Why Chinese never developed an alphabet??

Question

Chinese is almost the only non-alphabetical language in the world today. Despite its difficulty and inconveniency, China never developed an alphabet.

I wonder why they haven't introduce an alphabet system while other east asian countries like Korea and Vietnam developed their own alphabets.

Please help me out!

Answer 1

French settlers developed an alphabet in Vietnam, and also in Guangxi. Vietnamese people didn't need such a thing but it was important to French government to create an alphabet there as they would settle much easily.

Answer 2

BoPoMoFo (also called Zhuyin or Juyin) is indeed not that old. It is first introduced in the 20th century.

First of all, why should we develop alphabet system when we can write down everything in characters? The Chinese characters have hundreds of homophone, and it can turn out to be very confusing if the romanised version of each character is shown individually in a sentence. Also, the Chinese characters has many functions and unique features, why should we abandon them?

There were people who tried to romanise Chinese and turn it into an alphabetical language in the 1950s, but fortunately it failed.

Answer 3

They have something akin to an alphabet. I don't think I can describe it clearly, so here's a link: http://www.zein.se/patrick/graph/chinphon.gif

These are the characters of the Chinese "alphabet". Actually, it's not STRICTLY an alphabet, as these "letters" don't make up "words". But these can be written next to a word to tell you what sound it makes. So it's kind of an alphabet.

Also, the Chinese written language is totally different. It has millions of words, and they're all picture-looking things.

Answer 4

The Chinese had a syllabary long ago, which began with the sounds of be, pe, mo, fo... and in Taiwan today it still precedes the study of traditional characters. Also, pinyin is a way of using our letters, along with a different pronunciation guide and accent marks for tone, to describe Chinese words. It's essentially a very clear alphabet. Eventually, it may be all that is left to learn in Chinese schools, to make room for the more time-consuming other learning pursuits, I would imagine.

Writing in ancient times in China was prolific and extremely artistic. As an art form, it was special and widely appreciated. As a method of communication, it worked fine for them. No need to be critical... it has its advantages, such as the aforementioned lack of ambiguity.

Answer 5

Who says it's inconvenient?

In Chinese there is no ambiguity about what word you're trying to write. There are no homonyms in Chinese writing. Chinese characters eliminate confusion. Japanese is often actually easier to read with kanji than with kana, because the Chinese characters eliminate confusion which might otherwise exist. (actually, when there was some confusion about what someone was talking about...SPOKEN, my other exchange student friends in Japan and I would sometimes write "air kanji.")

It's harder to learn, but once you know it, it's in many ways easier to use. In fact, if Japanese and Korean had shared GRAMMAR with Chinese and not just some vocabulary, they might not have bothered developing their own writing systems at all. In Japanese (particularly academic or technical Japanese), and some old Korean text, the local writing system is mainly used to provide grammatical structure.

You might as well ask why other languages haven't developed ideograms. They never developed it because they never NEEDED to. (Well, not until computers came along, which is one of the main reasons they have pinyin)

Answer 6

If you decided in studying to talk Chinese then you need to now that the greatest selection is a Course for Mandarin.