The adaptation of Sanskrit scripts to the Southeast Asian languages was less straightforward than their adaptation to the Dravidian languages. In the Thai script (see figure 10.3), thanks to the Sanskrit phonemic inventory, there are 44 consonant symbols, but the language as pronounced only has 21 consonant phonemes. Two of the consonants are obsolete – they were used for sounds of Old Thai – but such is the power of a set alphabetic list that they are still considered part of the alphabet. Many of the consonants are pronounced alike: the voiced, voiceless aspirated, and voiced aspirated consonants of Sanskrit are all pronounced in Thai as voiceless aspirates. Furthermore, Thai does not have the retroflex series of consonants so characteristic of languages in India, whether they be Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Munda, or even Indian English (these sounds are made with the tip of the tongue curled somewhat backward, and are usually transliterated with a dot under them: The result is that there are six ways of writing the consonant [th] and three for [kh]. These extra consonants have been faithfully preserved in the alphabet and are used in spelling words of Sanskrit and Pali origin. Traditionally the names of the letters consist of the consonant pronounced with the inherent vowel, but as this leaves too many of the letters with the same names, they are also given a further name – a noun which begins with the letter in question. A reverence for original spellings means that there are a number of consonants written (from their original Sanskrit, Pali, or even English forms) that are not pronounced at all, since Thai is very restrictive in what sorts of consonants can be pronounced at the ends of syllables. These consonants are generally (and helpfully!) marked with a diacritic to indicate that they are silent.
Many Southeast Asian languages are tone languages, meaning that each syllable is pronounced with a particular pitch pattern, such as a high pitch, a falling pitch, a low pitch, or a rising pitch. Thai is no exception, with five distinctive tones. Some of the extra consonants are employed to provide information about the tone of the upcoming vowel, with four additional diacritical marks required to represent all tone distinctions. All in all, Thai orthography is quite complex. At least it has (like Tamil) done away with consonant conjuncts.
By contrast, the closely related Lao script (used to write the closely related Lao language) has turned its back on consonants whose only distinctive function is to show a word’s Sanskrit etymology. Lao uses only 27 consonant letters to represent its 20 consonant phonemes, with the extras again used as partial indicators of tone. Thai and Lao thus present contrasting choices in the age-old dilemma of literacy: should writing preserve tradition and information about the past (it is, after all, inherently preserving), or should it be easy to learn, modeling the present state of the language as efficiently as possible? Thai still feels the pull of the first-millennium, unified Sanskrit world, while Lao has chosen modernity, simplicity, and regional individuality.
Figure 10.3 The Thai script, descended from the southern form of Brhm, and preserving Sanskrit alphabetical order. The Thai language does not distinguish all the consonant phonemes of Sanskrit, so many letters are pronounced alike. Word-finally even fewer consonants are distinguished. On the other hand, Thai has added symbols for its many vowel phonemes. Consonants fall into three classes, which influence the tone on the upcoming vowel. Vowels do not have initial forms; when word-initial they are added to a dummy “zero consonant.” Thai does not use spaces between words.
The Sanskritic tradition was firmly on the side of preservation, enabled by the development of the science of grammar. A learned but otherwise dead language has a useful feature: it can be controlled – corralled into following prescriptive norms and largely preserved from change. Over time this becomes yet another argument for using the language: works written in Sanskrit were perceived as perennially accessible, as were works in Latin in medieval Europe. The preserving effect of writing had made it very obvious that while spoken language changes, texts remain the same; the vernaculars were therefore considered unreliable and unstable.
As the study of grammar began to be applied to other languages, first to Tamil in the Tolkppiyam and later to other languages as well, the normative urge of the Sanskrit grammarians was inherited. The grammars were not written to explain how Tamil, say, or Kannada was spoken, but rather to explain how Tamil or Kannada should be spoken. Probably it was felt that if the regional languages were to vie with Sanskrit as literary vehicles, they needed officially sanctioned, pure, and relatively changeless forms. To a greater or lesser degree in various languages, this attitude has stuck to the present day.
The result is that both Kannada and Tamil (which were early objects of grammaticization and vernacular literature) are now written in a form that is several centuries older than the spoken language. As a consequence, both languages are marked by strong diglossia. By contrast, while English spelling reflects an older form of the language (with words such as should, knight, and laugh), the archaic spellings are no longer pronounced. Every language with an established literary tradition has a certain amount of diglossia (in English, for example, we rarely write contracted forms such as hafta, gonna, and wanna, though they occur ubiquitously in speech), but in India, as in the Arabic world, the diglossia is much more thoroughgoing. In Kannada, and even more in Tamil, the situation would be analogous to English speakers conversing in twenty-first-century English but writing, reading aloud, and making formal speeches and announcements in Shakespearean English. Unlike English, Kannada and Tamil spell their words as they are pronounced – but only as they are pronounced in the literary form of the language. They are spelled as grammarians feel they should be pronounced.
The formal or literary variety is relatively free from dialectal variation, while colloquial styles vary considerably, both by region and by caste. The formal language is no one’s spoken style – not even the Brahmins’ – but everyone, whatever their class or caste background, will use the literary style in certain formal contexts, provided they have the education to do so. In yet another example of the reifying effect of writing, only the literary variety is considered “real.” Highly educated individuals may even believe that they speak the formal variety at home and not notice their instinctive use of their native colloquial. Foreigners are taught only the literary forms and may find themselves corrected if they try to use the colloquial. The literary style is the only form of the language that is traditionally taught – the colloquial style is acquired naturally at home. The foreigners may therefore have trouble finding a chance to learn the colloquial language and may continue to find it unintelligible even after they have studied the formal language for years.
Indians have long been used to speaking one language at home and writing another. After the age of Sanskrit, during the Mughal Empire (1526–1857), the court language was Persian, and in modern times English is used as an educated lingua franca. However, no single language has absolute sway. As amended in 2004, the Indian constitution recognizes 22 languages: Assamese, Bengali, Bodo, Dogri, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri, Konkani, Malayalam, Maithili, Manipuri (Meitei), Marathi, Nepali, Oriya, Punjabi, Santali, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu, and Sanskrit. Except for Sanskrit, these recognized, or “scheduled,” languages (so called because they are enumerated in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India) are spoken by at least a million people each. No single community uses Sanskrit as their home language, but it is still widely studied, and the Indian census reports a few thousand people who still claim Sanskrit as their mother tongue (though what this means in practice is not entirely clear). In addition to the scheduled languages, English is tolerated as a de facto national language, alongside Hindi, which officially holds national status.
Languages not on the official list are generally dismissed as “dialects,” although this leaves all but one (Santali) of the 20 languages of the Munda group, all but one (Manipuri) of India’s 121 Tibeto-Burman languages, and the entire Andamanese language family classified as mere “dialects.” Speakers of some of these supposed dialects, such as Tulu (Dravidi
an) and Bhili (Indo-Aryan), number in the millions. What the so-called dialects lack is neither numbers of speakers nor adequate distinctiveness from other languages, but an established literary tradition.
In the popular mind it is writing that makes a language. Though this is historically backwards, the reifying and standardizing effect of writing is undeniable. In India, where scripts run rampant, one can often recognize what language a text is written in merely by its script. Before 1992 there were only 15 scheduled languages, and they used 10 different scripts. Assamese and Bengali share basically the same script; Hindi, Marathi, and modern publications in Sanskrit share the Devangar script; and Kashmiri, Sindhi, and Urdu are written in the Perso-Arabic script. The rest each had their own.
In fact, the most significant difference between Hindi and Urdu is what script they are written in. Formal and religious styles of Urdu will use more Persian and Arabic loanwords, while the corresponding styles of Hindi will use more Sanskrit loanwords. At a colloquial level, however, Hindi and Urdu sound much the same, to the extent that most linguists consider them a single language. Visually, the two are entirely different. Hindi uses Devangar and Urdu uses the Perso-Arabic alphabet. Their scripts have made of them two different languages.
The recent additions to the list of scheduled languages (Konkani, Manipuri, Nepali, Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, and Santali) have smaller literary traditions and tend to use the more established scripts of other languages – often Devangar, the closest thing India has to a default national script. The exception is Santali, for which Pandit Raghunath Murmu invented the Ol Chiki script in the twentieth century.
The Pandit was reacting to Indians’ widespread belief that not only is a real language written down, but any truly self-respecting language has its own script. This attitude has inspired the invention of a number of scripts for so-called “tribal” languages, but Ol Chiki has been the most successful, helping to pave the way for recognition of Santali as a scheduled language.
The People of India project surveyed 4,635 different communities. These traditionally endogamous communities are based on distinctions of caste, tribe, religion, and language. With so many different social and ethnic groups, speaking so many different languages, India seems an unlikely candidate for a nation. The fact that it is one is in no small degree thanks to the unifying work of Sanskrit, whose vocabulary pervades the Indian languages, whose pronunciation has altered the phonemic inventories of unrelated languages, and whose alphabetical order is still followed. In India, it is the script that makes a language; yet it was Sanskrit that made the scripts.
11
King Sejong’s One-Man Renaissance
If Sequoyah had been born a royal prince of Korea, he might well have been like Sejong. Born in 1397, Sejong became the fourth king of Korea’s Chosn dynasty (1392–1910) in 1418 and ruled for 32 years. King Sejong’s accomplishments were many and diverse, but today, like Sequoyah, he is best remembered for the script he invented. These visionary men perceived that literacy was vital to the welfare of their peoples, both of which lived in the shadow of a more powerful nation (in Sejong’s case, China). With the added benefits of literacy, bilingualism, and a thorough education, Sejong was able to create the most efficient and logical writing system in the world. Those who trumpet the wonders of the Greek alphabet are misguided; it is the Korean alphabet which is the true paragon of scripts.
Sejong was an extraordinary man: a brilliant scholar, an able ruler, and a generous humanitarian. The new Chosn (or Yi) dynasty had chosen Neo-Confucianism as its official philosophy, blaming state-sponsored Buddhism for the failings of their predecessors in the Kory dynasty (918–1392, the dynasty from which we get the name Korea). Sejong’s rare moral vision reflected the best of the Neo-Confucianism under which he had grown up.
The Confucianism Sejong upheld enjoined him to be a wise and benevolent ruler, to cultivate virtue, and to pursue learning as a means to achieve harmony with the cosmos. Few rulers have lived up to these ideals as well as Sejong. He ascended the throne at the age of 21 upon the abdication of his father, King T’aejong, and within two years had launched his very own Korean renaissance.
By 1420 Sejong had revitalized the royal academy (the Academy of Worthies), handpicking its roughly twenty members. With this elite group of men under his personal direction, Sejong presided over Korea’s golden age. He directed the scholars to pursue specific projects, but also instituted academic sabbaticals, giving them time off for personal study.
Not content merely to gather knowledge, Sejong turned immediately to its dissemination, and thus to printing. Korea had long ago learned the art of woodblock printing (xylography) from the Chinese and may have heard of Bi Sheng’s eleventh-century invention of ceramic movable type (typography). It is also possible that the Koreans had never heard of Bi Sheng, as the Chinese themselves had not taken his invention very seriously. It was Koreans, however, who in 1234 first used metal movable type (a bronze font of Chinese characters), over two centuries before Gutenberg invented his printing press. In 1392 the Publications Office was established, charged with the publishing of books and the casting of type. In practice, the office used only block printing until 1403, when King T’aejong ordered the casting of a new font, declaring the availability of reading material to be essential to good government. This lofty ideal was reportedly greeted with skepticism by some of his officials.
King Sejong, however, followed enthusiastically in his father’s footsteps. He ordered a new kind of type cast in 1420 which could be used more efficiently, increasing from about 20 to 100 the number of copies that could be printed from a single form in one day. He had another new font cast in 1434, again with advances in design. In 1436 he experimented with casting type from lead rather than bronze, and brought out a large-print type for the elderly.
Meanwhile, xylography flourished under Sejong as well. Block printing involved considerable expenditure of time and effort in the initial carving of blocks, but once carved a woodblock could last literally for centuries. Movable type was much faster to set up, but the type had to be painstakingly realigned after printing every page, and so printing was slow. Large print orders were therefore usually done with woodblocks, while movable type was used for smaller publications. Given Korea’s small population (and its truly tiny literate population), combined with Sejong’s concern with disseminating as many publications as possible, movable type was far more practical in Korea than it had ever been in China. In all, 114 works are known to have been printed with movable type and 194 printed with woodblocks during Sejong’s reign. By contrast, block printing of books was only just beginning in Europe during this period, and Gutenberg was still experimenting with typography in the late 1440s, thirty years into Sejong’s rule.
Like other educated men of his time, Sejong read and wrote in Classical Chinese, the Koreans having been the first people outside of China to adopt Chinese characters. At the latest, Chinese characters entered Korea with the establishment of the Han Prefectures, when China ruled northern Korea from 108 BC to AD 313. The Koreans themselves were using Chinese characters by 414, as evidenced by an inscribed stele erected in honor of King Kwangaet’o (ad 375–413). Chinese characters, however, are designed for the Chinese language, and Korean (aside from a large quantity of Chinese loanwords) is not at all like Chinese. (It is sometimes, though not conclusively, classified with the Altaic languages; it may also be distantly related to Japanese.) So literate Koreans wrote in Chinese. During their long acquaintance with Chinese characters, Koreans invented about 150 characters and added some specifically Korean meanings to Chinese characters. Chinese words entered the Korean language in droves.
Korea accepted China as its “elder brother,” with the Chinese emperor – theoretically at least – being the Korean king’s overlord. China was considered the source of all culture and learning. The Korean elite therefore thought it natural that becoming literate meant learning the Chinese language: everything worth reading was written in Chinese.
Some attempts were made to write Korean, however. At first, the native style of poetry was written in hyangchal, a system of using characters for their pronunciations that was similar to (and may have inspired) the Japanese man’y;gana. Native Korean poetry declined during the Kory period, however, and with it hyangchal went out of use. Kugyl, analogous to early uses of katakana in Japan, was a system of simple and abbreviated characters that were inserted into Chinese texts to represent Korean grammatical elements and help Korean readers make sense of the Chinese grammar. Korean prose was written in idu (“clerk reading”), a system which used some characters for their meanings and others for their sounds. The oldest known idu text dates from 754; it remained the dominant method of writing Korean until 1894. Yet idu was looked down upon as vulgar by the literati. And indeed, it was a clumsy writing system that cried out to be superseded.
Sejong, while never overtly questioning China’s suzerainty, had the audacity to realize that Korea was different from China. He came to the throne at a time when the Chosn dynasty was still fresh and hopeful, and the new state-sponsored Neo-Confuncianism was still being defined. Instead of slavishly copying China, Sejong looked for distinctively Korean ways to implement his ideas. Korea needed new rites and ceremonies, and appropriate music for them, so he ordered the compilation of manuals of ritual and protocol, and the composition and arranging of music, in first Chinese style and then native Korean. A unique style of Korean musical notation developed under his reign, the first East Asian system to fully represent rhythm.
The Writing Revolution Page 23