Talk:Hán tự

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While I am not an expert on the subject, I am pretty sure the statement that written Japanese and Chinese are indistinguishable is not true. In fact, unless by Japanese it means classical Chinese written in Japan, then it is definitely false. Japanese does use chinese characters, but also two separate written scripts for parts of speech which have no equivalent in chinese. the meanings have changed, and pronunciations are also often different. Based on this, I would assume the assertion that one can read the chinese characters by simply replacing them with one's native language is also false.

You've misunderstood the article's assertion, I think. In ancient times, Classical Chinese (a language never in fact spoken by anyone, but related to Middle Chinese) was the East Asian equivalent of Latin in Europe. It was the language of the educated, and texts intended for consumption by the intellectual elite of the period were all authored in it, much as Latin was used in the middle ages. In the same way that a text authored in Latin by a French person of the time was not consistently distinguishable from a text authored in Latin by an Italian person, texts authored in classical Chinese by a Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese or Chinese person were all essentially similar -- none was actually writing in his native language, after all.

In those days, Japanese kana did not yet exist and no one wrote Japanese at all -- there was no way to write Japanese. The educated wrote things in Chinese. After a while, people started wanting to write their own language. The Japanese tackled this problem by picking a number of Chinese characters whose sound in Chinese approximated a syllable of their own language, and ignoring their meaning -- that is, using them purely phonetically. This system later developed into Hiragana and Katakana.

The Vietnamese tackled the problem differently. They created new characters, called chữ Nôm, to write native Vietnamese words. This worked well enough because Vietnamese, like Chinese, is basically a monosyllabic language and has a large number of homophones. But, like the Koreans, the Vietnamese resented constantly being invaded by China and thus saw Chinese characters as a sign of China's cultural domination; this is probably one of the chief reasons that the Latin based quốc ngữ script became their national standard (much as the Koreans have almost completely abandoned Hanja and write entirely in Hangul). Of course, the Japanese also created some of their own characters (kokuji) but I won't get into that here.

There is evidence that the use of Kanji is waning in Japan as well; comparisons of documents from 50 years ago and today indicate that the ratio of Kanji to Kana is falling rapidly. This is not particularly surprising, of course -- Chinese characters are an ill-fit for the Japanese language. Japanese is agglutinative, polysyllabic, and non-homophonic, except in Sino-Japanese constructs. Attempting to spell words that aren't at all cognate the same way has resulted in Japanese kanji being a confusing mess, with common characters having dozens of different readings, nothing resembling the Chinese one-character-one-syllable rule... the Japanese themselves are confused by Kanji. According to Japanese estimates, only about 3000 characters are now needed to read a newspaper in Japan, and furigana are common. For comparison, 3000 characters is nowhere near enough to read a newspaper in China.

Hope that helps... Also, please sign your comments with four tildes, thanks 70.132.14.22 02:31, 13 July 2007 (UTC)

Contents 1 Definition 2 Merger 3 Requested move 3.1 Survey 3.1.1 Survey - in support of the move 3.1.2 Survey - in opposition to the move 3.2 Discussion

[edit] Definition

I have rewritten this article because I found that the old article said Chu Nho is a Vietnamese writing system which is not true. Chu Nho is classical Chinese, that was used in Vietnam. Vietnamese could be written in vernacular chinese characters as well, but that is today called Chu nom. - Retval 10:49, 23 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Merger

I think this page should be merged into the Sino-Vietnamese page, although the Chu Nom page should remain sperate. Le Anh-Huy 03:17, 22 March 2006 (UTC)

Sino-Vietnamese does not refer to the writing, but to the vocabulary, which can be written in any form. DHN 18:27, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Requested move

It was requested that this article be renamed but there was no consensus for it to be moved. --Stemonitis 17:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)