Korean Hangul
In the middle of the 15th century, Korea was still using Chinese characters for their written language, despite having a very different spoken language. King Sejong argued that the Chinese script, with its thousands of characters, was too complicated for commoners to learn and was awkward due to the differences between spoken Chinese and Korean. So in 1446 he published a document demonstrating a new writing system, Hangul, which used only 51 characters, making it much easier to learn. 24 of the characters map closely to letters of the Latin alphabet. The most interesting part is that the characters are drawn to show the way the lips and tongue are positioned to form the sound, enabling non-native speakers to sound out words without extensive training.
January 2nd, 2008 at 4:52 pm
Written Vietnamese went through the same transition in the 16th century, compliments of French missionaries who were working there at the time. In the case of Vietnamese, actual roman characters were used, with various additional marks for variations on the vowel sounds and inflections (Vietnamese is tonal.) The reasons given were the same: phonetic spelling makes learning how to read/write easy. The mechanization of text would later benefit from the limited character set.
Old Vietnamese using Chinese characters is still studied, but it’s a niche area of study. It’s sort of like Latin in the Western world. Those purists decry the loss of nuance that occurs when you convert a language to a phonetic representation. Chinese characters encode a lot of meaning in their forms; the etymology of a word or relationship between words is often seen in the strokes of the characters themselves. All of that is lost in modern Vietnamese and Korean.