From: Martin J. Dürst (duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp)
Date: Tue Aug 25 2009 - 22:47:12 CDT
On 2009/08/19 6:45, verdy_p wrote:
> In a country where only a small minority is educated, and already has enough economic power to be able to pay the
> transition to a new system without lots of difficulties, this is not a problem: the switch is probably desirable
> (but this does not mean that they must adopt Latin only: any widely used script can be as convenient, and culturally
> more acceptable, notably if there already exists significant corpus in that script, including historic texts).
This is not how it usually works. Whether there is a small or big
minority (or even a majority) in power, those people are usually not
only well educated, but they use their education day-in-day-out (reading
and writing, that is) with high efficiency and speed. The more people
are really in power, the more they have to read and write, and the less
time they have. For them, a script reform is therefore most costly,
because it diminishes their efficiency (and therefore their capability
to rule) significantly. Also, in many situations, people in power are
somewhat older, and the older you are, the more time it will usually
take to adapt to a new writing system.
That's why serious script reforms are mostly undertaken when power
changes drastically (e.g. Russian revolution, end of Ottoman empire in
Turkey, Chinese revolution), where mostly younger people not yet too
much used to exercising power administratively have an incentive to
disadvantage the people who were in power previously.
(For the Chinese case, there is one alleged point that doesn't
completely match with the above general theory, which is that the
simplified shapes chosen mainly came from handwriting as used by
officials and therefor were favoring highly literary people who wrote
often and much over average or below average people who didn't write too
much.)
Regards, Martin.
-- #-# Martin J. Dürst, Professor, Aoyama Gakuin University #-# http://www.sw.it.aoyama.ac.jp mailto:duerst@it.aoyama.ac.jp
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Tue Aug 25 2009 - 22:49:31 CDT