Hanzi or Hanja Korean newspapers

[Quest]

You can fall back on pinyin

Money not the script is the cause for illiteracy.

[roddy]

Agree with the cause - but it's a bit hard to fall back on pinyin when nobody uses it outside of schoolkids and foreigners

Roddy

[Quest]

Agree with the cause - but it's a bit hard to fall back on pinyin when nobody uses it outside of schoolkids and foreigners

Roddy

you can ask the dictionary, or a friend when you forget a character. Or, you can substitute it with another character that has the same sound, if you are not writing an important document.

[Quest]

The same debate as exposed in the pasted article had already taken place in Vietnam... one hundred years ago.

And the same arguments for/against using characters (considered at that time as "national writing") vs latinized phonetic transcription (initially considered as "French writing") had been used.

It was the generation of Vietnamese revolutionaries preceding Ho Chi Minh (around 1900) which adopted the latinized transcription' date=' even though they still used classical Chinese and chữ nôm characters in their writings.

The efficiency of phonetic transcription (for learning, memorizing, printing) far outweighed the fact that it linguistically isolated Vietnam from Japan and China, two countries where many Vietnamese revolutionaries had taken refuge. The "conglomerates" were of a different kind at that time...

Present day Vietnam has been described by travellers as a "country-wide language lab", in which English and Chinese are the two most popular languages. Learning foreign languages (especially latinized English ) is good for cultural exchanges and business.[/quote']

I've heard the debate is still going on, despite the fact that it started a hundred years ago. So, I guess it is still debatable whether or not a radically new and phonetic script is really the better choice for countries that have been using characters for so many years.

I guess it would "seem" better when educational funding is lacking, however, when funding is not a problem and people are better off economically, they start to wonder why they ever abandoned something that was their past and their history.

[Ian_Lee]

The same debate as exposed in the pasted article had already taken place in Vietnam... one hundred years ago.

But Vietnam of 100 years ago was still a French colony and the Latinized script was developed by a French missionary decades earlier.

Under such environment, I doubt if such debate could consider all factors, i.e. economic.

But the current debate in South Korea is under a more free and unbiased environment with all other factors, i.e. economic and sandwiched between two countries that both use Chinese characters, taken into consideration.

[nnt]

Actually latinized Vietnamese has been invented in the 17th century as I've explained here:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=1077&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

Latinized Vietnamese language was first introduced by the French but it was not

until the revolutionaries were convinced that it could be an efficient weapon in

the struggle for independance that it was widely adopted by the Vietnamese

themselves: it was the Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục movement (東亰義塾: Đông Kinh here means Hanoi, not Tokyo... Đông Kinh is the origin of the French word Tonkin) which started the alphabetization movement around 1900. Of course, alphabetization was only the first step for the propagation of new ideas...

An outsider's view (at least concerning Vietnam) with much insight (despite some

cases of misjudgements):

http://ling.uta.edu/~taiffalo/chuliau/lunsoat/english/power/power-v.pdf

(if you have trouble viewing pdf documents on-line, download it by right-clicking and "save as...", and view it off-line with Acrobat Reader)

Although the French colonialists and collaborationists had promoted romanized

Vietnamese for decades by the twentieth century, it received only a slow growth

(DeFrancis 1977:69). In contrast, romanized system reached a rapid growth

under the promotion of the Vietnamese nationalists when they lunched their

modern nationalist movement in the early twentieth century (DeFrancis 1977:159). Romanized Quoc Ngu or the National Language was promoted by nationalists in the example of Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc. In 1907 Vietnamese nationalists established Dong Kinh Nghia Thuc (東京義塾), Tokin Free School, a private school to teach students Western ideas, science, and to train students as well-promoters of Vietnamese nationalist movement. One of the significant features of Tokin Free School was promotion of Quoc Ngu. As Marr (1971:167) stated, the teachers at Tokin Free School showed “a new willingness to employ quoc-ngu when introducing outside ideas or techniques, and they urged each

student to use the romanized script subsequently as a device for passing on

modern knowledge to hundreds of their less literate countrymen.”

Compared to "chữ nôm", latinized Vietnamese script has at least an

overwhelming advantage: you don't need to master Chinese characters first in order to write a non-standard script (anybody could invent his own "chữ nôm" word),which is even harder to learn than Chinese characters.

Alphabetization played an important part in Vietnam's struggle for independence. Economic considerations come later. Even considering this point of view, as a result, latinized Vietnamese is nearer to English (of course, English needs no further "latinization" : for example, scientific English is basic and unidiomatic enough to be comprehensible by non native writers) than to Chinese writing system. But Vietnamese phonetic system is nearer to Chinese (mandarin and Cantonese) than English. Both are business foreign languages: economic considerations are not forgotten...

[bathrobe]

funding is not a problem and people are better off economically, they start to wonder why they ever abandoned something that was their past and their history.

Maybe they specifically wanted to abandon their 'history'... by which I mean, perhaps they wanted to sever the Chinese cultural nexus.

I don't think the Vietnamese exactly enjoy being a kind of subordinate culture to the Chinese and throwing off characters would have been like a declaration of independence. (Even today there are insensitive and arrogant Chinese who claim that the Vietnamese are really Chinese, or similar things).

It was Ho Chi Minh who said he would rather smell French sh*t for 5 years than Chinese sh*t for a 1,000 years (or something like that).

[Ian_Lee]

I don't think the Vietnamese exactly enjoy being a kind of subordinate culture to the Chinese and throwing off characters would have been like a declaration of independence.

Hmmm.....So had US given up the use of English when it declared independence from England in 1776?

I don't know much about Vietnamese language. But I think there is legitimate reason for some Koreans in proposing to preserve the use of Hanmun in their language as Japanese language does.

[nnt]

Some more information on chữ nôm script here:

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/chunom.htm

and relations between Chinese language, chữ nôm and latinized Vietnamese here:

http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writsys/writviet.html

One consequence on latinization is that in Vietnamese History and classical litterature books, all Hán Việt (i.e. classical chinese language) texts are now written in Vietnamese PinYin (with often as an extra for those who are more courageous, the actual CHT characters).

For example, Vietnamese school-children will know the first declaration of independence, which was a short 11th century poem beginning with:

南國山河南帝居

through its Vietnamese Pinyin:

Nam Quốc sơn hà Nam đế cư...

(On the Land of the South, the emperor of the South shall reign...)

[hparade]

亰 --> is this old vietnamese character? so strange...... but interesting......

[bathrobe]

Hmmm.....So had US given up the use of English when it declared independence from England in 1776?

Not immediately. But the Americans decided to come up with their own spellings (grace à Noah Webster). And H. L. Mencken wanted to rename the English language 'Anglo-American'.

[nnt]

亰 --> is this old vietnamese character? so strange...... but interesting......

No, it's Chinese (but if you think it's Vietnamese, that's all the better )

Đông Kinh Nghĩa Thục (東京義塾) is a Hán Việt expression, not a Vietnamese expression (Please re-read the links I've given). It's just Chinese pronounced Vietnamese way.

In Vietnamese (chữ nôm), it would have been:

(Trường) Nghĩa Thục Đông Kinh (場)義塾東京.

Nghĩa Thục Đông Kinh is not a Chinese expression (not Chinese grammar), although 義塾 and 東京 are... Vietnamese (just like Japanese) include Chinese expressions.

A bit complicated, isn't it? You must know written Chinese and Vietnamese to write old Vietnamese.

[bathrobe]

Shouldn't it be 东京 and not 东亰?

[nnt]

东 is the simplified form of 東

京 is the right word for Kinh (jing1)

亰 is an old character, an old form of 原 and of 京 (Kangxi dictionary)and used as 京 by the Japanese, so 東亰 = Tokyo

I should have written:

You must know written Chinese (simplified and Traditional , old and current) and Vietnamese (old and current) (and perhaps some Japanese too) to write old Vietnamese.

[hparade]

oh really? does the japanese use 亰 instead of 京? i mean the extra line in the square....

[nnt]

Not instead, but as a variant (you can see both forms): for example (google search)

もし江戸に遷都されて無かったら?

... 03/06/27 19:27 世界的に首都＝TOKYO、古都＝KYOTO ... 04/03/10 23:01 この

ような変な表記をみつけますた。 東亰（とうきょう） 379 ...

academy2.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/history/1047453536 - 101k

or you can look it up in a japanese dictionary