Another Short History of Linguistics (48)

The alphabetic language is hard to be lingua franca or international language. Theoretically, since the alphabetic language connected sound with writing system, then any changed of sound must reflected in writing system. From the following web page: 

http://www.usu.edu/markdamen/1320hist&civ/pp/slides/17alphabet.pdf

Gives an example about the pronouncing of ‘girl’

gal (American dialect)

goil (New York)

gull (Irish)

gel (London)

gill (South African)

gairull(Scottish)

This example tells us that once a group of people adopt alphabet system, they are doomed to suffer endless splitting. For the writing system has to follow the change of dialect pronunciation. But the dialect can be changed in any minutes, after few hundred years, they may be changed totally, so the change of writing style will be inevitable. That is the key reason that the Rome Empire trying to unify the language during the 1,500 years of their ruling but after its fall, the European language split. On the other hand, in China, the unification of language was carried by 秦始皇Qin Shi Huang, who had decreed his order of language unification at 212BC, three years later, he died and 5 years later, his Dynasty was ended. That is to say his order was only carried out for eight years, yet the language started unified since then. Because the character didn’t follow sound to change, they never changed, any local dialect may change but no dialect could go too far, for the necessary of communication will pull you back. The best example was the 西夏language, it was invented in 1036 by the king named 李元昊. He wanted to split a new country from the central government. He thought that only with a new language, his region could be independent forever. So he invented language like this:

The character written in black is Chinese while in purple is 西夏language. But without any particular advantage it was disappearing after survived 191 years, when the Genghis Khan invasion occurred this country. This language had invented totally 6,000 characters. Most of them were similar the Chinese characters. Today it could be found only in some museum. People know them only by dictionary.