# Serious Asian attempts to switch to a phonetic alphabet?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-asian-attempts-to-switch-to-a-phonetic-alphabet/20475>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [May 25, 2000, 12:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-asian-attempts-to-switch-to-a-phonetic-alphabet/20475 "2000-05-25T00:39:41Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 2

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**Author:** ![dougie\_monty](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/439d5e/32.png) [@dougie\_monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougie_monty)\
**Post date:** [May 27, 2000, 11:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-asian-attempts-to-switch-to-a-phonetic-alphabet/20475/21 "2000-05-27T23:33:32Z")

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In _Talking Your Way around the World,_ Mario Pei commented on the drive (specifically in Japanese, but it coupld apply as well to Chinese and other languages using ideographic scripts) thus: “The dead hand of tradition prevents this, just as it prevents any attempt to reform the spelling of English. Existing printed works would have to be totally replaced, which would be a time-consuming and expensive process, and in the meantime everybody would have to learn both systems, old and new.”  
I also noted that in 1928, Kemal Ataturk discarded the Arabic script for Turkish, replacing it with the Roman alphabet. Apparently this makes sense: The Arabic alphabet has only indicators for three vowel sounds, _a, i,_ and _u,_, whereas Turkish has _eight_ vowel sounds. (I don’t know how Farsi and Urdu, which also use Arabic script, deal with vowels.)  
Incidentally, I once read that, when Tolstoy’s _War and Peace_ was reprinted in Soviet orthography, the printers saved about 100 pages (!!) just by dropping the hard sign _(tviordiznak)_ from the _end_ of words!

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**Author:** ![Koxinga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/4af34b/32.png) [@Koxinga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Koxinga)\
**Post date:** [May 28, 2000, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/serious-asian-attempts-to-switch-to-a-phonetic-alphabet/20475/22 "2000-05-28T08:04:22Z")

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> [@](#):
>
> “The dead hand of tradition prevents this . . . Existing printed works would have to be totally replaced, which would be a time-consuming and expensive process, and in the meantime everybody would have to learn both systems, old and new.”

This may well be the case for Chinese, but in the case of Japanese this analysis doesn’t make much sense. The three systems that the Japanese use _coexist_: you’ll often see each of them used in a single sentence. There’s nothing to “relearn”, since Japanese speakers are already thoroughly familiar with both the phonetic (katakana and hirigana) and character-based (kanji) scripts. I think the Japanese could make the switch, if they wanted to, with relative ease. (Not so Chinese.)

DHR

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