Fixing Chinese pictophonemes for Mao — 魂體한字

Huoonty Hantze, an etymological hybrid logographic hangul script & universal methodology to immortalize Chinese characters

Disclaimer: I’m not a dictator.

Part you can skip if you don't care about the political aspects of language

普通話 (Mandarin as "Chinese") as a concept is cultural genocide. Widespread systematic censorship of local languages specifically targeted towards children — cartoons were not allowed to be in anything but Mandarin, children were punished for speaking their mother tongue in schools, characters in films had to enforce the stereotype that speakers of other Chinese languages were uneducated if they wanted to include them at all, etc. For context as to how fast Mandarin took over the world, not even Mao Zedong knew Mandarin & this was around 1950. He spoke Hunanese. Even despite me saying all of this I completely understand what they were going for. Back then literacy seemed impossible, 漢字 (Chinese characters) are infamously hard to learn even today after standardisation & back then most people couldn’t read or write. I don’t think China could be the economic powerhouse it is today without the forced erasure of all the other countless languages for a universal united lingua franca. Spoken Mandarin is relatively simple compared to the others and the idea of teaching children Literary Chinese (which was pretty much completely separate from everyday speech) is unthinkable.

It’s pretty hard to imagine today but back in the day when all the language reforms were taking place it was such a big problem that even after having created simplified Chinese to help make writing easier, Mao was still convinced 漢字 as a whole needed to go “eventually” — This apparently only never came to fruition because Stalin talked him out of it. So that’s how we got “Chinese” as we know it today! Still the most difficult script for anyone anywhere to learn, even for Chinese people.

Why is it so difficult?

If you didn’t know already, this is because the writing has little to no reliable correlation with how the words are pronounced. There are many types of characters, some are just picograms, but most also have a phonetic component (聲旁) alongside them. There are many examples where this system works relatively predictably like with 馬s (horse) there's 嗎 (indicating question), 媽 (mum), 碼 (weight), 罵 (to scold) which are all pronounced “ma”; or 門s (door) 們 (indicating plural), 悶 (bored), 捫 (cover) all pronounced “men”. But more often than not these phonemes were bought over from middle Chinese and are now outdated or very abstract (like 旁 “pang” used in the title of this very article uses 方 “fang” as the phonetic component, and 韓 “han” uses 倝 “gan” which itself uses an ancient form of 偃 “yan” which coincidentally also used 方 “pang”) and even in the rare cases it works as it’s supposed to it can still be confusing to denote which component is the phoneme or if there is any at all. Like try to guess how these are pronounced — 関 (to close shut), 開 (to open), 間 (a room). From the previous example you’d think these are pronounced “men” too, but the 門 component in these are actually being used as a pictograph to represent ideas that involve doors. And coming back to 媽, knowing it has a female component 女 & a horse 馬 you’d be forgiven to think it has something to do with a female horse (the high school your mum jokes just write themselves). Most Chinese characters are composed like this, and there is little signification to suggest which components are phonemes and which aren‘t.

Another issue arises when you realize Hanzi’s use extends beyond Mandarin. It’s used in Japanese, and used to be in Korean and Vietnamese. Hanzi was easily adopted by other languages because the characters hold meaning rather than pronunciation, like numbers. So making the phonemes updated to just fit Mandarin would be unfair to the other languages that have been using Hanzi long before Mandarin had even been established.

Why not just switch to a fully phonetic system like the rest of the world?

I like to imagine what the conversation between Mao and Stalin could have gone. Despite it all, there’s a reason its so hard to imagine Mandarin without 漢字. The first issue is that Mandarin has very little phonemes at all — 29 while English has 44. The fact that Mandarin uses very short words oftentimes just containing 1 syllable, switching to a phonetic system would make many words very hard to distinguish from one another. In English we have the buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo debaucle but in Chinese we have this monstrosity of words which are all pronounced “shi”:

Aside from readability, Hanzi is just awesome, it’s the last pictographic script we still use (besides numbers and emojis) and its the main reason I study Chinese to this day despite all it’s frustrating pitfalls. It allows for writing that is concise and succinct. Writing that transcends even spoken language itself.

compromise

In my eyes the obvious solution is to combine the advantages of a phonetic system and a logographic system together. Replacing all the inconsistent phonetic compounds with an actual alphabet while keeping all the beautiful pictograms on the side. I decided to use Hangul to help with this because it’s another script that is arranged into blocks (and not just because it’s really cool).

What I came up with…

It’s really simple, I just had to repurpose and adjust the Korean Hangul system to fit the phonemes of Mandarin.

Then I had to figure out which components in every character were phonetic. I haven’t been alive for all of ancient Chinese history so for this I had to check every character in the Yellowbridge dictionary. The final step is to just construct the hangul and replace it with the phonetic component!

Because my idea for this was to make Chinese Characters immune to any phonetic changes that will come with time, and to make it more easily adaptable to any language that uses Hanzi, I call it 魂體한字 “Huoonty Hantze.” 魂 “hun” meaning spirit/immortal, which ironically has an outdated phoneme itself (云 now pronounced “yun”).

This is the result of my experiment with Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, used to demonstrate scripts on Omniglot. “人人生而自由﹐在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。他們賦有理性和良心﹐並應以兄弟關係的精神互相對待。” and chapter 25 from the Tao Te Ching

Digitizing an idea like this (accelerationist huoontification, if you will) would prove to be difficult but I still have a couple of ideas. I could either make a font which has a very limited use case and would take a lifetime to create (still might do it anyway & if I do I’ll document some cool etymology findings), or use a system that makes use of existing hangul unicodes besides the Chinese component, like 應 “yin” as written above could be represented by 인心 instead of in one block… which isn’t introduces a whole set of other problems but I guess it kinda gets the point across.

A handwritten draft

Applications in other languages:

Like I hinted at earlier, this project was meant as a new way to see Hanzi beyond just it’s use in Mandarin. I’ve just used Mandarin prior to this section as an example because it’s currently the most wide-spread use of Hanzi. The same methodology could be used in all other languages that have a background in classical Chinese — Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese; or other Sinetic languages (aka Chinese dialects… it’s political & relates to the very first bit of this article)— Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.

Korean and Vietnamese have stopped teaching Hanzi in their official education curriculum, both largely due to colonization. Japanese occupation of Korea caused Korean literacy to plummet, and post-occupation Korea grew to associate Hanzi with imperial Japan. Because of this Korean newspapers that exclusively featured Hangul became much more popular, and it eventually became the status quo. While in Vietnam, Christian missionaries and the French flat out ruined 𡨸喃 (Chữ Nôm) for everyone.

Apart from traditions sake, there could also be practical reasons. In Schwar’s video on Hanja, he explains how the sudden disappearance of Hanzi in Korean caused many words take the exact same written phonetic form, and how in official documents where specificity is crucial, Hanja is still used in conjunction with Hangul today.

Besides, just aesthetically I mean I can’t be the only one that thinks Korean mixed script looks awesome and wishes it could make a comeback.

As for Vietnam, a comeback for Chữ Nôm as it is would prove very difficult. The construction of their characters are quite complex, often adding phonetic components just like in Chinese writing. Because Chữ Nôm was never standardized, these phonetic components caused a lot of inconsistent variation. On top of that, much of Chữ Nôm specific characters are purely phonetic to express Vietnamese specific word extensions, and like I expressed earlier, this can cause confusion as to which components are pictographic and which are intended to be phonetic. Here’s Schwar again with his demonstration of how Vietnamese phonetic characters work in Chữ Nôm.

For both these countries, Huoonty Hantze could create a comfortable middle ground for them to reconnect with their forgotten culture and traditions. It would make Korean mixed script much much more accessible and easy to learn for Koreans, and standardize phonetic components for Vietnamese.

If you’ve been following along, you can probably imagine the possibilities of this being used for other Sinitic languages. Coincidentally Hokkien shares a very similar set of spoken phenomes as Korean, and also has a dire literacy rate. My grandma, who's Hokkien is literally her native tongue, genuinely still believes to this day that there is “no way to write it.” Well she’s wrong, but yes it’s just as “difficult” as you’d expect (at least to me), having a similar clutter to Chữ Nôm:

This is what it looks like. Really cool.

I debated bringing up Hokkien at all because the discussion around it is complicated and is too focused on keeping Hokkien alive at all to care about reforming a traditional writing system — seeing as to how close it is from going extinct in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. In this case many people argue that the standardization of Hokkien using the latin alphabet, like Pe̍h-ōe-jī, might be ideal. I’d even make the case that Pe̍h-ōe-jī is too complicated and convoluted to the average English and Malay educated Malaysian. It’s still interesting to note that a Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Hanzi mixed writing system exists too, and it’s a lot more readable than Pe̍h-ōe-jī by itself to most Malaysian Chinese people, but they’d still just read it as Mandarin because the Hanzi unHuoontified fails to preserve Hokkien specific pronunciation. It looks like this:

翻 tńg 工，我 koh hap i tī Hotel ê 餐廳食西式 ê chái 起，我講 beh tò 去稅厝 ê 所在，i beh 送我去，我 kā 拒絕，mā 無 beh hō͘ i 知我 ê 地址、電話番，講若有緣就會 koh 再相會。I 講人海茫茫，我若無 tī hit 間跳舞、唱歌，i beh 去 toh 位 chhōe — 我？「就是 án-ni m̄-chiah 講是緣」，我嘴是 án-ni 應，心肝內知影 kap i 自細漢到這時 ê 牽連、綿纏無 hiah 簡單就煞。

The Hangul & Huoontification is so obvious I’m weary to even point it out.

Either way I hope another linguacel finds this interesting!