Re: 雑談：日本ローマ字会が解散

木田さん、

英語で失礼します。

It’s an interesting topic, indeed.

> 耳で聞いて分からない、したがって、カナや点字（これはカナと同じく表音文字です。）で読んでも分からない、おびただしい数の漢語は、視覚障害や読み書き障害のある人びとを悩ませています。

I don't quite understand the problem here. Why is 点字 mentioned here? What is the relationship between 点字 and 漢字? What are the specific difficulties for 視覚障害や読み書き障害のある人びと?

> ディスクレシア問題、中国ではどうなんでしょうね？ 漢字の国の先輩として学べるところがあるかもしれませんね。

Regarding this, I think we have discussed it in the clreq group before[1], I will ask Roy Ran (our accessibility expert) for his opinions. Maybe this can be used as a point of cooperation, and we (jlreq/clreq/accessibility groups) can work together to write a paper.

> 漢字をめぐるいろいろな歴史が興味深いですね。

It's interesting indeed. I read a book about this recently, called 漢文と東アジア――訓読の文化圏. [2] Han characters have been written in East Asia for a long time. Since transportation was inconvenient in ancient times, the vast majority of people from the Japanese archipelago and the Korean Peninsula had no chance to go to China in their lifetime. For them, if they want to read books or write articles written in Han characters, they only need to know the shape and meaning of the characters and don't need to know the pronunciation of it. They can use their own language to pronounce it. When Chinese people read a Han character, the sound, shape, and meaning are unified, but after it spread to other East Asia countries, the pronunciation has changed.

When Han characters were first introduced to the Korean peninsula, they used 吏読 to express the Korean language with the sound of Han characters. Therefore, the vast majority of people cannot write Chinese proficiently, and they use Han characters as phonetic symbols. And then 世宗 invented 訓民正音. From the 15th century to the 19th century, Hangul was only used by ordinary citizens, and Han characters were used as written characters by bureaucrats. However, since Han characters and Korean could not be completely integrated, 漢字・ハングル混淆文 appeared. The writing of pure Hangul did not take off until the end of the 19th century.

After the liberation, South Korea began to gradually reduce the use of Han characters. In the era of 朴正煕, Han characters were officially taken out from the compulsory course and were only learned in 選択教科.

Now, Hanja is not used much in South Korea and North Korea.

About Japan, since the exchanges with 新羅 have become frequent, kanji began to appear in official Japanese documents. During 平安時代, kanji had become the common language of Japan. Since the grammar of Japanese is different from Chinese, for the convenience of writing, 万葉仮名 appeared, which is used to mark the pronunciation of kanji characters.

Then kana was invented, and gradually became a common language for people who do not know kanji. Since kana can not only represent the sound, but also be used for writing directly, kanji became not that important, so 漢字仮名交じり appeared, lowering the barrier.

Nowadays, there are almost no new 漢語 invented, and kana were used more and more widely.

There is not much content about Vietnam and the Ryukyu Kingdom in the book, so I plan to read some other related materials.

Similar to Japan and Korea, there have been many discussions in China about replacing Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet, kind of similar to the use of Cyrillic in Mongolia. The reasons include the cost of learning Chinese characters and the difficulty of 漢字をサイバースペースに移転すること etc.

Thank you for bringing up this interesting topic,

~xfq

Links:

[1] https://www.w3.org/2021/02/24-clreq-minutes.html#t01
[2] https://www.amazon.co.jp/%E6%BC%A2%E6%96%87%E3%81%A8%E6%9D%B1%E3%82%A2%E3%82%B8%E3%82%A2%E2%80%95%E2%80%95%E8%A8%93%E8%AA%AD%E3%81%AE%E6%96%87%E5%8C%96%E5%9C%8F-%E5%B2%A9%E6%B3%A2%E6%96%B0%E6%9B%B8-%E9%87%91-%E6%96%87%E4%BA%AC/dp/4004312620

Received on Thursday, 27 April 2023 07:21:44 UTC