Languages/Far East
While the Eorzean alphabet was gradually developing into that commonly used today, far to the east, the letters of Nagxia, Yanxia, and beyond were experiencing a much different evolution. This supplementary column will attempt to serve as an introduction to the peculiar script of the Far East.
Origins
The origins of Far Eastern script can be traced back almost two thousand Yanxian Characters years to a system of writing developed in ancient Yanxia. Unlike Eorzean, which employs letters (graphemes) to construct the literal representation of a word’s pronunciation, Yanxian was made up of logograms—thousands upon thousands of unique characters representing individual words or parts of words (morphemes). A principal drawback of this system, however, was that literacy was dependent on the memorization of these countless characters, a task that proved impossible for all but the educated elite.
From Yanxian script slowly evolved a series of syllabic letters that removed the meaning from simplified renderings of older characters, while retaining their pronunciations. These new “kana” could be arranged much like the graphemes of Eorzean to form sounds and words, effectively reducing the number of characters to be put to memory from over ten thousand to approximately one hundred, and opening the door for the majority of Othardians to learn their letters. [1]
References
- ↑ Encyclopaedia Eorzea: Volume II, page 43