This post at EmptyBottle.org really got my blood boiling, as it did his, obviously... ;) He references an article in the New York Times which talks about Asian orthographies as opposed to Western alphabets...
In particular, it references a new book by William C. Hannas, "a linguist who speaks 12 languages and works as a senior officer at the Foreign Broadcast Information Service..." The hypothesis, or rather, the seemingly unproven assertion, which the book is based on is that Asian orthographies are a detriment to scientific and analytical thought.
The first major mistake the article makes is in asserting that Asian orthographies are "syllabaries." In fact, no asian orthography is exclusively a syllabary, although Japanese includes two. A syllabary is an 'alphabet' in which each symbol represents not just a letter as we know it in English, but a whole syllable of sound, such as "ka" or "ban".
Japanese includes two full syllabaries, called hiragana and katakana, as well as chinese characters and the roman alphabet. With regard to its use of Chinese characters, sometimes they are read with one syllable, sometimes two, and sometimes three or four, depending on the situation. There are even characters read as English words, such as 釦 (ボタン), for 'button'.
Korean is not a syllabary either, but a true alphabet, and far more logically constructed than western alphabets. The forms of all the letters are based in a phonetic analysis of ancient Chinese, and were created in the 1400's by King Sejong. Like sounds look alike in the Korean alphabet (such as T and D), because they were constructed to resemble the position of the mouth and tongue when uttering those sounds!
The only thing "syllabic" about the Korean orthography is that each syllable is arranged into a square when written. This came about due to the aesthetic and cultural influence of Chinese characters, and because of the desire to harmonize the look of text containing both Korean characters (hangul) and Chinese characters. So, for example the word kabang (bag) is written as 가방, in two blocks, rather than ㄱㅏㅂㅏㅇ, horizontally. You can see how the individual letters are just arranged into the two squares. But it's still probably the most logically and abstractly constructed alphabet in the world.
Chinese characters are not a syllabary either, because they are partly ideographic, partly phonetic, and inconsistent in how they are constructed. Some have called them 'logographic' or other things, but they are constructed in a variety of complicated ways, and are clearly not a syllabary.
Furthermore, the assertion that they inhibit abstract thought is bass ackwards, considering that the whole system was created based on abstract thought. Ideographic components are commonly combined with phonetic components to produce modern characters, as in the character for 'flower', 花, which combines 'flower/grass' on the top with the sound component 'hua' underneath. Sometimes two or more ideographic components are combined, as in the character for 'natural disaster', 災, which combines 'river' on the top with 'fire' on the bottom...
It's a complicated business, and clearly each character involves an ancient thought process of abstraction. Now in the sciences, Chinese compound words are much much easier to read than western terms, because we use latin and greek, while they use their characters. An example off the top of my head is the word for 'diabetes'. In English, you don't know what it is until you simply memorize the word, but in Japanese the word is 糖尿病, or sugar-urine-disease, probably because those who had it had sugary or sweet urine. SARS is called 非典型肺炎 in Chinese, and 新型肺炎 in Japanese, which mean non-traditional-lung-inflammation and new-form-lung-inflammation respectively. Much easier to parse (and direct to the point) than some of our medical terminology...
So now let's look again at Hannas's assertion as related in the article:
Mr. Hannas's logic goes like this: because East Asian writing systems lack the abstract features of alphabets, they hamper the kind of analytical and abstract thought necessary for scientific creativity.
Now how silly does this seem?
I must say though, in the case of Chinese, there are other reasons to suspect it really does cause everyday problems for people, but in the cases of Japanese and Korean, I don't think you can argue that at all.
In Chinese, there's really no reliable way to write anything unless you know the characters, whereas in Japanese and Korean, the alphabetic or syllabic characters are accepted parts of the language, and can always be used as fallbacks. Chinese has the 'pinyin' romanization system, but it's rarely used and isn't considered part of the language. So if you're not very literate, you may come across cases when you aren't able to write something you're thinking about... This still doesn't prevent you thinking about it though, and you can always look up the characters in a dictionary. There's really no way that it can hamper thought, just maybe make everyday note-taking or writing harder.
Interestingly, Korean may be entering a new era when their orthography becomes much more similar to western ones than eastern ones, in that the old compounds which were created and written with chinese characters are now written in hangul, their alphabet, so some of the compound word roots may become forgotten or harder for the average Korean to remember, just like our Latin and Greek roots... :)
P.S. Doesn't Unicode rock?! I could never have written this post a few years ago without resorting to images. Now we have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English, all playing well together! Sweet. ;)
Excellent post, Trevor.
What I really need to know, though, is how you got the Hangul to work (let alone the Japanese and Korean)...I've never been able to make an MT post with any Korean in it that would work without doing the old View-->Encoding-->Korean trick, which is way too much to ask anyone to do to view some characters in a post that they probably won't be able to read anyway...
Please tell!
Everything on my site is utf-8 encoded, because I knew I could do everything I wanted to with unicode...
When I first put it up, movabletype didn't support any alternate encodings, so I just hacked the code to support it. Now, I think there's a flag you can set in the cfg file to set the MT-wide charset, but I don't know if it works for everything, so I'm still hacking in my change after I update MT each time.
I actually posted about it on the MT message board a few times, I think under the username 'torokun'.
Basically, there's a line in one of the files where it sets the charset for the html it returns to the browser, manually. I just hardcoded that to utf-8, and was good to go. I can tell you where it is if you want, but maybe setting the charset flag in mt.cfg is the better way to go now... I haven't tried it...
Posted by: Trevor Hill at May 5, 2003 09:42 AM
Also, I think it helps the browser to automatically set the encoding if you specify the charset as utf-8 in a meta tag on every page.
I did that just to make sure any encoding change would be automatically handled by the browser...
Posted by: Trevor Hill at May 5, 2003 09:44 AM
Trevor, Unicode rocks and so do you! As Stavros said, an excellent post -- not just for the firstrate explanation of how kanji facilitate abstraction but for the pointer about using Unicode. Would you consider writing a post on the subject? I'd love to stop using Photoshop to render Japanese text.
Posted by: Jonathon Delacour at May 6, 2003 07:23 AM
Thanks for that!
Singing : a-hacking we will go, a-hacking we will go....
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 6, 2003 07:23 AM
Look at us, posting simultaneously!
heh.
Also, I meant "let alone the Japanese and Chinese" in my first comment there last night. I'd had a few beverages by that point in the evening....:-)
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 6, 2003 07:38 AM
Thanks for the comments :)
I will consider writing about using unicode in blogging. I may only be able to cover the windows perspective though, but we'll see. :)
I've had an interest in unicode for quite a long time, and attended a number of unicode conferences while working for Quark (of QuarkXPress). I worked on East Asian typographical features for XPress while I was there, for a time being the sole developer in that area. I was lucky enough to meet Knuth (of TeX fame) and Ken Lunde, author of the CJKV tome, at the unicode conferences as well... :)
Unfortunately, Quark has yet to move to unicode, and the Japanese are notorious for sticking to JIS. I think it's getting better, but I hope at some point everyone will be using unicode...
Posted by: Trevor Hill at May 6, 2003 08:14 AM
I ran across an interesting idea at http://www.sf.airnet.ne.jp/~ts/japanese/ yesterday that I think is relevant to the discussion. If we look at chinese characters (so ignoring the kana in Japan) the author makes the point that :
"reading ideograms is faster than reading phonograms such as alphabets because ideograms are changed to meaning directly in your brain while phonograms are changed to pronunciation first and changed to meaning then. Dyslexics can hardly read phonograms but they can understand ideograms, if they know them. The ability to read phonograms can be damaged more easily because of its complexity""
So rather than being a hindrance to thought process they are actually an aid to quicker understanding, which is essentially the same point you were making Trevor with your SARS and diabetes examples.
Posted by: The Dynamic Driveler at May 6, 2003 12:12 PM
Hacks successful, at least so far (waiting for feedback that everyone can see my hangul).
Thanks Trevor. I can now merrily make little to no sense in two! count 'em two! alphabets!
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 7, 2003 06:11 AM
Mmm. Interesting point about reading ideographs... In fact, although it takes years and years of training to get there, once you really know the characters well you can very quickly understand most long compound words.
At this level of literacy people also often coin new compound words on the fly, when the component characters clearly explain the meaning... That's why you must really master the characters to achieve upper-level literacy in Japanese and Korean, just as you must understand word roots to achieve it in English...
:)
Posted by: Trevor Hill at May 7, 2003 03:25 PM
wonderchicken -- sweet. :) hehe...
나도 한국말가 아주 좋아요!
너 한국에 있읍니까?
Posted by: Trevor Hill at May 7, 2003 03:38 PM
In Chinese, there's really no reliable way to write anything unless you know the characters
This isn't exactly true. There are repeating elements, for example things involving using your hands have a hand radical and things involving explosions often have a fire radical, etc.
Also, I can't help but wonder if we're criticizing based on snippets of news articles. We've seen before how the media gets things so wrong, perhaps we should read the actual book before we set ourselves up for disappointment.
Nice post though.
Posted by: Adam Morris at July 30, 2003 09:34 PM
Adam -- You're right that many characters fall into semantic groupings based on their radical. Sometimes this helps people remember the radical, or remember the meaning of a character when they look at it...
But it won't help you remember the whole character most of the time. If you're lucky, the radical makes sense for the character, and it's easy to remember the rest of it because it indicates the pronunciation, but there are a ton of special cases, and it's not reliable to try to remember characters this way. You just have to memorize them, and ues these things as clues to jog your memory.
When I said the part you quoted, I meant that you can't just write the words you know in Chinese based on their sounds; you have to have memorized the proper characters for each of them.
As for criticizing the book, point taken. I should take a look at the book. But the entire idea that Chinese characters inhibit scientific thought seems silly based on my observations. If that's what he's arguing, he will have to have a lot of interesting evidence to convince me. ;)
Posted by: Trevor Hill at July 31, 2003 08:16 AM
you suck
Posted by: Anonymous at October 15, 2003 10:05 PM
I would be very hesitant to make or believe any claim that a given spoken language or written representation conveys a quantitative advantage for a certain kind of thought.
However, I am fascinated by the idea that linguistic structures in our brains are tied in with cognitive structures in such a way that altering the linguistic form used to think about and/or communicate an idea can profoundly change the connections we make and our perspective in a qualitative way.
Posted by: Nathan Young at December 5, 2003 04:25 PM
Posted by: stavrosthewonderchicken at May 5, 2003 09:33 AM