I’m currently studying Chinese, so I need to learn a huge number of characters in order to read and write. I know Japanese and Korean use Chinese caracters in addition to phonetic writing systems, but are there any modern languages that use a complex writing system other than Chinese characters?
I can’t give a definitive answer, but Unicode is trying to cover all written languages and the only ideographic languages it supports are the three you mention. All other languages use some sort of alphabet or syllabary. Incidentally, I believe that modern Korean has essentially abandoned Kanji in favor of Hangul, a fascinating alphabet invented several centuries ago in which the letters are supposed to represent the shape the mouth takes on when you articulate them. The syllables are written vertically (in one or two columns, although I don’t know the rules) and these are read left to right. Japanese has two separate and essentially unrelated syllabaries (one used for foreign words, just like we use roman and italic) and could write everything in one of them, but feel that that is for children. Certainly the main reason that the Chinese keep to Kanji is not an issue for the Japanese: China has a large number of “dialects” that are really separate languages, but use one mutually comprehensible orthography.
It’s much more complicated than that. Katakana is used to spell out foreign words phonetically. Japanese has imported LOTS of foreign words (mostly from English). Hiragana is used primarily to add inflections to the Kanji which are not expressed in Chinese (since Chinese is largely uninflected). As an example, imagine that “#” is Kanji for “pound”. In English, we might write “#s” to mean “pounds” by combining a kanji and a letter from the Roman alphabet. This is pretty similar to what the Japanese use Hiragana for.
Oddly enough, modern Korean seems to have discarded (for the most part) the use of Han-Mun (Chinese characters).
Anyway, here’s a cool site about writing systems: www.omniglot.com
Sanskrit based languages such as many of the India, tibetan, mongolian, Thai, Burmese
I understand that Chinese characters are not that commonly used, but it was my understanding that it was difficult to read all-hangul texts without having some knowledge of the Chinese characters that the words come from. I know that even in an officially all-hangul society like North Korea children are still taught approx. 2000 characters in high school.
They don’t strike me as being any more complex than, say, Arabic.
Texts written only in hiragana are surprisingly difficult to read. Japanese has no equivalent to spaces, so it’s difficult to distinguish where one word ends and another begins (moreso than it would be in an English sentence without spaces, I believe.) A further difficulty is the massive number of homonyms used in Japanese that would be unable to be distinguished without use of Chinese characters.
No. Firstly, those other non-Indian langauges are not “Sanskrit based”. Sanskrit itself is written with an alphabet, not with pictograms or ideograms.
While Tibetan uses a Sanskrit based writing system, it is not a “Sanskrit language”. It’s part of the Sino-Tibetan language family. (Sanskrit is Indo-European).
Mongolian is a Mongolian language (shocker!), and is mostly written in Cyrillic.
Thai is a member of the Thai-Kadai langauge family, and uses an alphabet derived from an older, Indic script.
Burmese is a Sino-Tibetan language using a script that is also derived from an older, Indic script.
None of these langauges uses a script as described in the OP.
And for emphasis in advertisements, it seems.
Those are abugidas, halfway between an alphabet and a syllabary. Each character has an inherent vowel (like if we wrote “b” for “ba”), but the vowel can be modified with further characters (as if “b” were “ba”, but “be” were “be”).
Not that I’m aware of. All similar writing systems that I know of have long since been replaced by simpler systems. Some authors I’ve read argue that there’s a natural progression from ideograms to syllabaries to alphabets and that the Chinese for whatever reason never progressed farther than half-way between ideograms and syllabaries.
Ahah! There is one! According to Omniglot, the Dongba script was used for the Naxi language, and there are still a handful of elderly people today who know how to read and write it.
And it’s not a separate language, but Nushu was an alternative script for the Chinese language, that the last proficient user of it died last year, but efforts are being made to revive it.
okay, maybe more accurate to call these Indic derived scripts. I’m thinking more double byte languages rather than picturegrams.
Mongolian in China uses the Mongol script and not a cryllic based.
Final nitpick, jury is still out on Sino-Tibetan as having common roots. 20 years ago it was commonly referred to as Tibeto-Burman languag family. Pretty big chance that the Sino-Tibetan is more politically motivated rather than linguistically.
Naxi script is practically dead and was never a writing system of the masses. I’ll be there on a business trip in 2 months.
That’s the word! I knew they weren’t true alphabets, but not quite syllabaries either. Gotta love language-- there’s a word for everything!
The script used to express Sanskrit, Hindi, and Maratha today is called devanagari, and it emerged from earlier scripts around the 13th century AD.
It has, essentially, 12 vowels and 34 consonants. This writing system is definitely an abugida. Inherent vowel sounds can be suppressed between consonants; thus ligatures are created.
That is cool. Wikipedia details the different writing systems:
Type Each symbol Example
Logographic morpheme Chinese hanzi
Syllabic syllable Japanese kana
Alphabetic phoneme (consonant or vowel) Latin
Abugida phoneme (consonant+vowel) Indian devanagari
Abjad phoneme (consonant) Arabic
Featural phonetic feature Korean hangul
Add to this that, once you learn them, kanji ideograms are capable of expressing concepts with great economy and subtlety, due to the addition of the visual/structural components; an example is the way related characters can be seen to be related by the shared radicals.
\hijack
Whoa, that table you inserted is my first experience seeing such a product imported into the board. Way cool, CaveMike!
\hijack\
Funny, Omniglot lists Korea’s alphabet in its alphabet section. That is probably because Hangeul is composed of consonants and vowels.