Iris Kuo

June 11, 2014

Honors 212B
Writing Assignment #3

Preface
Honors course descriptions come in three flavors. They can be 1) very long, 2) very short,
or 3) nonexistent. I generally prefer the first kind, since I like to believe that what I read is what
Ill get. As Ive learned through experience, however, the length of these descriptions does not
necessarily correlate with how accurately the words represent the material being taught. Any
choice is ultimately a gamble made based on crossed fingers and a leap of faith.
As I saw it, this particular course could either be the driest class or the most engaging
class I would ever take. Any academic discipline is inherently interesting, but linguistics is one
of those that can go either way depending on the perspectives used to present the material. As a
psychology major that happened to know Mandarin and was interested in psycholinguistics, I
knew how important of a role culture played in language development. I also knew that culture
could color the way we view the world in such distinct ways that its difficult to tease out our
own biases. In this regard, learning about a language is kind of similar to choosing an Honors
courseyou wont know what youre in for until you experience it yourself. And so, I added this
class to my schedule and havent looked back since.
On that last Monday of March, I entered Savery 138 for the first time with equal parts
excitement and apprehension. By the first Wednesday of June, I eventually left for the last time
with a very different mixture of emotions. It wasnt relief, it wasnt disappointment, and it wasnt
something I had felt after a class ended before. If I had to put a label on it, Id say it was

gratitude for the chance of speculating about eras gone by while exploring a topic that had a
personal connection to me as a human being.
***
Despite moving to the United States from Taiwan when I was only two, I was able to
retain my native language. I cant read or write anywhere as well as I wouldve if I had stayed
back, but I could get by if I wanted to travel by myself. I am also perfectly fine at verbal
communication, so my words do most of the work for me anyway.
According to my mother, I was a chatterbox when I was really young. One particular
story she always tells is about my love for walking down the streets in Taiwan and naming the
color of every car that passed by. For some reason, after I started attending kindergarten in the
U.S., I stopped talking as much as I used to. Looking back now, I know its because I had zero
experience with English, so I couldnt communicate with my classmates. Eventually, my teacher
requested someone from ESL services to meet with me weekly, which is kind of funny in
retrospect because my parents didnt know about this until I told them fairy recently.
Now, I dont remember much from that period of time. Its difficult to recall any
experiences from my early elementary school days, especially considering how fragile human
memory is. Regardless, there is this one moment that I will never forget. My ESL teacher always
came directly to my classroom to get me, and I would follow her out promptly with my backpack.
One day, we sat down at a cubby in the library and she took out a piece of paper. I watched my
ESL teacher as she picked up a crayon and drew out the following pictures:

Anybody who grew up in the U.S. could tell you what that says, and its not a big deal if
you can parse it out. To little 5-year-old me who didnt know much English, however, being able
to read out I, love, and you with some help meant the world to me. It may have been this
moment that cemented my passion for drawing.
Fast forward fifteen years and here I am at twenty, learning that the modern Chinese
characters Ive worked with all my life also arose via the same rebus principle and adaptation
methods that I had first experienced in kindergarten. I think I always intuitively knew that
written Chinese had pictographic roots. It is something that youre inevitably exposed to if you
learn to speak Mandarin growing up. However, the question of homonymy and why its so
prevalent in Mandarin had always confused me, especially since it made memorizing Chinese
characters very complicated. Now I know that phonetic loan contributed to this phenomenon,
which is something I wouldnt have believed if I hadnt taken this course.
What fascinates me more is the fact that this same process happened in other written
languages that utilized Chinese characters. Modern written Japanese is the most obvious
example. Anybody who has spent some time looking at Chinese and Japanese texts could pick
out some similarities. However, I never expected to find Chinese characters in written Korean
and written Vietnamese, because I had never encountered any such examples in my own life.
Its even harder to believe that old historical texts from the early developmental periods of all of
these written languages looked roughly the same, and now they look completely different.

Most likely, my ESL teacher had no clue that she was using the rebus principle. But, the
fact that any lay person can reconstruct a process that helped develop a lot of modern Asian
languages shows just how intuitive this concept is. We began and ended the quarter with the
question of how plausible a universal writing system is. It may never happen for countless
reasons, but the rebus principle is something that I do believe is universal. Whether it is equally
used across all cultures and languages, however, is a different matter entirely.
***
Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese are similar in the sense that their written languages all
emerged from Classical Chinese with the intention of writing poetry. The Manyoushuu, a
collection of famous poems in Japan, used phonetically and semantically adapted Chinese
characters to primarily write native Japanese morphemes, with the occasional use of
syllabographs called Manyougana (Seeley: 49-51). This is analogous to the use of hyangchal, or
local letters consisted of Chinese characters adapted as both logographs and phonographs to
write native Korean morphemes in Silla-era poems called hyangga (Lee & Ramsey: 48-50). In
Vietnam, phonetically and semantically adapted Chinese characters and newly formed
compounds made up the chu-nom, a collection of characters used to write both native and SinoVietnamese morphemes (Hannas: 79-84).
Curiously, all three written languages eventually took different developmental pathways
despite their beginning similarities. In Japan, mostly unmodified Chinese characters persisted to
write morphemes of both native and Sino-Japanese origin. These characters formed the
logographic kanji script that is used to write noun and verb roots today. Meanwhile, young
monks learning Buddhist texts began scribbling shorthand Chinese characters that became shared

among colleagues. These graphs became the standardized kana syllabaries used to primarily
write grammatical particles, endings, and the occasional foreign word (Rogers: 54-58; 61-65).
Currently, the modern Japanese writing system is consisted entirely of borrowed Chinese
characters, both abbreviated and unmodified in origin.
In 1443, King Sejong of Korea created Hangeul letters based on the shape of the mouth
that could spell out any word in Korean. This script met much resistance, as Korean scholars
believed that utilizing Classical Chinese proved to be more elegant and sophisticated. Eventually,
Hangeul became the official script in 1894, although idu proper persisted to the 20th century.
Originally, Chinese characters could still be regularly found in Korean texts as recent as the
1950s. After a turbulent history with China, however, Chinese characters can no longer be found
in North Korea, while they have become a rare specimen in South Korea (Lee & Ramsey: 31-35;
53-59). Currently, the modern Korean writing system uses the Hangeul alphabet to write mostly
everything, with Chinese characters occasionally serving to write news paper headlines,
disambiguate technical terminology, or represent someones name.
In Vietnam, all of the phonetically and semantically adapted Chinese characters fell off
the grid, along with the newly formed compounds. During the 17th century, the Vietnamese
adopted quoc ngu, an alphabetic script that is loosely based off of the Roman alphabet. Quoc ngu
eventually became widespread in the 20th century under French colonial rule (Hannas: 84-87).
Currently, the modern Vietnamese writing system only uses the new alphabetic script with no
occurrences of Chinese characters at all.
How did three writing systems with similar roots end up looking so distinct? We could
look deeper into the historical factors, such as the tense relationship between Korea and China,

or the conquering of Vietnam by France. However, the elements of the individual spoken
languages must be considered too. The following table summarizes the basic similarities and
differences among spoken Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese.

Syllable structure
Suprasegmentals

Mandarin
(C)(V)V(C/V)
Tone

Mostly one
morpheme per
syllable
Analytic
Inflectional/analytic
SVO
Word order
(Handel, April 28th, May 5th, 19th, 28th)
Morphemes

Japanese
(C)(y)V(n)
Length, pitch
accent
Vary in length

Korean
(C)(y/w)V(C)
-

Vietnamese
(C)(w)(V)V(C/V)
Tone

Vary in length

Inflectional
SOV

Inflectional
SOV

Mostly one
morpheme per
syllable
Analytic
SVO

After taking a cursory glance over the table, it appears that spoken Mandarin and
Vietnamese are most similar to each other, while spoken Japanese and Korean are most similar
to each other. If so, then why did the Japanese retain Chinese characters in their writing system,
while the Korean and the Vietnamese essentially replaced them with their own alphabetic scripts?
I think a case could be made by focusing specifically on syllable structure.
As weve established in class, Vietnamese has the most complex syllable structure out of
these four languages. Korean is the second most complex, with Mandarin in third and Japanese
being the simplest. As it happens, the two languages with the most complex syllable structures
are the ones that utilize alphabetic scripts today. This isnt too surprising, considering that it is
easier to represent more phonemes by associating each sound with a unique graph. This keeps
writing concise and provides approximate estimations of how an unfamiliar word should be
pronounced.

Of course, its important to remember that Japanese has its kana syllabaries, while
Mainland China and Taiwan eventually developed pinyin and zhuyin fuhao respectively (Handel,
April 2nd, 2014). They serve similar functions as the Korean Hangeul alphabet and the
Vietnamese quoc ngu alphabet in the sense that they represent sound units in the spoken
language. I suspect that Chinese characters could be completely replaced with pinyin, zuyin
fuhao, or kana and a native Mandarin or Japanese speaker could understand what was being
written. You might lose some of the hints that help resolve multivalency, but with context and
experience, this would not matter. Theoretically, then, written Mandarin and written Japanese
could throw away Chinese characters and just use phonetic elements in the future.
Since this hasnt already happened by now, it is unlikely that it will ever happen.
Mandarin directly descended from Ancient Chinese, so that was already a long shot, but
Japanese could still head in that direction if it wanted to. However, seeing as 100% of written
Japanese developed from Chinese characters, plus the fact that the syllable structure is
remarkably simple, continuing to use logographs to represent morphemes isnt difficult at all.
Now, what if we were to consider a Germanic language like English?
***
When we looked at the developmental history of the Japanese writing system, we did an
activity where the class divided up into four groups and attempted to write a sentence in SinoAnglish using a list of provided Chinese characters. Everyone produced different answers, and
some were more intuitive than others, but they were all readable. One group only used phonetic
loan, but most mixed semantic adaptation with phonetic adaptation and often included a marker
that would indicate whether a character should be taken for its meaning or sound value. This

method seems to be common, as the Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese writing systems all
developed using the same tools.
At first, it may seem silly and kind of crazy to even think about representing the English
spoken language with Chinese characters. However, if we ignore the Germanic roots of English
and focus on linguistic elements, well see that theres nothing in particular that makes it
different from the Asian languages. Like Korean, English has no tone, although it does have
certain stress patterns. Like Japanese and Korean, English morphemes vary in syllable length.
Like Japanese and Korean, English is inflectional, meaning words change form for grammatical
purposes. Finally, English is an SVO language, just like Mandarin and Vietnamese.
All of the English linguistic features mentioned above are present in at least one other
language that borrowed Chinese characters into its writing system. It is perhaps interesting to
point out that English appears to be most similar to Korean, save for word order (and notably,
both languages currently employ an alphabetic script). Hypothetically, then, it shouldnt be that
different of a process if we were to start adapting Chinese characters to write spoken English.
However, just as the Japanese wouldve discarded Chinese characters from their writing
system if they wanted to, a Chinese character based script for English wouldve been created if
people so felt inclined. Whats preventing this from being done? First off, Japanese and Korean
show that inflection can be accommodated perfectly fine from an originally analytic language.
As such, inflection itself isnt the issue, but rather how it manifests in a particular language. For
example, my impression is that all three languages have rules for changing tenses, but Japanese
and Korean have very structured suffix rules that can be applied to most (if not all) verbs, while
English has countless exceptions. If you were to ask a native English speaker how to convert a

verb to past tense, he or she would probably tell you to add -ed to form words such as kicked
or jumped. However, what do you do to verbs like run or have? They dont become
runned or havedthey break the rules and become ran or had.
How would this translate to a Chinese character based script? For the sake of argument,
let us follow the Japanese and use two different scripts to represent nouns and verbs versus
grammatical endings. You would have a different character for each verb (kick, run, and
have) as well as another character that represents the past tense inflectional ending. The first
part is easy, as you have three clear options of getting this done. You could simply use the
corresponding Chinese characters (ti, to kick), (pao, to run), and (you, to have) for
both their meanings and sound values and forget about including any native English component.
Essentially, this would result in Sino-English, the borrowing of Chinese vocabulary into English.
Or, you could only borrow the Chinese characters for their meanings and semantically adapt
them to represent the native English words. In this case, would be pronounced kick, would
be pronounced run, and would be pronounced have. The last resort would be to borrow
multiple Chinese characters for their sound value only and phonetically adapt them to a syllabary
of sorts that would be put together depending on how the English word is pronounced.
Assuming that you ignore the third option because its too complicated (how would you
find Chinese characters that accurately spell out kick?), you have two options left. The Japanese
kanji are filled with examples of both, with being a clear example. Depending on the context,
it can read tabe- (native Japanese), kuu- (native Japanese), or SHOKU (Sino-Japanese). The
native Japanese pronunciations represent bound verb stems, while the Sino-Japanese
pronunciation represents a bound noun morpheme, but they all convey the same meaning of to

eat (Handel, May 5th, 2014). In our Chinese character based script for English, maybe would
be pronounced kick (native English) when its used as a verb root (such as kicked), while it
would be pronounced ti (Sino-English) when its used as part of a noun (such as kick-boxing).
The point is, it is not difficult to represent English nouns and verbs using Chinese characters.
A more interesting problem comes with figuring out how to represent the inflectional
endings. In Japanese, you would add mashita after a verb to represent the polite, past tense form.
It is made up of two morphemes, -mashi- that represents politeness, and ta that represents the
past tense. Appending both to tabe- would result in tabemashita, or ate (Handel, May 5th,
2014). In English, you typically add -ed to form a past tense verb, so you could phonetically
adapt a Chinese character as a tense marker. de sounds relatively close, so kicked would
become , pronounced kicked because the Chinese character for kick is being used as a
verb root.
But, what happens if you wanted to write out ran, which doesnt follow the suffix rule
for past tense verbs? Lets start by using the Chinese characters weve already mentioned and see
what happens. Ran would become , pronounced run-de, while had would become ,
pronounced have-de. At first, it doesnt seem like this would work, because what in the world is
run-de or have-de? However, as we saw in the Anglish activity during class, people were
able to figure out what others wanted to say even if the answers werent intuitive at first. It
wasnt because we could read minds; it was because we were fluent English speakers. If these
Chinese characters were placed in a context where we knew someone had already performed an
action and that conventionally represents the past tense form in our script, then thats all we
need to figure out this puzzle. Lets return to as our example. The first part, , makes

perfect senseit means to run. If weve been taught that shouldnt be taken for its original
meaning (in this case, a possessive particle), but rather for its sound value to represent the past
tense form of a verb, then well register as runned and convert it to ran.
At this point, one might realize that its actually not necessary to associate with any
particular sound. It could just function as a past tense marker, and seeing it show up next to a
verb root automatically means we should look at the first Chinese character and change it
accordingly. Eventually, might become simplified to just the left or right side in an attempt to
write faster, resulting in a graph thats similar to the kana in Japanese. However, its not
completely the same because in this example, represents a grammatical function. It is not
associated with a particular sound anymore, unlike the syllabographs in Japanese kana.
With practice and more exposure to the writing system, this will only become easier, and
eventually it wont be strange to us that tells us to change a verb to the past tense in written
English. If we assume that we can solve every inflection problem in spoken English, then theres
only one last thing to addressthe different sound combinations that can be made. Spoken
English has the most complex syllable structure compared to Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, and
even Vietnamese. For instance, theres a reason why American actor names can look very long
and complicated on Chinese and Japanese movie posters, while Chinese and Japanese names
look magically concise on English movie posters. Also, what would you do about scientific
terminology and other proper nouns, such as city names? Unless there are Chinese characters
that correspond semantically to what we want to say, there will always be instances when we
have to resort to phonetic adaptation. If this werent the case, then none of the previously

mentioned writing systemsJapanese, Korean, Vietnamesewouldve used phonetic loan if

they could get away on semantic adaptation alone.
Eventually, someone might come along and create the Roman alphabet to represent
proper names for convenience. With time, people might even start suggesting using the Roman
alphabet to write everything in spoken English. After all, if we have a unique script, why not use
it all the time? We might be against it at first, but soon well see that English is a language that is
most properly represented by letters corresponding to specific phonemes. Its not because of
good fit, as weve seen countless examples of poor fit in English. Rather, the syllabic structure of
English allows for so many different consonant and vowel combinations that finding appropriate
Chinese characters to represent them under phonetic loan would be a rather difficult task. In the
end, Chinese characters will fade away, save for the rare instances when the meaning of a
borrowed Chinese character does not exist in English vocabulary.
This process is merely a mirror of what happened in Korea, and it is entirely speculative
in nature. The idea of successfully adapting Chinese characters to represent English is an
intriguing one, and is something I would love to see happen. However, native English speakers
naturally grow up within a grammar-heavy environment. It is way too difficult to cast away noun
plurals or inflectional endings that have been readily accessible throughout ones personal
histories. As such, even if scholars really decided to create a logographic writing system for
spoken English, it would be heavily biased by the pre-existing Roman alphabet and its luxuries
that weve come to take for granted.

References
Handel, Zev. The world of Chinese-character based writing systems. April 2nd, 2014.
Handel, Zev. The world of Chinese-character based writing systems. April 28th, 2014.
Handel, Zev. The world of Chinese-character based writing systems. May 5th, 2014.
Handel, Zev. The world of Chinese-character based writing systems. May 19th, 2014.
Handel, Zev. The world of Chinese-character based writing systems. May 28th, 2014.
Hannas, William C. 1997. Asias orthographic dilemma. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Lee, Iksop and S. Robert Ramsey. 2000. The Korean language. Albany NY: State University of
New York Press.
Rogers, Henry. 2005. Writing systems: a linguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Seeley, Christopher. 1991. A history of writing in Japan. Leiden: E. J. Brill.