Can languages restrict their number of distinct syllables when written by syllabaries?

Question

Disclaimer: I am not a linguist, please provide any corrections for terminology.

From How languages compare with the number of different syllables from all words?, Yoon Mi Oh's thesis counted the different syllables in the 20,000 most frequent words for several languages. Her results, ordered by increasing number of syllables are:

Japanese: 643
Korean: 1104
Mandarin: 1274
Cantonese: 1298
Basque: 2082
Thai: 2438
Italian: 2729
Spanish: 2778
French: 2949
Turkish: 3260
Catalan: 3600
Serbian: 3831
Finnish: 3844
Hungarian: 4325
German: 5100
Vietnamese: 5156
English: 6949

We can see all languages with a writing system historically based on (approximately) syllabaries (with characters associated with syllables) — Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese— have considerably less different number of syllables than others based on alphabets. Note that Korean until the end of the 19th century used Hanja, a writing system mainly based on Chinese characters. There is also an exception: Vietnamese, with a large number of different syllables and using until the 20th century Chữ Nôm, also a written system based mainly on Chinese characters. Despite this case, can a language restrict overtime its number of distinct syllables because it is written with a syllabary?

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I only have an idea for the case of Mandarin. Although there are many Chinese characters, literate individuals know and use between 3,000 and 4,000 characters (see 3). Maybe this is the physiological upper limit on the number of items of a syllabary for an average person to remember? In that case, this would place an upper bound for the number of different syllables for a language using a syllabary. Furthermore, Chinese characters are constructed by combining only 214 radicals, which sometimes are responsible for its phonetics. And the 10 most used radicals appear in 10,665 characters (or 23% of the dictionary), potentially restricting the phonetics even more.

Supporting the direction of the hypothesis (from San Duanmu, The Phonology of Standard Chinese):

While Middle Chinese (about AD 600) had over 3,000 syllables (including tonal distinctions), modern Standard Chinese (SC) has just over 1,300. Thus, over a period of 1,500 years, Chinese lost more than half of its syllables. Moreover, the syllable inventory of modern Chinese continues to shrink. In addition, about 200 of the 1,300 syllables in SC are now rarely used.

In addition, Evelyn Rawski writes that during the Qīng Dynasty (1644-1911):

Evidence of the large number of potential teachers and the widespread distribution of private schools led us to conclude that it was possible for a broad cross-section of Ch'ing [= Qīng] males to attain some degree of literacy in private and charitable schools. Information from the mid and late nineteenth century suggests that 30 to 45 percent of the men and from 2 to 10 percent of the women in China knew how to read and write. This group included the fully literate members of the elite and, on the opposite pole, those knowing only a few hundred characters. Thus loosely defined, there was an average of almost one literate person per family.

Thus, a large part of the population was literate, which could allow for some plausible influence from the writing system to the language.

For the particular discussion of Chinese language, I also asked the question: Why Mandarin Chinese has a few number of different syllables?

Answer 1

No. The use of a ‘characters writing system’ (I take it you mean something not simply alphabetic) does not restrict the number of distinct syllables. Even if you look at Yoon Mi Oh's list there's no reason to assume this. The gap between Cantonese and Basque isn't all that great and Korean uses an alphabet. The list is also fairly biased, for example many languages with very small syllable inventories exist that use the Roman alphabet, like the Polynesian languages, or a syllabary, like some indigenous American languages.

One might be tempted to think, okay, maybe using, say, a syllabary doesn't restrict what the language can do, but people speaking a language with many syllables will not use a syllabary, so there could be a connection the other way round. But a long time ago the language that would eventually turn into Ancient Greek was written with a script containing both syllabic and ideographic signs even though the language wasn't well-suited for that. Our knowledge here is scant, but the consensus is that they adapted their script from the Minoan script whose language presumably was better suited to it, although we don't really know. The way the Greeks dealt with the situation was basically by omitting some consonants and writing filler vowels.

The last technique is similar to how the Japanese adapt foreign words to their phonology, although they do so in speaking as well as in writing. Which is a nice segue to what happened when the syllable inventory of Japanese expanded beyond what their syllabaries (kana) could express. Initially they had to make do by spelling their unspellable words with the kana they had, mainly by using historical spellings, but eventually their kana system was reformed and expanded to cope.

Another historical example is Ancient Egyptian. We have no reason to assume it had a particularly small syllable inventory, but they used a kind of hybrid system where ideographs could also stand for a sequence of consonants (vowels were not written) and this system was in use well into the Roman period. The last surviving hieroglyphic text dates from 394 and the last surviving demotic text from 452.

I think that instead writing systems originate form sources of power, whether it be cultural, or otherwise and spread from there. Think of the Chinese ideographs spreading over all Chinese territory and even beyond to Korea and Japan. Or the Roman letters spreading over the former empire and beyond and over the world in the colonial age. Think of the Greek letters turning into Cyrillic and spreading into Russia. Or the Phoenician letters spreading over the Mediterranean. Or the Arabic script being adopted even by languages wholly unsuited to it, such as Ottoman Turkic.

People tend to adopt the script of the cultural hegemonic power in their area. If they're lucky they'll adapt it to fit their languages, think for example of all the digraphs in languages using the Roman alphabet that are needed to spell sounds that Latin didn't have. Cases of shaking off the yoke, like the Koreans and the Turks did, seem to me to be exceptions, at least for the bigger language communities. The Japanese won't switch to a kana-only way of writing any time soon, I'm afraid.

Answer 2

There is a very good reason for thinking that this is coincidence. The reason is that a language has the same number of syllables whether it is written or not, and whether it is written with one form of script or another. Mandarin has the same number of syllables whether it is written in characters or Pinyin.

The only way the pattern could be significant is if the syllable inventory somehow influenced the choice of writing system. But there is no evidence for this: on the contrary, most scripts are adopted because they are borrowed from neighbouring languages, or for political or religious reasons.

Answer 3

In some cases, I do think there's a causal link here. However, Japanese, Mandarin, Korean, and Thai have very different writing systems, so I wouldn't group them all together as "characters". (Japanese is a syllabary plus logograms, Mandarin is pure logograms, Korean is an alphabet, and Thai is an abugida.)

Focusing on Japanese specifically, Japanese is a language with a fairly small inventory of syllables. Writing each mora with its own symbol (morae are sort of like syllables, and are the basis for the Japanese writing system), you end up needing only 71 symbols to write the entire language.

Compare this to English, with its ~7,000 different possible syllables. A syllable-based system is significantly less feasible here!

Is there a reason any of these languages couldn't be written with an alphabet, like English is? Not at all. Roumaji (Japanese written in the Roman alphabet) can convey exactly the same information that kana (Japanese syllabic characters) do. But there is a reason why English isn't written with a syllabary, and that reason is tied to the size of the syllable inventory.

P.S. It's worth noting that some languages with enormous inventories do/did use syllabic writing systems, such as Hittite and Mycenaean Greek. In these cases, the writing system doesn't fit very well, and writers have to use awkward workarounds: inserting extra vowels, as in Hittite harkzi (two syllables) written ha-ar-ak-zi (four signs), or leaving out some consonants, as in Mycenaean sperma written pe-ma.

Answer 4

The problem with trying to draw any conclusion from statistics like the one shown is that the mapping from spoken to written languages is not one-to-one:

• writing systems are shared by many unrelated languages
• a single language may adopt different writing systems at different times
• multiple writing systems may even be in use simultaneously, as with Japanese
• both the writing system and the spoken language evolve over time

However, we might try to look for other evidence disproving the hypothesis.

Are languages which have fewer distinct syllables more likely to use syllabaries or logographies rather than alphabets?

As far as I know, spoken language always precedes written language, so it is quite reasonable to conjecture that the structure of a spoken language would influence a writing system designed for that language.

Unfortunately, most languages do not invent their own writing systems, they adopt and adapt systems from cultures they admire, or simply from cultures they have been conquered by. For example, Maori is written using the Latin alphabet because of the British conquest of New Zealand, not because it is suitable for the language.

That alphabet in turn was adopted for English under the cultural influence of Roman Christianity, and was itself adapted from the Greek alphabet, which was adapted from the Phoenician. At best, we would need to discard all evolution of European spoken languages, and examine the sounds of Classical Latin 2000 years ago, when that alphabet last changed substantially.

Do languages which are written with syllabaries or logographies rather than alphabets evolve to use fewer distinct syllables?

Your question discusses the opposite relationship, that writing influences speech. The clearest evidence for this would not be difference between languages, but difference over time - if a language was originally unwritten, or written using an alphabet, and then began to be written with a syllabary, our hypothesis would suggest that it would start to lose distinct syllables over time.

One broad reason to be skeptical of this hypothesis is that until fairly recently, the number of users of most spoken languages vastly out-numbered the users of its written form. Any influence would presumably need to first take root in a literate elite, then supplant the dialects used by less literate sections of society.

We can also look again to the relationship of English to the Latin script. Modern English has 20 to 30 distinct vowel sounds, but uses a writing system with only 5. Although some are reasonably consistently represented by digraphs like "ee" and "oo", others are simply ignored by the spelling - notably the unstressed "schwa", which is actually one of the most common vowel sounds in spoken English. The ability to distinguish written sounds doesn't seem to be a pre-requisite for distinguishing spoken sounds.