[KS] Writing as a Block for Asians & [KS] Does "Orient" exist? 5/12/03

[Lee JooBai]

Hi,

I had an opportunity to look through Mr. Hannas' "The Writing on the Wall"
and personally found it to be a provocative work of polemics. Many of
the pages and the choice of words and phrases seemed decidedly selected
to provoke, shock, shame, anger, outrage and irritate many people, including
the 1.5 billion users of chinese characters.

Hanja is seen as the major culprit in the lack Oriental creativity, but he 
also doles
out the rebukes fairly to arabic, hebrew, korean hangul, and japanese kana.
The faults lie in the lack of vowels, over-subservience to syllables, and 
simply being
a syllabary, respectively. I think the Indic-script languages escaped his 
lashes. Tibetan is
not amongst those severely thrashed.

The ideal is located in the ancient Greek alphabet with its proper 
complement
of abstracted consonants and vowels. It is in this ideal setting he locates 
the
seat of creativity.

But aside from the heavy-going analysis of the requirements for a creative
mind-set, where he lays out the arguments for why an abstracted 
consonant+vowel
alphabet is a prerequisite for a creative mind, the rest of the book has a 
very
different flavor.

While this part is arguably extremely speculative and carried out in an 
overly rarefied
and abstract language, the rest of the book is quite filled with concrete 
facts and
interesting concrete observations.

One third of the book is devoted to detailing the historical and current 
creative efforts
made by China, Japan, and Korea in technology transfer from the West to 
their respective
camps. Aside from his occasional complaints about the "unfair price" being 
received by the
West in the exchange, the section does give a detailed view of the well 
organized effort
by the Orient as a whole and the quirky differences in the roles played by 
the different
countries' emigres.

The groups not covered are N.Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan. While the author
can be accused of casting the operations of China, Japan, and Korea as 
sinister surveillance
and espionage activities, once one gets over these few unpleasant phrases, 
the rest
of the section can be viewed as interesting facts, descriptions, and 
observations.

After he reveals all the sordid details of this Oriental gambit, he makes 
what I thought was
a half-hearted arguement that the Orient must engage in this sordid activity 
for lack
of creativity, which cause he finds in the failings of the writing systems 
of the Orient.

The other third is probably the most objective and concrete part of the 
book. He lays out
for China, Taiwan, S. and N. Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, the relevant 
historical developments
in each country's writing system. In contrast to the authors of the two 
sides of the
"Finishing Touch on Hanja", the author of this work, I thought, does a 
rather throrough job
of laying out the facts of the case, fully and honestly.

Because of the thorough honesty of the careful observations he makes, one is 
led to much difficulty
in viewing this polemical work as simple advocacy for the alphabet.

Amongst his observations which makes one wonder about his advocacy are:

1. The Japanese working vocabulary would be made completely ambiguous and 
useless
  were it to be fully phoneticized because of the severity of the homonimy 
caused
  by the lack of distinctions in the pronunciations of the characters.

2. There is a real danger of political disintegration in China and Taiwan 
were there to be
  immediate abandonment of Hanja as the writing system. Once the characters 
are
  abandoned, the dialectal groups within China and Taiwan would find 
themselves speaking
  and writing mutually incomprehensible languages.

  (Shanghai will model itself after Singapore and become a city state. 
Souther China will
   declare independence and will cry for the election of Jackie Chan as the 
president,.... )

3. In N. Korea, it was recognized that the a priori knowledge of hanja is 
required for the
  full-hangulization can function meaningfully.  And presumably, the full 
alphabatization will
  also require hanja knowledge to function meaningfully.

4. There was a time when hanmun literacy amongst chinese, korean, japanese 
and vietnamese
  that made it possible for the common vocabulary of modernity to spread 
through the
  chinese character cultural block of Asia. Without chinese characters as a 
point of reference,
  this commonality of vocabulary of modernity will be visible only to those 
Americans trained in
  linguistics anchored by training in chinese characters, which is not a bad 
thing from the
  American perspective.

So, given that Mr. Hannas predicts a complete breakdown in national 
integrity for China and Taiwan,
loss of working vocabulary for Japan, and de-meaning of korean lexis as the 
consequences of full
alphabatization of Oriental languages, he seems to be questioning his very 
own advocacy.

Even granting his hypothesis that these nations will become more "creative", 
he is clearly also
warning of the loss that would entail this gain.  The payoff here would 
logically be a "creative"
mind with meaning-less and confusing vocabulary: creativity in 
meaninglessness.

Now, this he offer some alternative lexis that is not tainted by homonimy.  
Is he proposing that
they all learn English or Greek or Latin or voweled-Hebrew as a new 
substitute lexis?

His point that chinese character is the solution for the homonimy that is 
created by chinese
characters is logically correct.  But it does serve very special and unique 
functions, and one
is at a loss to fathom what the proper solution would be.

The book really is a disturbing and fact-filled wake-up call.

And many are the ways to view the book. But the facts stated by the book as 
facts does make one
think twice about how playful the author might be.


Regards,

JooBai Lee

5/12/03

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