I think that it has already been answered in the first page of this thread.
By the time China came into contact with alphabetic writing, ideograms were well established.
Up until the 1950s, only a tiny minority of the Chinese population could read and write and it was strongly opposed to widespread literacy.
China is a vast country where not only several distinct languages are spoken, within individual languages there are strong dialectical differences in pronunciation. Having a writing system that is dissociated from pronunciation offers real advantages for an administrative language.
Ideograms were well established in the Levant, too. They were supplanted.
Again, in the West, only a tiny minority could read.
But at that time China as we know it today was not unified and not a vast country. We’re talking of the time of the Shang Dynasty here, not Qing. And I’ll note that China fragmented later, so there were further opportunities.
They were largely supplanted through conquest or socio-political changes, though. It was never just a matter of a script imposing itself through its qualities, but through the power of the culture that used it. China was never under the sphere of influence of a culture that used an alphabet. At least not until the opium war.
That’s not relevant. A better comparison would be Egypt, in which the ruling class used hieroglyphs for almost 3000 years. They had no interest in adopting alphabets that were in fact derived from their own writing. When king Sejong tried to introduce hangul in Korea with the intent to raise literacy he was met with rather fierce opposition from the ruling class. King Yeonsangun banned it completely not long after its introduction. Without support from the ruling class a writing system cannot fully establish itself.
Yes, we’re talking about the Qin dynasty. The earliest major contact with a phonetic system would have been at the earliest Ashoka’s missions, which (maybe) reached China around 265 BCE. Chinese characters were certainly not invented for the purpose of bridging language barriers, but they are somewhat advantageous in this regard compared to alphabets.
Ah, now we might be getting somewhere. Would you care to elaborate?
Really? Hieroglyphs survived despite being Egypt conquered by various empires, including at least three that used alphabets, which would argue against both of us.
Ah. So is there any evidence of such opposition in Chinese records?
Not 1800-1000 BC, we’re not. And I wrote Qing, not Qin.
What about traders from India? What about Mongols?
You reminded me of something and I’ve been trying to remember what it was: a woman saying “I want to marry someone who can write 薔薇 in kanji”. The idea was that someone who knew how to write those kanji must be super-smart or educated. But I can’t remember anything about the context.
That explanation was cynical and a bit misleading. There is a prescribed list of “kanji for everyday use” that everyone is expected to be able to read. If you use a kanji that is not on the list (or if the pronunciation is non-standard, for example a personal name) you can use the little characters (called “furigana”) to tell the reader how the word is pronounced.
Especially in an academic environment, the administration may perfectly legitimately have been using specialist vocabulary written with non-jouyou kanji.
Interestingly, the word for “vocabulary” itself is written with a character that, until recently, was not included in the list.
You’re mostly correct, but I’ll add a few clarifications.
The list of 2,000 kanji only applies to the Japanese government (although it is generally followed by newspapers as well). Any Japanese with a high school education will know and use significantly more. On the whole, it’s not the greatest list… there are a number of kanji is common use by elementary school students that aren’t on it.
So any book not aimed at a young audience will generally use a fair number of non-Joyo kanji. Furigana usage varies considerably. I’ve certainly read a number of academic texts in which the author seemed to be showing off his kanji knowledge, writing things in non-standard, difficult ways. These often didn’t use furigana (I pictured the author laughing to himself as his readers scrambled for their dictionaries).
Tang rulers were not Tibetan, though. Tibet, for much of its history was either more or less under the sphere of influence of China, but as far as I know it was never the other way around.
The Tibetan alphabet was developed in the 7th century CE, which post-dates major cultural contacts between China and India.
The Yuan Dynasty is the more interesting case, but here it’s important to note that China was conquered politically but not culturally. Most importantly, Kublai Khan kept important elements of previous dynasties’ bureaucracy. For alphabetic writing to take a foothold in this era, the Mongols would have had to attempt to completely replace existing administrative, religious and cultural classes, which would not have been politically advisable or even possible.
Hieroglyphs survival during foreign conquest hinges on the fact that like China during the Yuan Dynasty, some classes managed to keep their power. In the end, their usage faded in complete sync with the loss of influence of native bureaucracy and religion.
Every single TV program and movie I’ve ever seen in Taiwan has had subtitles. I’d be very surprised if that weren’t also universally the case in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
If you’re disputing (A) that Chinese dialects are often mutually unintelligible and equivalent to languages in their own right, and/or (B) Chinese people get around this by resorting to the written word, then you have no idea what you’re talking about.
And regarding the OP: As in most things, I blame Qin Shihuangdi. Dude unified all the disparate states (which in size and character were not unlike Western European nations that emerged a few thousand years later) and burned any books and killed any scholars that didn’t adhere to his version of orthodox thought. There very well may have been alphabetic scripts arising in the time of Confucius, but we’ll never know.
Analogy may be a bit of a stretch, but imagine if the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire had recaptured the West some time after Charlemagne and imposed some extreme classical Latin orthography on the whole place. Nations like France and Germany may never have emerged and their languages may never have emerged from the status of vulgar local argot.
Tang Dynasty China was interesting. It’s put forth (by the Chinese) as a strong dynasty. That said, according to Tibetan history, this was Tibet at it’s strongest and most belligerent. So much so that the Tang Dynasty Emperor (what’s his face) gave up his daughter Wen Chang to be a consort of the Tibetan leader. Wen Chang, according to Chinese history, is claimed to have brought buddhism to Tibet (while the Jokang Temple is hers, it’s a little far fetched that she brought buddhism to Tibet). But I’ll grant you that the Tang rulers were not Tibetan although it sure appears that the Tang had an appeasement strategy.
the Nanchao Kingdom of Dali rivaled Tang Dynasty China for power and influence.