単亜語/Anthropology

Dan'a'yo returns a shared world of the w:East Asian cultural sphere. The ancient w:Imperial examination (科挙(ㄎワㄍヨ)) created a common experience across the region. Everyone read the same w:Chinese classics and learned the same law codes. Peoples from various language families were nevertheless united and could communicate. With the advent of the internet and Unicode, there is an avenue for peaceful interaction, a reunification of shared cultural and linguistic norms. By taking w:Classical Chinese and updating it, Dan'a'yo can serve as a bridge for those who have drifted apart.

Languages

The language communities that Dan'a'yo seeks to incorporate and unify are Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and to a lesser extent, Vietnamese. Korea and Japan have long formed a sprachbund already, and have many calques and grammatical features in common. They even share some vocabulary. There are those who think they are genetically related, but that has yet to be conclusively proven.

There is some additional similarities that must occur with southern Sino-Tibetan languages, but that is not a design goal, merely a consequence.

Proto

There is no proto-language which all our source languages are supposedly descended from. Our ancient form is Classical Chinese, which is well-known and actually exists in documented form.

Phonologies

Korean has a tense/lax system which is completely unknown to the others in the region. Japanese alone contrasts voiced/unvoiced, instead of aspirated/un-aspirated like the rest. The Chineses have contour tones which are much more complicated than JK pitch accent system. All these features must be ignored as they have no common parallels.

Korean has the most robust phonotactics, with CVC syllables allowing many kinds of consonants in the coda. Mandarin has only /n/ and /ŋ/ there. Japanese has gemination – which doubles the next voiceless stop, and a homorganic nasal – which can be /m/, /n/, or /ŋ~ɴ/. In short, a rough compromise is possible, with everyone having to learn something, but nothing like what it would take to learn any other language.

Orthographies

Chinese characters have roughly stayed the same for 1,000 years, but some changes have crept in. The most overreaching is the Simplified characters of mainland China, which are utterly dependent upon Mandarin pronunciation and incompatible with the region as a whole. Korean uses ancient versions, which are sometimes grossly out of date and far more obtuse than what others write. A strong, compromise position is to use Japanese Shinjitai, which has mild updates and simplifications to some characters.

A phonetic alphabet is hard to agree upon. Japanese hiragana and katakana are no capable of indicating precise coda consonants. Korean Hangul is generally well-suited, but would require two extra characters to show diphthongs not in Korean. Bopomofo is best because it already has a strong infrastructure and a system in place for writing foreign words with the needed sounds.

Prolegomena

Multilingual dictionary sources – such as Wiktionary – already document much of the vocabulary in common across the Far East Asian region. Selection of a limited number of Chinese characters must involve a kind of voting process.

Implementation

Japan is well-positioned to begin education of Dan'a'yo at an early age. Korean politics are unfortunately embroiled over a senseless debate about the national character of learning Chinese characters, a holdover from the war and the product of pride. Chinese standard education frowns upon teaching grammar, but there is a revival of Classical education. Many teaching resources are still needed.