Changing Writing Systems   Let’s start by giving some examples of languages changing their traditional writing system. Just imagine the effort involved. Since high school I’ve been aware of only the one in Turkey, but now, when researching topics for East Asia, I’m surprised to find several more. Nevertheless, everything I’ve found does involve Asia.

TURKISH We’ll start with the westernmost part of West Asia. First recall the revolutionary political, social, legal, economic, educational and cultural reforms in the 1920’s-1930’s of Mustafa Kemal, to whose name the Turkish government in 1934 added Atatürk (Father of Turks). Even the fact that they gave him a last name, that particular one being an honor, was based on one of his reforms, which required that all Turks have a specific last name, since many before that did not.

Up until then, Turkey had used the Arabic alphabet, since it was an Islamic country lying culturally in the sphere of influence of Arabic. But Turkish is an Altaic language (2009/29) and Arabic is Semitic, which is like apples and oranges. Not only was Turkish burdened with several letters that Arabic needed for sounds it had that Turkish did not, there was the vowel problem, which in particular made the Arabic alphabet highly unsuitable. Turkish grammar is much more dependent on the “sing-sang-sung” kind of vowel change even than English is, and Semitic alphabets (Hebrew, too) notoriously don’t normally write down vowels other than A. Gd lck wth tht. OK, “that”.

In the summer of 1928 the alphabet change was announced, a commission worked on it, and it became legally binding to use the Roman (Latin) alphabet on November 1 that year. To look at Turkish today, as we noted on our visit in the 1970’s, it’s amazingly readable (even though the words are incomprehensible), with an extremely high sound-to-symbol relationship, something which lay people call being “phonetic”.

It includes the recognizable vowels Ö and Ü, which we’ve discussed in the past. You notice quickly that the regular I (as in machine) is always dotted, even when capitalized. This looks a little odd to our eyes, but it appears in the names of two major cities, İstanbul and İzmir. The dotless I, which looks normal when capitalized, but odd in lower case (ı), as in “kapı” (door), is the equivalent of the neutral Schwa sound, like the first sound in “among”.

Most unusual letters in the Turkish alphabet are easily learned and remembered J is “zh” as in French “je”. The plain S is an S, while the “s-comma” (Ş and ş) is “SH”. Şiş, for example, means “skewer” in Turkish, which any lover of kebabı (with a dotless I) will recognize.

G is as in “go” but there’s a “weak G” that is spelled Ğ and ğ as in ağaç (tree). That example also illustrates Ç and ç. Which is pronounced CH as in church. We came across that, as any traveler would, in İstanbul when we found that the famous inlet-harbor known in English as the Golden Horn is called Haliç.

Finally, C is a surprise. It sounds like J in jug, and that comes with a recollection of mine. Before we ever went to Türkiye, the first and only word of Türkçe I knew was Cumhuriyeti, which I now know how to pronounce. In the 1960’s I worked for a while for American Express as a German and French translator, and there was a steady flow of letters in French under the heading Türkiye Cumhuriyeti. How did I know what it meant? Right below it said République de Turquie.

How the commission that worked on the alphabet in 1928 put things together is interesting in this highly efficient operation. There was a Swedish interpreter present, and he suggested the Swedish letter Ö for the equivalent sound in Türkçe, so even though German has the same letter, Swedish gets the credit. However, the Ü did come from German. The Ş came from the Romanian alphabet, and the Ç came from Albanian, where it is pronounced the same way. This letter should not be confused with French or Portuguese spelling where Ç is just a variant spelling of C, as borrowed into English in “façade”. Finally the unusual use of C was taken from—of all things—an Arabic letter with the same sound that looked a little like a C.

The change in the alphabet resulted in a dramatic rise in literacy, which is something to keep in mind as we move now to the other side of Asia and continue cumbersome writing systems.

VIETNAMESE All countries surrounding China have been influenced by the ponderous Chinese writing system of logograms (sinograms) at one time or another. It was the classical case of a major language being dominant for cultural and religious reasons. Just as the Arabic writing system had overtaken Turkish, the Chinese writing system had overtaken Vietnamese and others, even though, once again, Vietnamese, in Southeast Asia, and Chinese are apples and oranges. But after earlier Portuguese missionaries in Vietnam started promoting the Roman (Latin) alphabet for Vietnamese, a French missionary codified the adapted alphabet in the 17C, and it spread from just church use to the entire culture. Under French colonial rule, the Vietnamese alphabetic writing system became official in 1910.

The Vietnamese system is much more complicated than in Turkish, with many diacritical marks above and below letters, and I won’t--and can’t--give specifics here, but the name of the country is spelled, including the diacritic marks, such as dots under vowels, Việt Nam, Hanoi is spelled Hà Nội.

MONGOLIAN Traditionally, in Central Asia, both Mongolias (2009/29) used a unique squiggly script that look a little like Arabic, but, quite strikingly, with individual words written vertically. Now Westernization has come, but not in the way you perhaps think. Mongolian is written in Cyrillic!

Let’s modify that a bit, since there are two sides to the border. In Inner Mongolia in China, the traditional script is still used, but, since the majority of the people living there are Han Chinese, Chinese characters are seen everywhere. Both Mongolian and Mandarin are official there, and all signs have to be bilingual. Introducing Cyrillic there was considered briefly to conform with independent (Outer) Mongolia, but the idea was dropped at the time of the Sino-Soviet split during the Cold War.

In independent Mongolia, the idea of introducing Roman (Latin) script was toyed with in the early 1930’s (and is commonly used for computer input today), but it was decided in 1946 to use Cyrillic instead. This is not really surprising considering the long northern border with Russia. In the early 1990’s an attempt was made, surprisingly, to reintroduce the classic Mongolian script once again, but not so surprisingly, failed in the face of popular resistance.

The alphabet varies somewhat from the Cyrillic used in Russian, but then that’s true between all countries using Cyrillic (Ukraine, Bulgaria, Serbia). The name of the country in Mongolian is Монгол улс / Mongol uls (literally, Mongol land). The capital, traditionally known in the West as Ulan Bator, is now also known as Ulaanbaatar or Улаанбаатар.

Writing Korean   After dancing around West Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia, let’s now concentrate on the three languages of East Asia proper, starting with Korean. The Korean situation is again a matter of a writing change, as above, but with a purely local twist. Originally, once again, Chinese characters were used to write Korean, and it was usually just the elite of society that learned to do so. As ever, a system that wrote abstractly at the word level did record meaning, but not the sounds (phonemes) of the language. This was resolved centuries ago, in 1446, when the Korean alphabet called hangul (newer spelling hangeul) was devised. Yes, it is a regular alphabet based on sounds (phonemes), but it has an unusual idiosyncratic twist. Words are not only clearly broken down into syllables, but the letters of each syllable are put in a pile.

Picture it this way. Mama and Papa get on the bus with four kids, but there are only two seats left. So Mama takes one seat, puts Junior on her lap, and the baby on top. Then Papa sits next to her and does the same thing with the other two kids. Thus six people are taking up the space of just two seats. Take a look at the word “hangul” written in Hangul.

This is a beautifully clear, color-coded depiction of how syllables appear in hangul. The initial consonant here in shown in red, the central vowel in blue, and the final consonant in green. To use another metaphor, each syllable has its sounds piled up like groceries in a bag. Also note that, while Korean writing might resemble Chinese because of this syllabic shape, a quick rule of thumb to quickly identify something as Korean is the possibility of circles somewhere in the figure, which Chinese never has. Also, Chinese logograms will be tied tightly together, while Korean syllables clearly show divisions between the letters, as in this example.

Hangul is read from left to right and top to bottom. Syllables can be listed horizontally or vertically. It’s best described as an alphabet organized in syllabic blocks. Some of the elements are simple consonants, others are clusters of two consonants, some are vowels, others diphthongs. Each block has 2-5 letters, with at least one consonant and one vowel. Here are the positioning possibilities of the blocks, and the letters (click to increase the size): Hangul Positions & Letters.

Now let’s think about this. Why these unusual syllabic blocks? What’s your take? My guess is that the influence of the Chinese characters was so great when this alphabet was devised that there was just a desire to make it look like abstract Chinese characters, even though they are entirely different, being a collection of sounds (phonemes). That’s cultural influence for you. In the early 20C a minor attempt was made to write the letters in a horizontal row, like other alphabets are written, and to forget putting them in syllabic blocks, but it was unsuccessful.

Hangul was introduced on October 9, 1446, and the Koreans are so proud of it that October 9 is now a national holiday in both Koreas. As a matter of fact, what got me looking into hangul was an article in the Times this summer saying that Korea is trying to export its alphabet. Some Korean educators have found a people in Indonesia whose language doesn’t have an alphabet, and they’ve devised an appropriate variation of hangul to fit this language.

During Japanese colonial rule in Korea, 1910-45, the Korean language and its hangul writing system were prohibited in business and other official settings. The schools couldn’t teach either, but many people learned secretly until a post-colonial revival was able to come about.

A newer Romanization of hangul was announced in 2000 and was supposedly more accurate than the older one as to Korean phonology, but there were a lot of critics, and I find some things cumbersome. Although the city of Pusan is now spelled Busan, if that’s more accurate, then I’m for it, but then I remember flying into Inchon airport outside of Seoul to find it spelled Incheon, yet still pronounced the same. Similarly, hangul is now just respelled as hangeul, and in both words, it seems the old spelling just makes more sense.