What's wrong with the Chinese writing system?

Let's get back to the subject of history. We have already established that China has lost its dominance on the world stage for many reasons, including its unique geography, lack of serious competition and its relative influence in the region. As of mid-XV century, the stage for European domination has been set, and perhaps no further major explanation is necessary.

However, there is an additional factor, which I believe would have hindered China in many ways in the upcoming centuries, and that factor is its writing system:


I believe that even if China did emerge as a dominant power in the XV century, alongside Europe, they would have still had trouble developing, in particular in the realm of science. I will speculate that the Scientific Revolution would have had a much more difficult time arising in East Asia. Why is that?

Compared to the Latin alphabet in Western Europe, the Chinese writing system is considerably more complex, which has disadvantages in at least the following areas:

1. Memorizing hieroglyphs requires a lot more time and effort than memorizing a simple alphabet of 24-40 letters. This means it takes longer for children and illiterate people to learn, and makes high literacy rates more difficult.
   
2. Hieroglyphic writing is by its nature resistant to loan words from other languages.
   
3. Hieroglyphic writing takes slower to adopt new concepts into the writing system, because it requires an invention of a new character every time. This has the consequence that ideas from other languages will be adapted slower, as they have to go thru the artificial filter of the writing system.
4. The Chinese hieroglyphs in particular have been excessively stylized to the point where they hardly resemble the objects they were supposed to represent, even in the simple case (illustrated by the picture at the beginning of the post).
   
5. Hieroglyphic writing has further promoted elitism, has warped the concept of what it means to be educated, and has created a lot of waste in the educational system. Thus the focus was placed on learning the characters at the cost of the knowledge behind them.

• Up until the XX century, much of the mentality around education in the East Asian countries has been along the lines of "I know more fancy characters than you, therefore I am more intelligent".
• The emphasis has not only been on memorization of the characters themselves, but also the proper way to write them, including the direction and the thickness of each stroke!
  
• In Korea, even though they invented a truly phonetic alphabet in the XV century, it was considered low-class for "weak" people who couldn't read the real writing (the original Chinese). It was called "women's script" or "children's script".
• Similar things happened to the syllabaries of Katakana and Hiragana in Japan, which were not widely accepted by the elites, instead utilized by women, who did not have access to "proper" education.
• There was a proliferation of obscure poetic paradigms, such as the Chengyu, the four-character idioms, which have a different meaning than what is directly implied by the characters they contain. While useful for poetry, and abstract expression, from the point of view of illustration of concrete concepts and hard sciences, this is just another digression.

a four-character idiom

A hierogphyphic system is a natural start and is well suited for early stages of a civilization's developments, where each character represents a concept. However as a society becomes more complex, new technologies get introduced and people begin to express more complex concepts, the hieroglyphic systems have a harder time keeping up with the expanding vocabulary (more about the evolution of writing in another post).

Europe's well-established alphabetical system allowed for quick transfer of ideas, and made introduction of new terms easy, which I believe is one of the main reasons the Scientific Revolution happened in Europe and not in Asia.

Long time no post

Hey folks,
I dug up some older posts from 2004 and before. I think they fit in well on this blog. The topics are religion, capitalism, media, and a little bit of math. If you're feeling bored, browse around on the right side panel in the blog archive.

Optmism and bubbles

I have been following market headlines for the last couple of months, and the picture looks grim. The bubble is bursting, ladies and gents, and we gotta brace for the worst.

So why do bubbles happen? Haven't we seen this before? There was the dot-com bubble in 2000, and the tech bubble followed. Then everyone started investing in the real estate market. The real estate has real value, the real estate is a real investment, the market won't burst, land prices always go up. Yeah, let's buy more real estate! Oh yeah, let's buy a house so huge I don't know what to do with it. Let's buy a house so huge I got no money left. Because hey - I can sell it 2 years later, and the bigger the house, the bigger the profit.

So let's dig a little deeper. It's one thing to think you can afford a house which is too big for your own good, and quite another to actually go ahead with the purchase and having the ability to pull it off. Here the average deluded consumer got the help from the institutions and people around him. Banks willingly lent him money for a purchase he couldn't afford. Friends told him his house prices would rise, and that theirs have already risen. Newspapers told him about the housing boom, and how it's such a hot investment these days, everybody's doing it, why don't you? Get on the bandwagon! Cash in on the craze!

The fundamental reason bubbles arise is people are too optimistic for their own good. They don't see or they don't wanna see failure, either of people around them or their own. They think things are always going to improve and when they hesitate, they're easily convinced by other people. In my experience, there are a lot more optimists in this world than there are pessimists. This happy-go-lucky attitude does wonders for a bubble, because everyone is affected.

• The person who wants to buy a huge house realizes he can buy it now, even though he cannot afford it. He doesn't really know what he's doing, or if he can make it, but he's easily persuaded by his optimistic friends and the bank that's giving him the loan so easily despite his bad credit history. Everything is gonna be alright...
• The bank employee / loan officer overlooks the buyer's credit history for the same exact reason. He is an optimistic too. He doesn't need to check too hard. If he hesitates, his colleague or his competitor is going to extend the sub-prime loan, and make a couple of thousand in commission on the sale. Why shouldn't it be him? Everything is gonna be alright...
• The bank's CEO sees his loan officers making bad sub-prime loans but he won't stop them. It'll be fine. The other banks have made similar loans, and their stock price has gone up big time. Why should he miss out? Everything is gonna be alright...
• Even the regulators turn a blind eye on the bad lending practices. The economy based on maxed-out credit cards and defaulted house loans keeps zooming on, the construction industry is driving the rest of the economy, unemployment is low, the dollar is high. What could go wrong? Mr. Greenspan is praised for his supervision of the superb invincible powerhouse of the American economy. His ego is on the line too, he's an optimist, everything's gonna be alright...
• Once in a while a pessimist or a realist raises his head above the crowd and says something like "What are you guys doing? The real value of the house has nothing to do with what you're paying! The prices can't rise forever, etc."

• But nobody wants to listen. "Why you gotta be such a downer, Mr. Pessimist! Can't you just be happy like the rest of us. You're always crying wolf!" And so the pessimists voices drown in the sea of happiness, as everyone appears to be getting richer at the same time, with no consequences. Solid judgement gets dismissed as doomsday predictions. Everything is gonna be alright...
  

Even as the bubble is bursting, the markets are refusing to believe it. They're still optimistic. It's only a few bad apples, it's only one bank, it's only some states, it's only the American economy, it's only the dollar that's tanking.

KAPANG - And then the bubble bursts...