WI Chinese in Cyrillic or Roman alphabets?

[proximefactum]

I have read that Mao Zedong once toyed with the idea of writing Chinese in the Cyrillic or Roman alphabets. Presumably, Mao wanted to increase literacy.

Yet there are quite a few challenges with this idea, such as:

*how to switch from ideographic to alphabetic language. Vietnamese did this successfully when it started using a Roman alphabet derived writing system.

*How to represent tones. Again, Vietnamese worked out tonal symbols to go along with the Roman alphabet.

*The breakdown of Chinese writing as a bridge between Chinese spoken dialects

*Multiple transliteration systems for the Roman alphabet developed before pinyin. I'm not sure about Cyrillic transliteration, though I'd guess that the Chinese developed a Cyrillic transliteration for Moscow.

*The loss of classical writings, poems, government documents, etc. through the general abandonment of Chinese ideograms.

Would this experiment have worked out logistically? The only other major change in writing system I can think of right now (other than Vietnamese) is Turkish, which abandoned writing in the Arabic alphabet under Ataturk and switched to an adapted Roman alphabet.

Also, what would be the societal impact of adopting an alphabet and discouraging use of traditional ideograms? Would these alphabetic reforms enter into popular conscience or use, or would people informally/discretely use Chinese characters? To what degree would Mao force his subjects to use an alphabetic system?

This might provide some extra information on Mao's language reform schemes (from Google Books preview): Minglang Zhou, Multilingualism in China: The Politics of Writing Reforms for Minority Languages 1949–2002. (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003)

 

[RGB]

The only other major change in writing system I can think of right now (other than Vietnamese) is Turkish, which abandoned writing in the Arabic alphabet under Ataturk and switched to an adapted Roman alphabet.

Well, the Koreans switched to Hangul largely in the 19th/20th c, even if the system has been around for a while. That's another example.

And in the territory of the former Russian Empire several languages underwent transitions from say, Arabic, to Latin, to Cyrillic, or Cyrillic to Latin, or Greek to Cyrillic, or Mongol to Cyrillic.

It takes a good deal of effort; on the scale of China, difficult to imagine.

 

[iori]

Well, if he did do it, and had been successful I figure he may have done more than just change the script, he may discourage some words that may be difficult to spell in Roman script without adding more letters.

I do think though that you'd see an interesting situation where-in people generally wrote in Romanized Chinese but wrote names in Chinese characters.

 

[Geekhis Khan]

Japan also developed their own syllalibries in Hiragana and Katakana.

 

[Dan1988]

Why not a modified version of Xiao'erjing with distinct vowel letters and using the Arabic vowel diacritics to indicate tone?

Though if you're interesting in Cyrillic, I'd suggest checking out Dungan. Here's tha alphabet.

 

[Zajir]

Why not a modified version of Xiao'erjing with distinct vowel letters and using the Arabic vowel diacritics to indicate tone?

Though if you're interesting in Cyrillic, I'd suggest checking out Dungan. Here's tha alphabet.

Why would Mao Tse-Tung pick an Arabic alphabet, if to modernise his country, it makes far more sense to use Cyrillic(used in the Soviet Union), and Latin(most widely used alphabet).

 

[Dan1988]

Why would Mao Tse-Tung pick an Arabic alphabet, if to modernise his country, it makes far more sense to use Cyrillic(used in the Soviet Union), and Latin(most widely used alphabet).

Well, he wouldn't use Latin because that's the alphabet of "the American imperalist running dogs", and for Mandarin Chinese the Cyrillic alphabet would be quite complicated (though Dungan is a counter-example). With a few tricks, the Arabic alphabet could be modified to suit Mandarin/Putonghua, especially since (IIRC) traditionally Chinese characters were meant to be written right to left (the old way also of writing Japanese). Plus, the Arabic alphabet would have additional letters that although might be used for Mandarin, it could be used for other regionalects, such as Wu (Cantonese) or Min (Amoy/Taiwanese/Teochew/Hainanese). In other words, it's just as modular as Chinese characters. The only other "native" alternative would be a system that Mao himself rejected in OTL - bopomofo.

 

[strangeland]

Mandarin actually does have a rarely-used syllabic script: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo which, like Pinyin, uses diacratics to denote tones.

 

[Dathi THorfinnsson]

Japan also developed their own syllalibries in Hiragana and Katakana.

The problem with Japanese, in particular, and probably Vietnamese and Korean, is that they CAN'T be written in glyphs/ideographs/chinese characters. Japanese, at least, has grammar and connectives and so on that require additions to the Kanji characters, which is the main reason that the kana syllabaries were invented, IIRC. I believe that the situation is similar for Korean.

I know that Japanese has stuck with Kanji partly because of the complexity of the language - that there are so many homonyms that a purely phonetic script doesn't work. I have been told that Japanese, while talking (in a restaurant, e.g.) will sketch Kanji to make their conversation clearer.

I know that there are many homonyms (at least if you discount tones) in Chinese, so a simple Wade-Giles or pinyan system would be difficult to use INSTEAD of characters (as opposed to e.g. supplementing them).

Now Vietnamese does manage, although it's a mess to look at / write (with all those blasted diacriticals), so maybe Mandarin might as well.

OTOH, I suspect that the biggest single problem is the destruction of the 'Chinese language'. Any alphabetization will instantly make 100 million+ 'Chinese' instantly 'foreigners' (Fujianese, Cantonese, etc, etc, speakers).

Now, 200 years ago, the French managed to suppress all non-'French' speakers in 'France' (on an official level), so a sufficiently dedicated bureaucracy could pull it off, no doubt, but at the risk of severe disaffection all through the south....

 

[Frige]

The suggestion of a system based on Arabic characters has no basis in the attempts at Chinese writing reform that were actually made under Mao... from whose era we got Pinyin and Simplified Chinese of course.

In China, the public response to Mao’s new emphasis on a “national in form” alphabetic system was the submission of something like 1,700 schemes of various kinds. After considerable deliberation, the Committee on Chinese Writing Reform presented for Mao’s consideration six alternate schemes. Four were based on Chinese characters, one on the Cyrillic alphabet, and one on the Latin alphabet. Mao did not like any of the schemes that were “national in form.” In 1956 he finally accepted the one based on the Latin alphabet. The government, after further deliberation leading to a final draft, in January 1958 officially promulgated the now well-known Pinyin system.

From this online resource:
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/defrancis/chinese_writing_reform.html

Some interesting titbits of information:

Chairman Mao: Chinese language is not bad, but the Chinese characters are not good.
Prime Minister Zhou: They are very difficult to learn.
Chairman Mao: And there are many contradictions between the oral and written language because the oral language is monosyllabic while the written language develops from symbols. We do not use an alphabet.
Dr. Kissinger: There are some attempts to use an alphabet, I am told.
Prime Minister Zhou: First we must standardize the oral language.

Entirely replacing the characters with an alphabet was ruled out as unrealistic though, from what I gathered.

 

[George Carty]

Well, he wouldn't use Latin because that's the alphabet of "the American imperalist running dogs", and for Mandarin Chinese the Cyrillic alphabet would be quite complicated (though Dungan is a counter-example). With a few tricks, the Arabic alphabet could be modified to suit Mandarin/Putonghua, especially since (IIRC) traditionally Chinese characters were meant to be written right to left (the old way also of writing Japanese). Plus, the Arabic alphabet would have additional letters that although might be used for Mandarin, it could be used for other regionalects, such as Wu (Cantonese) or Min (Amoy/Taiwanese/Teochew/Hainanese). In other words, it's just as modular as Chinese characters. The only other "native" alternative would be a system that Mao himself rejected in OTL - bopomofo.

Would fiercely-atheist Communists though equally reject Arabic script, seeing it as a symbol of Islam?

 

[LeX]

Chinese characters are too linguistically and culturally important to be gotten rid of. You would have to change the entire language itself to make it work, and the benefits would only be superficial at best.

 

[Dan1988]

Would fiercely-atheist Communists though equally reject Arabic script, seeing it as a symbol of Islam?

IIRC Islam was not like Christianity in the aspect of the missionaries, so whilst the CCP could see that in the Arabic script, at least they were not as intrusive as the Christians (the latter which Hendryk could attest to). Besides, China has its own calligraphic style of the Arabic script, called Sini, which is based on Chinese calligraphy.

 

[Dan1988]

Chinese characters are too linguistically and culturally important to be gotten rid of. You would have to change the entire language itself to make it work, and the benefits would only be superficial at best.

Hmm, could there be the possibility of a co-existence of characters and bopomofo, à la Japanese with kanji and hiragana?

 

[Dan1988]

The suggestion of a system based on Arabic characters has no basis in the attempts at Chinese writing reform that were actually made under Mao... from whose era we got Pinyin and Simplified Chinese of course.

I know that, but if someone brought that up as an option, could there have been at least some serious study into Xiao'erjing?

 

[Dan1988]

Now Vietnamese does manage, although it's a mess to look at / write (with all those blasted diacriticals), so maybe Mandarin might as well.

The problems with Vietnamese are largely due to the fact that it is essentially an über-etymological version of the Portuguese alphabet (which has the digraph NH, shared with Vietnamese, which was originally from les langues d'òc), with some input from Italian and French. Had Vietnamese moved away from Romance spelling conventions, things could have been different - yet Vietnamese, with regards to homonyms, has a 'policy' where each one has one basic meaning and all other "alternate" meanings are not used, so that solves the homonym problem.