AHC: English written with Chinese characters

[Phalamus]

After finding this interesting youtube video (btw, there are subtitles), I decided this might make a fun little AHC.

With no POD restrictions whatsoever as long as you don't resort to ASB, make English (or some variety of it) be written with Chinese characters and adopt a large number of anglified Chinese loanwords in the same way as Japanese and pre-WWII Korean.

 

[Simeon]

After finding this interesting youtube video (btw, there are subtitles), I decided this might make a fun little AHC.

With no POD restrictions whatsoever as long as you don't resort to ASB, make English (or some variety of it) be written with Chinese characters and adopt a large number of anglified Chinese loanwords in the same way as Japanese and pre-WWII Korean.

Make the druids learn summoning magic!

 

[Analytical Engine]

The easiest would probably be "Hong Kong English written in Chinese characters".

 

[Lalli]

Residents of Hong Kong decides write English in Chinese letters. Otherwise this seems quiet ASB or at least extremely implausible.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Implausible, yes, ASB, no. The obvious solution to this is to have an early Chinese Industrial Revolution, which is likely to make China a global hegemon much exceeding Britain IOTL. It is then fairly likely to have significant political influence on Britain. Just as in Vietnam, Korea, and Japan, you could then reasonably see some experimentation with writing English in Chinese characters, although the obvious inferiority relative to Latin characters for writing English will probably discourage this from becoming anything more than a minor academic experiment.

Chinese loanwords, of course, would be very common, especially for industrial and technical areas (just as English loanwords are extremely common in those areas IOTL)

 

[Otto Kretschmer]

How good are Chinese characters for writing English?

 

[Analytical Engine]

How good are Chinese characters for writing English?

How good are Chinese characters for writing anything? Their main benefit is that, as logograms, they can theoretically used for any language, provided the grammar doesn't get in the way.

 

[DocJamore]

I suppose getting a couple million Chinese to speak English is accomplishable with a PoD and then a Chinese regime bans the Latin Alphabet. In China. And only in China.

I can't for the life of me imagine how this could work or spread outside of China.

 

[Mad Bad Rabbit]

As part of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong orders everyone in China to speak English but continue writing in Chinese script, because reasons?

 

[Otto Kretschmer]

Chinese differs from English is that every syllabe has a meaning on it's own and there are few syllables. Logographic writing system helps distinguish between words that are pronounced the same but mean different things. In English "market" has a meaning but "mar" and "ket" do not.

 

[Workable Goblin]

How good are Chinese characters for writing anything? Their main benefit is that, as logograms, they can theoretically used for any language, provided the grammar doesn't get in the way.

Theoretically, but in practice the examples of Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese show that they work very badly for unrelated languages. Note that in Korean and Vietnamese, especially, the introduction of better-adapted scripts (Hangul in the former case, a variant of Latin in the latter) was specifically intended to make it much easier to gain literacy (well, in the Vietnamese case also for complicated colonial reasons related to French domination; but I don't think anyone would deny that it was very hard for people to gain literacy when they were writing Vietnamese in Chinese characters). Even in Japanese, you have hiragana and katakana, which are clear indications that kanji are not really the best system for writing Japanese, and in Vietnamese the domestic version of the Chinese script, chu nôm (I can't reproduce the full diacritics on my keyboard) introduced a bunch of new characters to try to beat it into some semblance of usability.

Thus, widespread adoption of Chinese characters is only really likely for languages that have no native writing system when they come into contact with China, as with the languages cited above. Even then, they're likely to make many modifications to the characters or adopt auxiliary writing systems to create a system that works better for non-Chinese languages. It's therefore unlikely that any European culture will adopt Chinese characters wholesale, because they will have access to other scripts well before they can plausibly get into contact with China. A more plausible (and, in its own way, interesting) possibility would be to have them adopt cuneiform, which is conceptually quite similar to Chinese writing but is more "domestic" and thus easier to spread into Europe.

 

[Jan Olbracht]

There are languages using abjads as alphabets, that makes me wonder-is there any script derived from Chinese logographs that is used as alphabetic script?

 

[Workable Goblin]

There are languages using abjads as alphabets, that makes me wonder-is there any script derived from Chinese logographs that is used as alphabetic script?

You could probably beat Hangul into doing that fairly easily, or the Japanese syllabic characters, but I don't think there's any examples of that aside from maybe trivial proof-of-concepts or the like. The problem is that the Sinosphere (speaking broadly) didn't really have the cultural influence at the right moments to get any countries that want alphabetic scripts to adapt Chinese characters into an alphabet-like system. Even the Mongols and Uyghurs, who you'd think would do something like this, actually have a script derived (very ultimately) from Phoenician!

 

[Dan1988]

How good are Chinese characters for writing English?

Provided you have prior knowledge of what is considered Standard Chinese at any point in time, whether it be Mandarin now or the various forms of Classical Chinese at earlier points in time, . . .

Otherwise, they're really not that great for writing English. They only barely fit written Japanese and written Korean because the written language was modified to suit the characters. Having said that, considering that Chinese characters at one point formed a syllabary in ancient times which broke down over time, based on prior knowledge of Sanskrit one would need to do a phonological analysis of English at the time (making it easier to devise fanqie to suit English pronunciation of Literary Chinese), then standardize the phonetic parts of Chinese characters to provide a consistent reading (even if it requires more syllables than the Chinese original). The semantic part of the Chinese characters would be ignored in this case - as, in fact, most Chinese are wont to do.

This is when it gets interesting, because most non-Chinese readings of Literary Chinese are based on Middle Chinese, whose contemporary analogue at this point in time is, in fact, the common ancestor of both Anglic languages (English and Scots) and Frisian. That's if the adoption of characters happens around this same time, so even here the "fit" between grapheme and phoneme would break down as language naturally changes. So there would be as much difficulty learning Standard Written English with characters as there is Modern Written Chinese with Standard Mandarin pronunciation and characters (if you're not using bopomofo or Pinyin first).

 

[xsampa]

As part of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong orders everyone in China to speak English but continue writing in Chinese script, because reasons?

He considered Esperanto briefly

 

[Optical_Illusion]

Maybe you'd get a sort of version where you use Hanzi for core morphemes and then use "Romaji" for grammar. I think a "pure" version would be so ungrammatical it would be hard to imagine coming into use. The more likely equilibrium would be essentially writing in English with a peppering of prestige Hanzi?

Chinese differs from English is that every syllabe has a meaning on it's own and there are few syllables. Logographic writing system helps distinguish between words that are pronounced the same but mean different things. In English "market" has a meaning but "mar" and "ket" do not.

In a pure sense not really... or y'know Chinese wouldn't understand each when they spoke.

What you can say for characters is that they make written forms possible that would be unintelligble when spoken aloud, and that much of classic Chinese literature would be unintelligble if translated phonetically. This is the argument that most defenders of Hanzi today make - if people don't continue to learn them, you kind of shut the Han Chinese off from a rich past literature of poetry, essays, etc, and you make it extremely difficult to understand and inaccessible.

But they're not needed at all for understandable written Chinese to be possible at all. Because if they were Chinese wouldn't be understandable in verbal form.

 

[Workable Goblin]

The more likely equilibrium would be essentially writing in English with a peppering of prestige Hanzi?

This seems like the most likely way to get "widespread" use of hanzi in English to me, though probably only in a scenario where China is high-prestige (i.e., early Chinese Industrial Revolution or possibly the future). Essentially, you would be using hanzi for technical terms or borrowed terms, something in the way that English borrows words like sprachbund or tortilla from other languages. The problem is that those are typically "English-ized" over time and in any case rendered in the existing writing system. Of course, this is typical of most languages, so you'd have to have some rather good explanation of it not happening for English...

 

[Arkenfolm]

Chinese loanwords, of course, would be very common, especially for industrial and technical areas (just as English loanwords are extremely common in those areas IOTL)

Even there you wouldn't have much of an incentive. For a comparative example, most Japanese technical terminology was mostly based on Chinese aside from some stuff invented after 1945, and IIRC Chinese and Korean use the same terms (with native readings of the characters obviously) which were borrowed from Japanese. While Japanese borrowed from Dutch and Portuguese in a few areas in the Edo period, it didn't have too much of an impact.

So England in a Chinese dominated world would likely continue the old tradition of borrowing Greco-Latin terms to coin new words, maybe in some cases based on Chinese calques for the term in question, alongside Chinese loanwords for a few terms (and maybe not just Chinese but Korean, Japanese, etc.). I'm curious if there are comparable examples of the educated in any culture borrowing bits of a totally foreign alphabet for certain words. It just makes more sense to write it in English when dealing with an unsophisticated audience and write the technical papers and communications between professionals entirely in Chinese.

 

[Dan1988]

The easiest would probably be "Hong Kong English written in Chinese characters".

Because much of it would already have been of Cantonese Chinese origin anyway.

 

[Workable Goblin]

Even there you wouldn't have much of an incentive. For a comparative example, most Japanese technical terminology was mostly based on Chinese aside from some stuff invented after 1945, and IIRC Chinese and Korean use the same terms (with native readings of the characters obviously) which were borrowed from Japanese. While Japanese borrowed from Dutch and Portuguese in a few areas in the Edo period, it didn't have too much of an impact.

So England in a Chinese dominated world would likely continue the old tradition of borrowing Greco-Latin terms to coin new words, maybe in some cases based on Chinese calques for the term in question, alongside Chinese loanwords for a few terms (and maybe not just Chinese but Korean, Japanese, etc.). I'm curious if there are comparable examples of the educated in any culture borrowing bits of a totally foreign alphabet for certain words. It just makes more sense to write it in English when dealing with an unsophisticated audience and write the technical papers and communications between professionals entirely in Chinese.

In the post you quoted, I was specifically separating the use of loanwords from the use of the character system. A loanword can simply be transcribed or translated into the destination language, which is obviously much easier than simply copying the source writing wholesale unless they happen to use a similar writing system (as with words borrowed from, for instance, German).

As for what words I was thinking of, I was specifically thinking of industrial and post-industrial terms such as "telephone," "television," "computer," and the like, which I feel are much more likely to be borrowed from Chinese than recreated upon exposure. It's generally easier in English to transliterate a Chinese word than it is in Chinese to represent a foreign word, after all, so there's much less incentive to copy the current Chinese approach of coming up with more or less sensible "domestic" versions of foreign terms in this case.