Chinese, Japanese, and Korean all have distinct types of writing systems: the varieties of "alphabets"
The basics.
Westerners group the Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages into the same mental bucket, and this is reasonable: they’re the Big Three of Asia. Their cultures share similar Confucian blah blah blah - the cultural similarities are deep and interesting! - but not the topic here. Instead, I want to describe how different their writing systems are. Super different - in an important sense, they are more different from each other than English is from Arabic.
Chinese uses a logography, Japanese uses a syllabary (well, and a logography, but ignore that for now), and Korean uses an alphabet. If you don’t know what some of these things are, that’s OK! The point of this essay is to describe them.
It might be because I’m editing this at 2am, but I worry this essay is so heavy with terminology that it might be hard to understand. If you think so too, I advise you to approach this post with two goals:
forgive me
understand the difference between a logography, and syllabary, and an alphabet.
“Alphabet” in English is a colloquialism for “writing system”, but when you dig deeper, it means something more specific. To explain what I mean, it’ll be easier to start with a logography, the furthest you can get from an alphabet. A logograph is a symbol that represent a whole word. A logography is a writing system where everything you write is a logograph: each symbol you write can, by itself, represent a whole word.
For example, in Chinese, the character for Moon is 月. You can’t break 月 up into any constituent letters, because Chinese doesn’t have letters. This is of course very different from English, where “moon” can be broken up into ‘m’, ‘o’, ‘o’, ‘n’. More examples: 河 means “river”, 草 means “grass”, 山 means “mountain”.
So the individual symbols in a logography like Chinese each mean something. This different from a syllabary - a writing system where everything you write is a syllable. In a syllabary, most symbols need to be combined before you get any kind of meaning. Japanese is a syllabary. Since each Japanese symbol represents a syllable, you need less symbols in Japanese to make a word or sentence than you do in English.
Japanese is a pain to explain, since it has three of its own writing systems, but two of them are syllabaries, and in this essay I’m focusing on just one: Hiragana.
The Japanese Hiragana writing system is a syllabary. You can only write syllables - you can’t write the equivalent of English letters. Instead, you can only write pairs of them. For example, in English, “ra” is two letters, but you can’t write an ‘r’ by itself in Hiragana - you can only write the syllable ら (pronounced “ra”). Or か, for “ka”. Or て, for “te”. You write in syllables, not in letters.
Exception: you can write ‘a’ ‘e’ ‘i’ ‘o’ ‘u’, and ‘n’ (??) by themselves, because they have their own dedicated syllabic symbols - for example, あ is ‘a’.
So, roughly:
In Chinese - a logography - you cannot write any vowel by itself, nor any constant by itself, nor any syllable by itself, without an accompanying meaning - every symbol you write has a meaning.
In contrast, in Japanese hiragana - a syllabary - the symbol ら doesn't mean anything by itself, like how in English, ‘R’ doesn’t mean anything by itself. But it’s still a syllable: ら - “ra” - maps to two combined English letters.
And English, of course, is an alphabet - you can write ‘r’, but it doesn’t mean anything by itself, and to make the sound “ra”, you need to write two symbols: ‘r’ and ‘a’.
In this sense, English is more similar to Arabic than it is to Chinese or Japanese - Arabic is also an alphabet.
And Korean, too, is an alphabet. In Korean Hangul, ㄱ is like a “g”, ㅁ is like an “m”, ㅈ is like a “j”, ㅣ is like “i”, and so on. A very different writing system - an alphabet - from the logographic Chinese and the syllabic Japanese!
Hangul is pretty interesting - apparently Koreans used to use Chinese logographs for all their writing, but in the 1400’s, the King developed the Hangul alphabet and started spreading it around, and these days, everyone uses it.
Thank you for reading my post. What follows is overly wrought qualifiers and me begging forgiveness from Asian readers. Please do not read it, it is embarrassing.
I mentioned that Japanese has three writing systems. Katakana, like Hiragana, is a syllabary. But the third writing system - Kanji - is very common, and is a logography like Chinese - actually almost all of the logographs in Japanese Kanji are the same symbols that Chinese uses. So Japanese writing is more complicated than I’ve described here.
Letters in the Korean alphabet combine in interesting ways to form shapes that have some relationship to Chinese characters. For example, the common Korean surname “Kim” is not written k, then i, then m (ㄱㅣㅁ), but rather 김 - the letters combine into a shape!Every Chinese symbol is a word, but not every Chinese word is a single symbol. Like, they didn’t have to add a new symbol when computers were invented: instead, they combined 电 (electricity) and 脑 (brain) into 电脑 (computer). Electricity brain!
This is an introductory essay for westerners who know next-to-nothing about Chinese, Japanese, or Korean. While these countries seem often to be in political tension with each other, I am sure they would all unite against me if they read this essay, given all the complexities I have skipped in my highly abstract descriptions of the three languages. From such readers, I can only beg mercy.
Interesting