Cool Writing Systems From East Asia

[act]

Out of all the writing systems in the world, I think the most interesting of them come from East Asia. The first one I'd love to bring your attention to is Hangul, the South Korean script. Before it's inception, writing in the Korean language was done with Chinese characters - with heavy adaptation to work with the significantly different Korean language. However, this was generally cumbersome to use, so in 1443 the Korean king Sejong the Great developed the Hangul script.

It was designed specifically with learnability in mind, and it's so learnable that there's a popular saying about the language; that being "A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days."

Another one is the Thai script. It was developed from the earlier Brahmi script - which was also the progenitor to many Southeast Asian scripts. What's interesting about it is that it's still extremely similar to it's original inceptions back in the late 13th century, in spite of the linguistic evolution Thai has gone through. This means that the Thai script that's learned in schools in Thailand is the exact same one that was used in even the oldest of writings using the Thai Script. And this isn't a case like what we have with many Romance languages today, there aren't new words and new ways to spell old words in the Thai language, it was just a shift in sounds. The literary aspect of the Thai language is exactly the same! This means that people who know the Thai script and language can read texts from both today and the 1300's alike.

[Murdoch]

The written Asian characters are indeed quite beautiful. But given nowadays I get a hand cramp writing even a sentence in English, I am deeply glad I do not have to use such characters in my day to day life.

[bfadam]

always thought the Burmese script looked so alien ( Like its not a real script ) yet beautiful in its own way first time I saw it was when I found a coin in my yard with it on it 

 

 

found on google   

 

[GarrettChan]

Can't deny Chinese is hard to learn. Kinda sad nowadays, probably Chinese don't really write Chinese anymore.

[Xcalibur]

I can confirm, hangul is arguably the best-designed writing system in the world. It consists of elements/particles grouped together, each element representing a phoneme, so that each block is a syllable; in this way, it combines the advantages of an alphabet and a syllabary. Not only that, but the vowels & consonants are easily distinguished, and the design of the particles is similar to how the tongue is placed when pronouncing it. It really is superior, but it's only used in Korea, so if you're not into that language/culture it's not relevant.

 

Chinese characters are built on a different principle than most writing systems. Instead of capturing the sounds of language, it captures ideas. This has certain benefits -- if you know the characters, you can read a text without knowing the language (historically, this helped unify China, which then as now is a huge region with different peoples and languages). It condenses meaning down into less symbols, and as someone else said, they have great aesthetic qualities. The main downside is that they're much more difficult to learn, it's alot to download into your head. But even that issue is alleviated somewhat by the system of radicals/components. All characters are formed from the same set of components, and these intuitively tell you the meaning and how it's pronounced. Chinese relies on these symbols entirely, while Japanese (which I've studied) combines them with a native syllabary; strangely enough, modern Japanese is written similarly to Bronze Age languages, with logograms for words and a syllabary for grammar.

 

Our own latin script is pretty good, although not necessarily the best. It's ultimately derived from the Greek alphabet (as is Cyrillic), which came from the Phoenician alphabet, which in turn was derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs (which are logographic). So there's an entire chain of evolution reaching back to ancient times. Chinese characters have their own ancient origins as symbols etched onto oracle bones, which were used for divination. Gradually they developed from pictograms (which directly resembled real things) to more abstract forms; this can also be seen in the development of cuneiform, a script which despite its merits went extinct in antiquity. Inventions of writing were relatively rare, the breakthrough only happened a handful of times. While there are many writing systems, most of them can be traced back to a small number of originators. One exception may be rongorongo, a unique writing system from East Polynesia, discovered on Easter Island.

 

As you've guessed, I've delved into this topic a fair amount, and this gave me an excuse to expound on it. I could say more, but that's plenty enough for now.

[Gez]

I like Vietnamese writing. Portuguese missionaries introduced Latin script, but they struggled to convey Vietnamese adequately with just the Latin alphabet, so they added a lot of diacritics. E.g.:

Quote

Tóm tắt: Trong bài báo này chúng tôi đề xuất một phương pháp tiếp cận mới trong ứng dụng kỹ thuật thủy vân số (digital watermarking) trên các tài liệu tiếng Việt. Cách tiếp cận này khai thác đặc điểm đặc biệt của chữ viết tiếng Việt để nhúng thông tin bảo mật vào tài liệu. Thông tin bảo mật được sử dụng để chứng minh bản quyền sở hữu hoặc chống giả...

That gives it a very distinctive look even if it's using the Latin letters we're all familiar with.

[Nefelibeta]

19 hours ago, GarrettChan said:

Can't deny Chinese is hard to learn. Kinda sad nowadays, probably Chinese don't really write Chinese anymore.

Unless you're a student and have to do homework every day. :(

[GarrettChan]

1 hour ago, Nefelibeta said:

Unless you're a student and have to do homework every day. :(

Nope, I still practice writing everyday.

[Arrowhead]

I know these aren't East Asian scripts, (they're technically West Asian) but I've always loved the look of the many Georgian scripts, (Asomtavruli, Nuskhuri and Mkhedruli) - always found it interesting that they have three distinct scripts for the same language.

[Stupid Bunny]

Hangul is an absolute work of genius for all the reasons that @Xcalibur said.  I'd append though that it's brilliance works a lot better for a language like Korean, where there's a hard limit on which phonemes can end a syllable and on how many or which consonants can be grouped together.  As such, it works with splendid elegance for Korean but would do a horrendous job rendering a language like Georgian where you can have 4 or 5 or 6 consonants in a row that are all pronounced.

 

The kana in Japanese are also perfect for the language they represent, which has stricter limitations on syllable construction than almost any other language I can think of, meaning that you can easily represent all possible syllables with just 46 characters plus a few modifiers and the "n" character.  Of course, the elegance is undercut somewhat by the fact that there's two parallel kana scripts and of course kanji which are the exact opposite of elegance, but this quality also gives Japanese a wholly unique character of its own.

 

I've never learned to read any of the southeast Asian scripts, it's amazing what a diversity there are and all of them are beautiful.  I'd probably start with either Thai or Khmer (the latter of which is unique in the region for its lack of tones and may be easier to learn for it.)

 

Also gonna add some love for Old Mongolian

 

[Azuris]

I just wanted to call you out, because you were so smart to write EAST asian and i wanted to point out, that Latin cames from Phoenician and it would be so also a Asian Alphabet.

 

Now i just found out, that phoenician itself is a Deriviation of a simplification of agyptian Hyroglyphes.

 

That Family Tree is pretty amazing.

You can see how every Language adopted and evolved the Source for it certain needs.

 

 

I personally am a Fan of the Latin one, just not as English or French are using it, having not really a fix Sound for every Letter.

Spanish and Italian are the closest one to it.

 

I do not like the symbolic ones, as the Symbol is bound to a Meaning, not to a certain Sound.

 

So, sorry for some Offtopic, but hopefully some that added some interessting Stuff to Language and Writing Fans :P

[act]

11 hours ago, Azuris said:

 

Imagine how the world would've developed simply if Linear B survived the Bronze Age Collapse.

[Nikku4211]

Filipino alphabet's pretty cool.

 

You got all the classics, like A, E, M, C, L, B, V, etc.; and then you've got the N with tilde from when Spain owned the Philippines; and then Ng is considered its own letter, rather than just a simple digraph, though it represents the same sound as the equivalent English digraph.

[Nikku4211]

3 hours ago, spicyz said:

cool, that's interesting. I always wanted to learn Chinese, but it's not so easy to do

Which Chinese language? Mandarin? Cantonese? Fuzhounese?

 

Their grammar may be relatively simple, but those characters are a pain to memorise, even when taking into account the radicals system they use, there's hundreds.

[Graf Zahl]

What I find most interesting is how poorly all those scripts translate into computer use.

While Latin, Cyrillic and Greek work with simple and straightforward layout rules it is virtually impossible to input or render any of the Asian scripts (including Arabic) without using complex software or huge amounts of data for the CJK characters.

 

 

The Europeans must have anticipated the rise of the computer more than 2000 years ago! :D

 

[Gez]

Or perhaps computers were designed around Latin alphabet and other systems have had to be shoehorned afterwards.

 

Western alphabets have gone through several steps of complexification and simplification. Monks who manually copied books came up with all sorts of shorthand techniques to make the process faster, including cursive (which resulted in the distinction between majuscules and minuscules) and a ton of ligatures, some of which eventually became their own characters (e.g.: & is "et", @ is "ad", ß is "ſz", and of course w is "vv" or "uu"). Some letters were duplicated (i begat j, u begat v), others disappeared (say goodbye to ð, ᵹ, þ, ƿ, and of course ſ)... The latest round of simplification was with the typewriter that was the direct ancestor to our modern computer interface.

 

Make no mistake, the software needed to handle correctly classical typography (including ligatures and hyphenations) are just as complex as what you need to write correctly in any Eastern script.

[Nikku4211]

7 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

What I find most interesting is how poorly all those scripts translate into computer use.

 

I feel you. Having to deal with Shift-JIS when it comes to playing Japanese games is a nightmare, even if UTF-8 already exists nowadays.

7 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

While Latin, Cyrillic and Greek work with simple and straightforward layout rules it is virtually impossible to input or render any of the Asian scripts (including Arabic) without using complex software or huge amounts of data for the CJK characters.

 

A few scripts in civilisations in Asia use discreet letters too, like the Georgian script or the Hebrew abjad.

4 hours ago, Gez said:

Make no mistake, the software needed to handle correctly classical typography (including ligatures and hyphenations) are just as complex as what you need to write correctly in any Eastern script.

 

There are THAT many ligatures and hyphenations in classical Latin-alphabet typography?

 

I wouldn't think there'd be thousands of different, unique ligatures like there are thousands of unique Chinese characters.

[Gez]

That's quantity, not complexity.

 

But yeah, for hyphenation there are potentially more of them than there are classical Chinese characters, because that's every possible split of every possible word in every Latin-character languages and when you look into it you can see that American English and British English already use different rules...

[Graf Zahl]

 

20 hours ago, Gez said:

Make no mistake, the software needed to handle correctly classical typography (including ligatures and hyphenations) are just as complex as what you need to write correctly in any Eastern script.

 

That may be - but if you go back to the source (i.e. original Latin) you end up with a small uppercase-only alphabet and no complicated typesetting rules.

What you talk about here is not proper reproduction of the actual language, but proper reproduction of how the language was written at specific times - the mere content can still be expressed with the basic alphabet. So the complexity here is on a totally different level.

 

The real problems come around if letters change their shape based on surrounding letters or sometimes even get swapped around in a living writing system of an actively used language. In that sense, Chinese is not actually complex, it's merely bloated. The real horror is scripts like Arabic or Devanagari. Korean is also interesting in that it combines 3 letters into one character and as a result explodes a rather simple and straightforward alphabet into a huge pile of different 3 letter characters.

[Taw Tu'lki]

Turkic alphabet 

[Nefelibeta]

It looks like the language that aliens would use. :)

[Xcalibur]

On 3/8/2022 at 3:28 PM, Gez said:

Or perhaps computers were designed around Latin alphabet and other systems have had to be shoehorned afterwards.

This is accurate. Other scripts wouldn't be difficult to input with proper accommodation. For example, you could have a keyboard with radicals or hangul components, and the software would combine them into characters automatically as you typed them. Of course, that keyboard would have to be designed differently, ie you'd have to have multiple components per key, and the ability to easily shift between them to cover the whole system. Radicals for Chinese characters would be especially challenging, but as long as the most common radicals were easily accessible, it would be fine (you could have more complicated input for the rare ones). For a kana keyboard, you could have different shift keys for dakuten/handakuten as well as a shift lock for switching between hiragana & katakana.

We get so used to our way of doing things, that we forget that there are other ways and means.

[gwain]

On 3/8/2022 at 11:12 AM, Graf Zahl said:

While Latin, Cyrillic and Greek work with simple and straightforward layout rules it is virtually impossible to input or render any of the Asian scripts (including Arabic) without using complex software or huge amounts of data for the CJK characters.

 

 

The Europeans must have anticipated the rise of the computer more than 2000 years ago! :D

 

if your interested in Latin, Greek and slavic languages than you should look into p.i.e (Proto Indo European) it was the language those are based off of.

[Gez]

On vendredi 22 avril 2022 at 7:12 PM, Taw Tu'lki said:

Turkic alphabet 

Looks like Futhark and Tifinagh had a baby.

 

[Gibbon]

Here’s some love for Baybayin.  What the Philippines used before the Spanish came.

 

[Graf Zahl]

On 5/3/2022 at 3:51 AM, Xcalibur said:

 

We get so used to our way of doing things, that we forget that there are other ways and means.

 

True - but that's not really the issue here. If we had taken all the quirks of our handwriting systems and put them into the printed language, it would also be extremely complicated.

But with many other scripts all these quirks were meticulously preserved when creating a printed version of the script.

 

Ultimately I think it is the simplicity of the European alphabets that made many inventions possible in the first place. The more complex a writing system is, the less likely is that people using it will do technical inventions around it. Let's just take the typewriter. This is a perfect match with 25-30 letter alphabets - but once you have to deal with thousands of different characters or different forms of the same character, depending on where in a word it occurs - or even languages where the preceding parts of a word change if you add another letter, you have two things that poorly match together.

[Nikku4211]

Can't sneeze at Mongolian Cyrillic.

 

Look at that O with a horizontal line on it. Look at the differentiation between straight U and regular U, both of which look like Y.

 

So beautiful.

[Xcalibur]

On 5/4/2022 at 12:16 PM, Graf Zahl said:

 

True - but that's not really the issue here. If we had taken all the quirks of our handwriting systems and put them into the printed language, it would also be extremely complicated.

But with many other scripts all these quirks were meticulously preserved when creating a printed version of the script.

 

Ultimately I think it is the simplicity of the European alphabets that made many inventions possible in the first place. The more complex a writing system is, the less likely is that people using it will do technical inventions around it. Let's just take the typewriter. This is a perfect match with 25-30 letter alphabets - but once you have to deal with thousands of different characters or different forms of the same character, depending on where in a word it occurs - or even languages where the preceding parts of a word change if you add another letter, you have two things that poorly match together.

There is truth to what you're saying. East Asia had woodblock printing long before the West, but it was Europe that invented movable type, a key breakthrough. Why is that? Because movable type is far easier to create with an alphabet than with thousands of characters.

So yes, structural differences can be significant, but what I said still applies.

[Taw Tu'lki]

On 5/3/2022 at 12:48 PM, Gez said:

Looks like Futhark and Tifinagh had a baby.

  

Maybe because they used turkic alphabet.