Scripts and Writing

This chapter deals with the diversity of scripts in East Asia. By the time that neighbouring societies came into contact with Chinese writing, it had already gone a long way towards standardization and had already generated a substantial literature. In many of those societies the Chinese script was used to write official and then literary texts in Sinitic, and subsequently to write the vernaculars using characters phonographically. This was true of Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, but it was not true of the Tanguts or of Tibet, where the arrival of Buddhist scriptures stimulated the desire to translate, and for this purpose scripts were invented for the Tangut and Tibetan vernaculars. In Japan the two kana scripts emerged in the ninth century, and later vernacular scripts were developed in Vietnam (nôm), Korea (hangul or chosongul) and other societies. This diversity, it is argued, is largely due to the principle of disassociation.