Modern China Lecture Series featuring Uluğ Kuzuoğlu - April 3, 2024

Modern China Lecture Series
"Codes of Modernity: Chinese Scripts in the Global Information Age"
featuring
Uluğ Kuzuoğlu, Assistant Professor of History, Washington University in St. Louis
with
Arunabh Ghosh, Associate Professor of History, Department of History, Harvard University
April 3, 2024

[@gliang9406]

Thanks for sharing the history of the Latinization process of Chinese characters! Very interesting.
On the other hand, I think the speaker emphasized too much on the political aspects of the script reforms. The Latinization of Chinese characters definitely had its own political driven force then, but when the dust finally settled down, Chinese are looking at the script issue more from scientific but not political perspectives.
From information theoretic perspectives, one can prove that the Chinese system has a great advantage over alphabetic systems. Such advantages come with a sizeable startup cost. As a return, the overall cost of Chinese language is much lower than those of alphabetic languages.
Another advantage of Chinese system is that it can absorb good aspects of other languages easily. For instance, one can say that English is a subset of Chinese because the 26 English alphabets can be merged into Chinese straightforwardly, as it has already happened, so Chinese could adopt good parts of English for information communication. I cannot image any other language can borrow good aspects of Chinese systematically, at least not easily.

[@adindahutabarat_sinolog]

Chinese alphabetical/pronounciation systems: Wade-giles, Zhuyin, Pinyin.
Chinese script/character systems: Jiaguwen, ..., Caoshu, Hanzi.

[@MeiinUK]

It is not that easy.... Cos he has added other script firms but why were they added ? Is it because there were migrants from those regions or not ?... This is not good. The hybridity led to destruction of those mini civilisation..... And rights.... And destroyed legitimacy. Absolutely trash.