It's interesting how seeing how these scripts has spread, can teach us about the tight trading routes and connections different civilizations in the past had, initially spreading the logographic writing from Egypt to the rest of the world, and later spreading the phonetic script, again from Egypt area.
It's also interesting how according to this map, the entire southern and western hemisphere use latin alphabet, and that the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.
I'll highlight Japanese because that is what I know.
A lot of imagery can be conveyed with choice of characters. Whether alternate readings in a novel, or brilliant neon signs on the street, you get a lot more information at a glance due to the overloaded meaning of the word being represented. Even more so in the case of compound words.
In spoken language you say のむ (nomu) - to drink, and contextually it doesn't matter how it's used. However, in writing 飲む means to drink a liquid, while 呑む means to drink alcohol. Imagine an author using the former for the latter as a particular word choice, probably to convey something like an alcoholic drinking alcohol as if it were water!
The language also has the problem of having a ridiculous amount of homophones. Deciding to use the more phonetic-like hiragana system inversely makes adult level reading even more difficult, not simpler. Texts would become longer (one character kanji vs multiple hiragana), and the implied meaning would be lost.
The ridiculous amount of homophones is due to what I consider as a big mistake, the Japanese did not only import the Chinese writing, but they also imported the Chinese readings of the Chinese symbols.
The import of the Chinese readings has created some homophones between Chinese words and native Japanese words and also many times more homophones between distinct Chinese words that had different pronunciation in Chinese, but which are pronounced identically by the Japanese.
Spoken Japanese has a higher proportion of native Japanese words, but written Japanese has frequently much more words that are derived from mispronounced Chinese words than native Japanese words.
Scientific and technical literature has an overwhelming proportion of words derived from Chinese, because it contains a large proportion of compound words. Most compound words in Japanese use the Chinese pronunciation of the signs, because the native Japanese words are usually longer.
Had the Japanese always used the Chinese signs only with the native Japanese readings, there would have been no ambiguities due to homophones and it would have also been easy to transition to any other writing system, if they would have ever wanted that.
As it is now, it is unlikely that the Japanese writing system could ever be simplified. The argument that changing the current Japanese writing system would disconnect the people from their cultural heritage, is much less valid than it would seem, as I have discovered when attempting to read some books written before the first World War.
Even if the simplifications in Japanese have been far less than in the transition from Traditional Chinese writing to Simplified Chinese writing, nevertheless in modern Japanese there are a large number of kanji that have been modified from their versions used one hundred years ago. Also many hiragana/katakana spellings have been modified, to reflect modern Japanese pronunciation.
So for reading Japanese writings with an age of more than one century, you need to learn much more than for reading modern Japanese, and that is true also for the native Japanese people. Reading old Japanese books is far more difficult for Japanese people, than reading a book published in 1500 AD, or a Latin bronze tablet from 2200 years ago, is for Europeans.
Perhaps there is an analogy with how "western" words are formed. We usually use so mix of Greek and Latin roots, especially in science and engineering.
For instance the word "telemetry". It has the "tele-" prefix one finds in "television" and the "meter" root, so you instantly know that it has something to do with measuring something from afar.
I don't understand the "text length" argument. I can see it can be a problem - I avoid French translations of software because French is usually longer than English and it sometimes lead to text truncation or overflow bugs, but it's no big deal, really. Besides, it seems to me that Korea's Hangul shows that compromises are possible.
It's amusing to read in Wikipedia that "Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy [...] As a result, Hangul was initially denounced and disparaged by the Korean educated class" [1]. This sort of reinforces my impression that the Japanese writing was made to be pedantic rather than practical.
We had that in the west until public schools were built: reading and writing was only accessible to wealthy families that could afford hiring a teacher and had a lot of free time. There's a sort of urban legend that public schools did some compromises too; the long summer break was supposedly created so that children of farmers could help with harvesting.
Homophones don’t seems like they would be a problem intuitively. If a homophone can exist in the spoken language and retain meaning, then it would be able to exist in the written language too without a loss of meaning.
While there are a ridiculous amount of homophones (top 3 are 45, 38, 31!), it does look like the total number of words that include them is at 3.4%, increasing outside of daily language as you step into more specific topics. Not exactly small, but not as dramatic as I had pictured either. English apparently has 7-15% depending on what you reference by comparison.
The biggest difference is that while they are individual words in English, they are only word components in Japanese, which is why I'd say it's arguably harder. Not impossible of course, children are taught with spaced out hiragana at first, eventually learning the more compact non-spaced version of the language as they incorporate more kanji to help with word boundaries.
I think "kou" has more than 30 meanings, which is maddening even while speaking.
But the in person context is not the same as written context. There are several elements of context, such place, people, situation, which are obvious to parse in a spoken conversation, but would have to be introduced when writing.
> the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.
I would expect that that has a lot to do with how long-lived China's culture is. The "choice" of writing system was made long ago and has stuck. There hasn't been a significant enough upheaval that would have allowed another choice to take hold.
And Japan just happens to go along with that because they borrowed parts of their writing system from China.
Korea is a solid counter example. Around the 1400's their King devised han'gul, which as of today is the dominant writing system of that country which replaced Chinese. They still study and use Chinese characters in school, but only for two specific cases: Names, and official government documents.
Historically, most of Vietnam were the settlement for Chams people with phonetic writing and language of their own [1]. They were very successful traders and South China Sea was originally called Cham Sea [2]. Then they were displaced by the Nguyen Lords who considered themselves belongs to Han Chinese, and latter enforced Chinese based logographic writing system to the populations.
Unlike phonetic, logographic writing system is neither effective nor it's efficient. In software engineering processing Japanese words is still problematic until now because of their usage of logographic writing system [3]. The are several movies and drama series documenting how the Korean moved from the Chinese logographic to Hangul phonetic writing system by their King Sejong to rapidly and significantly increase their literacy rates.
Chinese spoken languages are different, so the replacing logographic system will create an additional fault line inside the society.
Besides, even a change of alphabet creates a barrier in understanding of an existing written corpus. I once worked as a translator for a Kasakh high school student who created a program converting different alphabets used in Kasakh language. Once it was Arabic alphabet. Then came progressives and changed the alphabet to Latin. Then came Soviet communists and change the alphabet to Cyrillic. Progressives continued to use Latin though - in exile… There were interesting texts in each “encoding”, and my protege created a program for International Science Fair competition that allowed reading of all Kasakh texts in a preferred encoding.
So computers simplified the transition a bit, but the problem still exists.
Actually neither in Mainland China nor in Japan the choice of the writing system has remained stuck to what had been used there for millennia.
In both Mainland China and in Japan the writing system has been reformed enough so that anyone who learns only the modern writing systems will have great difficulties to read any writing from before the first World War.
The reform was much more profound in Mainland China than in Japan, resulting in the Simplified Chinese writing system, so now Japan has remained with the more complex writing system.
For China, as others have said, that is mostly for allowing a common writing form for multiple related languages.
By replacing the Traditional writing with the Simplified writing, the Chinese have already made impossible the reading of the older writings without studying separately the Traditional writing, exactly as if they would have converted to the Latin alphabet.
The reason why Korea and Vietnam were successful in replacing the Chinese writing system, while Japan cannot do the same, is that the Korean and Vietnamese languages have been less influenced by the Chinese language than the Japanese language.
The modern written form of the Japanese language is a mixed language that uses both words from the language spoken by the Japanese before the introduction of the Chinese writing system and also a much larger number of words taken from an older form of the Chinese language.
Unfortunately, the very large number of Chinese words that have been taken together with the signs correspond to a much smaller number of Japanese pronunciations, creating an extremely large number of homophones, which cause an ambiguity in writing that is extremely difficult to avoid without the using of kanji.
An alphabetic form of Japanese writing, or writing it only with hiragana/katakana, would work only if the text would include along most words some kind of classifier sign, written with some kind of kanji or emoji, which would show the semantic class of the word, like it was done in a few ancient writing systems.
To remove ambiguities, a pretty long list of such semantic classifiers would need to be devised.
To give an example for those who are not familiar with how semantic classifier signs are used in writing systems, if there were a list of semantic classifiers that included 2 signs with the meaning "human body part" and "metal tool", then one could disambiguate the Japanese word "ken" by writing the sign for "human body part" followed by the phonetic signs for "ken", to indicate that the meaning is Chinese "quan2" = native Japanese "kobushi" = English "fist".
Similarly, one would write the sign for "metal tool" followed by the phonetic signs for "ken", to indicate that the meaning is Chinese "jian4" = native Japanese "tsurugi" = English "sword".
The Japanese word "ken" has many other meanings besides these 2, each being derived from distinct Chinese words, for example prefecture from xian4, ticket from quan4, and many others.
A large number of other semantic classifiers would be needed to disambiguate all meanings, e.g. "geographic place", "document" and so on.
So it is likely that even if a system with semantic classifiers would no longer need at least 2000 kanji signs, it would still need about one hundred semantic classifiers besides a phonetic syllabary or alphabet, to be able to write the Japanese language without losing information in comparison with the kanji writing.
Intellectuals do this. For example in English they added the letter b to the word debt. Sometimes it goes the other way and difficult words are made easier, like ornithology becomes birdlore, which didn't work out, but folk-lore stayed.
Are we sure that's what happened? We still have the word 'debit', I've always presumed it was descended from the Latin directly and contracted to one syllable as part of the general English tendency to do that, the current pronunciation of Worchester being one memorable example.
It turns out (from a grep of /dict/words and some time with the etymology) that this was done with three different words: subtle, doubt, and debt.
I happen to agree with the scholars which chose these spellings, which turn up at first in the 14th century btw, not such an eggheaded time.
I might support a hard reform to make English orthography phonemic, but that's radical change. The immense complexity of English spelling reveals the creole substrates of the language, and we have hundreds if not thousands of cases such as debt and debit where understanding the common Latin root is part and parcel.
I don't see the advantage in `dette`, basically. As long as the orthography is highly irregular, we may as well gette something outte of itte.
Neither system of writing originated in Egypt. Logographic writing originated in Mesopotamia with Cuneiform, proto-hieroglyphs came a bit later. The first alphabet was proto-Canaanite which evolved into Phoenician.
In which way are Egyptian hieroglyphs and their hieratic form [1] not an alphabet? There is a huge number of ligatures and some determinatives, but that's an ad-on. You can use the single characters like any other alphabet.
By that logic we also don't use an alphabet because we have started using symbols like the smiley. Which non-phonemic symbol have they used that couldn't be replaced by a phonemically created word?
Hieroglyphs include some alphabetic elements, but it’s not an alphabetic system. There are no significant historical texts written in it purely alphabetically. If you wrote out a complete text spelling out the words usually represented logographically in phonetic form they’d have thought you’d gone mad. Nobody used it that way.
Sure you will find some places where hieroglyphs are referred to as “an alphabet”, such as in childrens books, but we’re talking about the historical development of writing systems. We can’t do that accurately without distinguishing clearly between different types of writing systems, and this is well established terminology.
You’re probably right about emoji. Oxford Dictionaries named an emoji the ‘word of the year’ in 2015.
It's also interesting how according to this map, the entire southern and western hemisphere use latin alphabet, and that the only two countries still using a logographic writing system are China and Japan. I wonder why this writing system still has a stronghold there.