It seems wisest and most informative to approach upcoming trips by starting with pre-discussions in advance, such as talking first about US east coast settlement history and then culminating in the visit to Provincetown and Cape Cod. In a similar vein before we get to Japan and Taiwan, all armchair travelers who wish shall mentally move en masse from North America’s east coast to Asia’s east coast.

East Asia   We have in the past reviewed the divisions of Asia, three of which are Central Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia. While we’ll make reference to the first two, we here discuss just the latter, but in a narrow definition that particularly suits our purposes.

Beyond geography, most definitions make political references. Here, beyond geography, we are just making ethnic, cultural, and linguistic ones. I consider East Asia to consist of (1) Eastern China with Taiwan, (2) the Koreas, (3) Japan. Here’s a map of the Sea of Japan (Map by Chris 73), called in the Koreas the East Sea—politics already rears its ugly head—so that we can see what three cultures we’re discussing. Whle I’ll be going shortly to Japan and Taiwan, I’ll mention again that I was briefly in South Korea (Seoul and the DMZ) on the way to Vladivostok (2005/7), and that Carter Brey described his trip to North Korea in “Pyongyang Diary” (2008/5). The locations of all three of these cities are visible here, as is the nearby Russian island of Sakhalin, which I plan to make future reference to. Below that are the four main Japanese islands, and the upper part of East China can also be seen. To see the balance of the area in question, we have this map of the East China Sea. It includes the lower part of East China with Taiwan, and the Korean city of Pusan (Busan). In southern Japan, it shows the city of Fukuoka, from which I’ll make my air connection to Taipei. Between them are the Ryukyu Islands of Japan, the most famous of which is Okinawa. Note how the islands line up off the Asian coast from north to south: Sakhalin, the four major Japanese islands, the Ryukyus, Taiwan.

But more broadly speaking, and particularly if you focus on political borders, East Asia can be sweepingly defined, as the United Nations does: mainland China in its entirety (including autonomous regions), Mongolia, Taiwan, North & South Korea, and Japan. (You should particularly note that this broad definition will speak of the People’s Republic of China, a political designation, where I simply geographically mention mainland China.)

I agree here that, lying to the south of this region, Vietnam is not included, since it’s part of Southeast Asia. I agree that, to the north, the Russian Far East is not included, since it’s an extension of Europe. [Note once again that many westerners call everything west of the Urals Siberia, while Russians clearly distinguish between Siberia in Central Russia and the Russian Far East in, well, the far east.]

But I would prune the UN’s definition still further, since we needn’t get into political entities. What is best for our purposes here is an ethnic, cultural, and linguistic framework, where China is China and Korea is Korea as we look at who the people are, history, geography, language—and food.

To review this properly, the largest country in the area, China, needs further discussion, because China in particular appears different when looked at politically and when looked at in an ethnic-cultural-linguistic framework. Most people are aware that the former Soviet Union was ethnically and linguistically diverse. Its subdivisions were even called Republics, and once the Soviet Union broke up, we see that Russia proper, while still the largest entity, is today only one of the countries resulting from the breakup.

But not everyone is aware that China is ethnically just as diverse as the Soviet Union was. We all know that Tibet is different, but a common perception in the West is that all the rest of China is the same. If you are not aware of the word Han, make note of it. When people talk about “Chinese”, what they usually mean are Han Chinese. The Han Chinese are the majority ethnic group in China, and the largest single ethnic group in the world. In mainland China, 92% of Chinese citizens (a political category) are Han Chinese (an ethnic category). But as many of them as there may be, the Han Chinese are concentrated in roughly only half the territory, mostly the eastern half. In Taiwan, the same figure is up to 98%, but that’s because of a geographically more concentrated population.

The remaining half of the territory of China consists of autonomous regions, including large areas in the west, but also to the north. These are huge areas with smaller populations, all ethnically, culturally, and linguistically connected to other places, including Mongolia, which I also exclude. Note this map of the Administritive Divisions of China (Map by Ran). The autonomous regions in beige are as different from Han China as Estonia or Kazakhstan are from Russia.

Best categorized as part of South Asia are Tibet, Tibetans being ethnically and linguistically connected to Burma, and Gunăngxī, whose Zhuang people are ethnically and linguistically connected to Thailand.

Best categorized as part of Central Asia are two areas:

(1) Xīnjiāng, a huge western province taking up 1/6 of China’s territory, that used to be known as Sinkiang. It’s the home of Islamic Turkic peoples, notably Uyghurs, related to those in the nearby ‘Stans of Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, etc). (To pronounce "Uyghur" say "weaker", then change the K to a G.) Adjacent is Qīnghăi, considered a regular province, although the Han are only just over half, the rest including many Tibetans and Mongols.

(2) Mongolia, both Outer and Inner. Independent Mongolia, lying between Russia and China and fitting into the U-shape at the top of the map, was traditionally Outer Mongolia, while Inner Mongolia, running in a long strip to the southeast of independent Mongolia, is part of China and an autonomous region. Each has a population of about 2.5 million, but independent Mongolia is about three times larger in area, much of which is, however, the Gobi Desert. Adjacent is Níngxià, home to the Hui people, who, as Muslims, don’t eat pork, which is otherwise so essential to Chinese cuisine.

Regional Language Relationships   Finally, here’s an Ethnolinguistic Map of China (Map by Jiang). In the Sino-Tibetan group, the "Sino-" part covers the Han Chinese (or, if you will, “Chinese Chinese”), broken down to the wide distribution in beige of Mandarin, as opposed to the smaller area referred to here as "Southern". In the West is the Tibetan area of the Sino-Tibetan language family. Note the Altaic languages, a whole different language family, which include Turkic languages from Turkey and across Central Asia, and, as you can see, to Western China. Mongolian is another Altaic subgroup.

However, this last map, while good for borders, simplifies things made clearer by this other Ethnolinguistic Map of China. The Altaic (Turkic, Mongolian) are still in the west and north, and the Han area under Sino-Tibetan is not subdivided, but the map makes clear that the latter half of that name is more accurately Tibeto-Burman, which are elsewhere described as the non-sinitic members of the Sino-Tibetan family, namely Burmese, the largest, and Tibetan, plus some 400 others in the mountainous area.

Also of interest is the indication on Taiwan that the aboriginal minorities still living there are the source for the Malay-Polynesian language family as we discussed earlier this year (2009/3).

Since the Mongolian, Turkic, and Tibetan languages are connected to groups elsewhere, I don’t feel they’re appropriate to be included in a study limited to just East Asia. Thus we are left for our discussion the Han Chinese of East China, plus Korean and Japanese (note the small Korean language area in blue spilling into China from Korea).

KOREAN & JAPANESE Your first thought might be that all three of our languages are related. Not so. You then might think that, given the history between Korea and Japan, those two at least might be related to each other. Also not so. Do remember that, when we were talking about Basque (2007/10), we said Basque wasn’t related to anything else, and is referred to as a language isolate. Well, we have two more. Korean is a language isolate, and Japanese is a language isolate. Therefore, none of our trio of languages is related to either of the others.

CHINESE The language family of Han Chinese, Sino-Tibetan, is the second-largest language family in the world after our own Indo-European. Calling the family Sino-Tibetan means there is a distant relationship between Chinese and Tibetan, but I would suppose the difference in the two factors of Sino-Tibetan is like the wide spread in the Malay-Polynesian family between Malay and Polynesian. In any case, as for Sino-Tibetan, we’ll just be involved with the “Sino” part.

Well, let’s clarify that, and reveal the dirty little secret. There is no Chinese language, not in the way most people understand.

All languages have dialects. People speak slightly differently in different parts of a language area, but the deciding factor in calling two versions dialects is that they be mutually intelligible, more or less. An American will understand a Brit, more or less. A Berliner a Viennese, a Parisian a Niçois. (This sometimes go to the extreme that dialects want independence because they are NOT mutually intelligible, something that happens in Italy. Go to Wikipedia, find a topic—“Italy” itself is a good one—and note on the left menu that you can get the article also in Nnapulitano or Sicilianu, in other words, the Neapolitan or Sicilian “dialects”.)

But “Chinese” is different. The reality is that so-called “Chinese dialects” are a group of mutually unintellgible languages, and linguists consider it inappropriate to call them all one language, further subdividing “Chinese” as a group of related languages. This map reveals the reality of The Sinitic Languages (Map by Wyunhe), which continues to make the distinction between Mandarin and the southern (southeastern) sinitic languages.

What you are looking at is the extent of Han Chinese in the two Chinas. If you’ve always wondered about the word “Mandarin” being used when discussing language in China, you can see that Mandarin IS “Chinese”, and it’s by far what most Han Chinese speak. Check the notation that Jin is usually grouped together with Mandarin, and you’ll see that fully 70% of all Han Chinese speak Mandarin natively. The other related “sinitic” languages are then tightly grouped together in the Southeast and in Taiwan, the most famous of these being Cantonese.

Mandarin is the official “Chinese” everywhere, so we can now modify the earlier statement: there is no Chinese language per se; Mandarin is “Chinese”. But understand that all these “Chinese languages” are written in the same Chinese writing system, which is the basis for China to imply that they’re all one language. Of course, people commonly accept this fiction—but people also accept the fiction that Eurasia is two continents.

Finally, as to Taiwan, note on the map that they speak the two languages on the mainland located closest to the island, since that’s where most immigrants came from. My understanding is that on the new Taipei metro, all announcements are quadrilingual, that is, in these two languages (because that’s what everybody speaks), in Mandarin (since that’s official, and most people are bilingual) and in English (since that’s international).

To put the ethno-linguistic situation as simply as possible, it’s the Han Chinese around which the country called China is formed, and it’s Mandarin that is meant when the Chinese language is referred to.

Writing Systems   Since we’re talking about East Asia, we have to really see what the traveler is up against when trying to interpret directional signs. In simplest terms, and for our purposes, we have three possibilities.

ALPHABET: SOUND-BASED Writing systems that are based on individual sounds (technically, phonemes) are called alphabets, ideally one sound to one symbol. They are the simplest and most efficient way of writing. Say S-I-T and write SIT. However, alphabets are subject to abuse over time: say D-E-T and write DEBT, where historical spellings are introduced into the reality of alphabetic writing. If someone does write DET, he’s subject to ridicule, with the admonition “he’s writing it how it sounds!!!!”. Just consider how contrary to the purpose of an alphabet that admonition appears.

SYLLABARY: SYLLABLE-BASED Writing systems that are based on individual syllables are called syllabaries. Consider for a moment that you need here a different “letter” for every syllable in the language, so that a syllabary is going to be less efficient than an alphabet. But there are languages that have simple enough syllables so that it can work. These few languages will be ones that most likely have syllables of one consonant with one vowel (CV), or what I’ve called LA-LA languages, such as Italian (na.po.li), or, for an even better example, Hawaiian (ho.no.lu.lu).

The concept is simple: take each consonant in the language, and team it up with each of the vowels, so your B syllables will be BA, BE, BI, BO, BU. In this way, you’ll have five syllables for each consonant, but then each syllable will have its own “letter”.

Hawaiian DOES NOT have a syllabary, but for purposes of illustration, let’s make believe it does. We want to write Honolulu. We go to the five H syllables and find that HO uses the letter X. Then we go to the five N syllables and find that NO uses Y. Finally, we go to the five L syllables and find that LU uses Z. Thus we write ho.no.lu.lu by its syllables: XYZZ.

There is one historically well-known syllabary used in the United States. One might remember a recent postage stamp celebrating the work of Sequoyah, a Cherokee Indian who, in the early 19C, formulated a syllabary for the Cherokee language. Wikipedia tells me that Sequoyah signed his name in Cherokee as:

The Cherokee Nation officially adopted his syllabary in 1825. In Oklahoma there is a Sequoyah County, and there is a Mount Sequoyah in the Great Smoky Mountains, two areas associated with the Cherokees. Also, the tall Sequoia tree of California, which was named shortly after his death, is thought to have been named for him.

We mention syllabaries here because that’s one of the systems Japanese uses.

LOGOGRAMS: WORD-BASED Writing systems that are based on individual words (technically, morphemes) use a set of logograms. “Logo-“ means “word”, so a logogram is “word-writing”. This is the the most complex of all, and arguably the most difficult for either natives or foreigners to learn. You may think that having a separate symbol for each syllable in a syllabary becomes complex, but picture having a separate symbol for each individual word. Even when a native learns a new word, you can’t just spell it out, since you’re not using an alphabet, so you have to learn the symbol for that word, although most frequently, you use a pair of existing symbols to represent the new concept. Picture the difficulty of putting together a dictionary, or looking something up in one. Picture the difficulty of setting up a keyboard system, or using it. Welcome to Chinese.

Logograms represent words, but I am informed that when used in Chinese many of them do actually have a phonetic character as well and give the reader a hint toward pronunciation. Still, it’s a word-symbol that can also work in multiple languages.

Here’s an example of a logogram we use all the time, even though our system is alphabetic: the symbol “&”. It tells you nothing about pronunciation. It represents a word. If you see it in an English sentence, it represents “and”, but in a Spanish sentence, it represents “y”, in French “et”, and in German “und”.

Here are more logograms that work in any language: $, £, =, +, and all the other mathematical symbols. And of course, it’s equally true about all the numbers. 7 to an English speaker is seven, but to a Swedish speaker, it’s sju. 2+3=5 to an English speaker is the entire sentence “Two and three are five”, but to a French speaker it represents “Deux et trois font cinq”, yet the logograms themselves (the symbols) remain neutral. If you tell a cab driver in Moscow that the house number you want is “forty” and he doesn’t understand, you write down 40 and he finally understands “сорок! / sorok!”.

In that case, there’s really a practical international use, but just imagine logograms spread to all the words in your language, using single or double characters, and the job learning them all becomes formidable.

Logograms used in Chinese can also be called sinograms, and the Chinese writing system would then be sinography. Or, if you don’t want to use that, or even logograms, you can simply call them Chinese characters. The Chinese call them hànzi, in which you can see the word Han. The word “hànzi” written in hànzi would appear as:

We’ll make the distinction later between traditional and simplified characters. Hànzi are written in imaginary square blocks and look quite angular since they originated as symbols written with a brush. Many strokes end with a sharp point, which is where the brush would have left the paper.

I understand that a certain large Chinese classical dictionary contains about 47,000 characters, but most of them are obscure. It is estimated that for full literacy in Chinese you need to know 3,000-4,000 characters, and for basic literacy 2,000.