Are Chinese Characters Modern Enough? an essay on their role online
[Supplemental Illustrations, p14]

Introduction: Chinese Characters Blamed for Uncreativity?

Figure 1 demonstrates how the writing systems are distributed across the world, with categories of written systems from Latin to Logographies.

Figure 1 Writing systems of the world today

Since the number of alphabets are usually smaller (e.g. 26 for English) than that of characters (e.g. more than 5,000 for daily Chinese), it appears that East Asian languages, especially Chinese, are indeed disadvantaged. Particularly for the most abstract digital world of zero-and-one, East Asian languages that are influenced by visual features of Chinese characters appear not simple and elegant enough. For example, the German keyboard layout is more complex than the English one and simpler than the Japanese one as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2 Selected keyboard layouts for American, German and Japanese

The Role of Chinese Characters from the Print and Telegraph Era to the Digital Worlds

Blame Games on Chinese Characters

It should be emphasized that unlike the relationship between Latin and other Latin-influenced languages, spoken Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese are, strictly speaking, unrelated to Chinese language in the sense that they belong to separate language families. Spoken Vietnamese belongs to Austro-Asiatic language family, while spoken Korean and Japanese, Altaic languages. They are all different from spoken Chinese which is a member of Sino-Tibetan language family. Thus, Chinese writing systems were mainly appropriated rather than copied. Figure 3 shows how the Japanese syllabary, or Hiragana (the bottom part of each cell), has evolved from Chinese characters (the upper part of each cell) and their cursive script forms (the center part in red) used for their pronunciations.

Figure 3 An example of Japanese borrowing: Hiragana origin (since 800 A.D.)

Figure 4 shows how the first comprehensive Korean native script is mandated along with the corresponding classic Chinese writings. Figure 5 presents an excerpt of teaching material for Vietnamese children to learn Chinese characters. All these materials indicate that indigenization of Chinese writing practices have emerged much earlier. Hence the picture is not just a competition between Romanization and Sinicization, but rather their strategies for indigenization.

Figure 4 An example of Korean indigenization: a partial translation of the Hunmin Jeongeum Eonhae, released in 1446, the original promulgation of Hangul.

Figure 5 An example of Vietnamese borrowing: a 19th-century primer for teaching Vietnamese children Chinese characters

Technical Factors of Print and Telegraph

The economic and technical constraints of telegraph can be explained by the encoding standards. For example, a book titled “'Unicode': The Universal Telegraphic Phrase-Book” published in 1886 London provides some evidence ('Unicode', 1886). As a commercial code book, it claimed that the ‘Unicode’ could provide low-price and accessible alternative to the other high-priced exclusive ones, under the word-tariff system. In terms of encoding, it claimed to “strictly conform to the regulations of the International Telegraph Conferences held at Paris, London, and Berlin” (ix) by exclusively employing the standard ciphers Latin words. Latin words were reused as a laconic representation of European languages involved. In contrast, it was difficult to use and share Chinese characters for East Asian countries simply because the number of characters involved are not economic enough. A partial attempt by Viguier (1872), shown in Figure 6, represented ten thousand characters with a four-digit decimal code.

Figure 6  Chinese telegraph codes from 0001 to 0200 by Viguier (1872)

Writing (or Typing) in the Digital Worlds

Indeed, the materiality of media and communication technologies can influence the way people read and write. For another example, the use of input methods, which permit users to input Asian characters under the constraints of standard keyboards, has in effect created what I called “de-facto hidden digital alphabets” for those languages.

Some of these Asian alphabets are shown in Figure 7, and it should be noted that all these alphabets are designed for users to type any characters with combinations of pronunciation or/and visual structure of a certain character. They are de-facto alphabets because users need to use them to type.

Figure 7 Selected keyboard layouts for Korean, traditional Chinese (based on the pronunciation system of Zhuyin) and traditional Chinese (based on character features)

Figure 8 illustrates how three kinds of input methods allow users to type the Chinese character 花 (flower) differently. Both Hanyu Pinyin and Bopomofo rely on the pronunciation of the character whereas Canjie exploits the visual structure. Although they require different corresponding keystrokes, they should generate the same Chinese character, which can be exchanged in digital environments.

Figure 8 Different ways to type the Chinese character 花 (flower) and &#32 denotes “space bar” keystroke

The Role of ‘Unihan’ in East Asia

Unihan and CJKV

Figure 9 shows three Chinese characters are written slightly differently in, from left to right, mainland simplified Chinese (zh-CN), traditional Chinese (zh-TW), Japanese (ja) and Korean (ko). Experts in the Unicode Consortium have decided that they refer to the same characters and hence they are assigned with the same Unicode number, show in the first column. In sum, Unihan project not only has solved the inter-exchange problem with its Unicode infrastructure, but also has unified the codes for some of the shared Chinese symbols with same digital numbers.

Figure 9 Examples of slightly different written forms for the same character (User:chrislb, 2006).

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