much easier to typeset). The Japanese adopted the Kanji as an emulation of a "higher" culture several hundred years back (I'm not sure which century, but 3th to 5th century CE is a very rough approximation)....the Chinese characters in Japanese could be considered an unnecessary and quaint "cultural affectation".

godfry

Thesto Neroses

I was given to understand that during the Meiji restoration the idea of abandoning the Kanji was toyed with, but ultimately rejected.

Dunno how true this is, but it would have fit with the spirit of the era.

godfry n. glad

I have not heard of consideration of this particular reform, but you're right, it does fit the tenor of the age.

godfry

Thesto Neroses

Well, given that this is a thread on Chinese Culture (which I am semi-immersed in at present), does anyone have an opinion on whether Chinese characters should be abandoned and replaced with a syllabary?

I have suggested it to my co-workers as a way to reduce the hideous workload inflicted upon Taiwanese kids, and they simply stared at me in incredulity.

I kind of understand their astonishment, it would mean abandoning something quintissentially Chinese, but I still think it is worth thinking about - and it would also make it much easier and less daunting for weiguoren to learn Chinese.

(edited for clarity)

godfry n. glad

Hmm.... "should be" abandoned? I don't think I could get behind any imperative to change a major factor of another language. I have wondered how the Chinese intend to adapt to the necessities of the electronic culture with their ideographic writing. I suspect that necessity shall be the mother of invention, or adaptation.

I've always been under the impression that ideographic communication has some benefits over alphabetic and vice versa. Is anyone in this conversation conversant with the benefits and pitfalls of the two writing systems, and willing to attempt to describe and explain them?

godfry

...and, I'm assuming that "weiguoren" in Chinese is the same as "gaijin" in Japanese...foreigner. 'Zat right?

Monkeybot

Yep, that's true. I forget who wrote it, but somebody wrote out an entire proposal to scrap kanji and switch to an all-hiragana system. Appropriately, he wrote his manifesto in hiragana only

There were also proposals to switch to English at one point, but I don't know how far off the ground that one ever got. (Not far, I'd suspect.)

Since the end of WWII, the number of "official" kanji Japanese children have to learn has been declining.

Monkeybot

IIRC, it's waiguoren, but I'll let one of the actual Chinese speakers confirm or deny that.