훈鬼骨티 ツ한字 — Peacemaking ‘twixt Signified & Signifier

Huoonty Hantze, an etymological hybrid logographic hangul script to provide a universal framework for the destratification of East Asian scripts.

人人 生而 自由﹐째土(在) 尊吅얀(嚴) わ헤(和) 木뛴(權)利 上 一律 平竹등(等)。他イ믄(們) 貝푸(賦)有 王리(理)性 わ헤 良心﹐並 ♡잉(應) 以 兄弟 門관イ시(關係) の 精神 互相 對彳대(待)。

Disclaimer: I’m not a dictator., but I might’ve been a pretty cool one… 窝是 子尘。窝 숴斤イ줘(所做) の 一체刀(切)、皆 ゐ ウ딩羊이(定義) 自 窝、イ단(但) 窝 其實 冇 一个 囗구ウ딩(固定) の 身イ펀(份)。窝 シ커(渴)求 戊청(成) ゐ 一个 木가이(概)念、从 辵저黑뎬(這點) 來言숴(說)、窝是 一名 分례衣(裂)性シ랑(浪)漫者。窝 來自 추夂几추夂几(處處)、や 來 自 無추夂几(處)。尸빙(屏)息以彳다이(待) 囗바(吧)、因ゐ 窝 會 シ샤오𣏟산(消散) 於 無形! 窝 就是 一土창(場) 矢두안足루(短路)!

TLDR BUTTON: TAKE ME STRAIGHT TO THE PRAXIS

[Updated 9/19/25]

Read in Mao’s Mandarin / 華語翻譯

the Mandaring of Chinese languages

Chinese identity is a lie. Ontologically, 普通話 (Mandarin recontextualized to be “ordinary speech” i.e “Chinese”) as a world encompassing phenomenon can be understood as a cultural genocide. Inb4 “communism bad”, know it was much outwardly so under CIA-funding. During the White Terror in Taiwan under Kuomintang’s dictatorship, Mandarin erased all native traces of Hokkien/Hakka by military force. Schools were literally policed; native land was strategically handed to mainland settlers to infiltrate families; and yeah just torture the Taiwanese Opera singers to be sure. Full transparency: I’ll get into it later but the blood that runs through my veins is mostly Hakka/Hokkien so I may be biased. (If you’re curious an exploration of this non-identity is somewhat reflected in my République of Twinknation Flag.)

For context as to how fast Mandarin took over the world, not even Mao Zedong knew Mandarin & this was around 1950. He spoke Hunanese. Despite me saying all of this I completely understand what they were going for. Back then literacy seemed impossible, 漢字 (Chinese characters) are infamously hard to learn even today after standardization & back then most people couldn’t read or write. I don’t think China could be the economic powerhouse it is today without the forced erasure of all the other countless languages for a universal united lingua franca. Spoken Mandarin is relatively simple compared to the others and the idea of teaching children Literary Chinese (which was pretty much completely separate from everyday speech) is unthinkable.

It’s pretty hard to imagine today but back in the day when all the language reforms were taking place it was such a big problem that even after having created simplified Chinese to help make writing easier, Mao was still convinced 漢字 as a whole needed to go “eventually” — This apparently only never came to fruition because Stalin talked him out of it. So that’s how we got “Chinese” as we know it today! Still the most difficult script for anyone anywhere to learn, even for Chinese people.

Why is it so difficult?

If you didn’t know already, this is because the writing has little to no reliable correlation with how the words are pronounced. There are many types of characters, some are just picograms, but most also have a phonetic component (聲旁) alongside them. There are many examples where this system works relatively predictably like with 馬s (horse) there’s 嗎 (indicating question) , 媽 (mum) , 碼 (weight) , 罵 (to scold) which are all pronounced “ma”; or 門s (door) 們 (indicating plural) , 悶 (bored) , 捫 (cover) all pronounced “men”. But more often than not these phonemes were bought over from middle Chinese and are now outdated or very abstract (like 旁 “pang” uses 方 “fang” as the phonetic component, and 韓 “han” uses 倝 “gan” which itself uses an ancient form of 偃 “yan” which coincidentally also used 方 “pang”) and even in the rare cases it works as it’s supposed to it can still be confusing to denote which component is the phoneme or if there is any at all. Like try to guess how these are pronounced — 関 (to close shut) , 開 (to open) , 間 (a room) . From the previous example you’d think these are pronounced “men” too, but the 門 component in these are actually being used as a pictograph to represent ideas that involve doors. And coming back to 媽, knowing it has a female component 女 & a horse 馬 you’d be forgiven to think it has something to do with a female horse (the high school your mum jokes just write themselves) . Most Chinese characters are composed like this, and there is little signification to suggest which components are phonemes and which aren‘t.

Another issue arises when you realize Hanzi’s use extends beyond Mandarin. It’s used in Japanese, and used to be in Korean and Vietnamese. Hanzi was easily adopted by other languages because the characters hold meaning rather than pronunciation, like numbers. So making the phonemes updated to just fit Mandarin would be unfair to the other languages that have been using Hanzi long before Mandarin had even been established.

From this viewpoint we can start to empathize with Mao’s understanding of 漢字 being elitist counterrevolutionary nonsense., And… Well he’d be completely right.. but before we continue uhh,, let’s have a word with the elitists! There is much to be said about the signifying nature of it in comparison to the dissolution of meaning in purely phonetic systems.

漢字 as resistance against the imperial significating degloving machine

鬼모シ파(魔法) 三角 の 三辵변(邊) —— 聲音-耳팅(聽)覺、圖イ샹(像)-身骨티(體)、目睛-疒퉁(痛)艸쿠(苦) —— 째土(在) 窩イ믄(們) 看來, 似乎 木꼬우(構)戊청(成)了 一禾쫑(種) 意涵 の 秩广쉬(序), 一个 殘酉쿠(酷) の 骨티(體)系。째土(在)此, 言츠言위(詞語) 基本 具有 も지(指)禾칭(稱) 工能, イ단(但) 圖イ상(像) 本身 與 被 も지(指)禾칭(稱) の 物結合, 木꼬우(構)戊청(成)了 一个 竹푸(符)號, 而 目睛 則 째土(在) 兩者 之門쩬(間) 游移, 从 一者 の 可見性 中 提取 わ(和) 衡量 另一者 の 疒퉁艸쿠(痛苦)。

The magic triangle with its three sides—voice-audition, graphism-body, eye-pain—thus seems to us to be an order of connotation, a system of cruelty where the word has an essentially designating function, but where the graphism itself constitutes a sign in conjunction with the thing designated, and where the eye goes from one to the other, extracting and measuring the visibility of the one against the pain of the other.

In Anti-Œdipus, Deleuze and Guattari describe a deconstruction of orthography in that each process involved in creating a writing system is in conflict with each other. Earlier he talks about the development of phonetic symbols and how it requires two separate cultures / languages for one to meet up and misinterpret them. As it turns out it’s easier to communicate a symbol as a sound than a concept,,.

There, however, as elsewhere, an irreducible exteriority of conquest asserts itself. For if language itself does not presuppose conquest, the leveling operations (les operations de rabattement) that constitute written language indeed presuppose two inscriptions that do not speak the same language: two languages (langages), one of masters, the other of slaves. Jean Nougayrol describes just such a situation: “For the Sumerians, [a given sign] is water; the Sumerians read this sign a, which signifies water in Sumerian. An Akkadian comes along and asks his Sumerian master: what is this sign? The Sumerian replies: that’s a. The Akkadian takes this sign for a, and on this point there is no longer any relationship between the sign and water, which in Akkadian is called mu. . . . I believe that the presence of the Akkadians determined the phoneticization of the writing system . . . and that the contact of two peoples is almost necessary before the spark of a new writing can spring forth.” One cannot better show how an operation of biunivocalization organizes itself around a despotic signifier, so that a phonetic and alphabetical chain flows from it. Alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by illiterates.

For a phrase as nonsensical as “Alphabetical writing is not for illiterates, but by illiterates” there are a surprising bulk of cases we can study in the real world. One that came to mind was with Nüshu 女書 (girl writing), which emerged at a time when women were blocked off from education. With the little they knew, they created their own phonetic writing system based on Chinese characters. This happened in two isolated instances between China and Japan, where japanese 女手 eventually became hiragana.

It goes by way of illiterates, those unconscious workers. The signifier implies a language that overcodes another language, while the other language is completely coded into phonetic elements. And if the unconscious in fact includes the topical order of a double inscription, it is not structured like one language, but like two. The signifier does not appear to keep its promise, which is to give us access to a modern and functional understanding of language. The imperialism of the signifier does not take us beyond the question, “What does it mean?”; it is content to bar the question in advance, to render all the answers insufficient by relegating them to the status of a simple signified. It challenges exegesis in the name of recitation, pure textuality, and superior “scientificity” (scientificite). Like the young palace dogs too quick to drink the verse water, and who never tire of crying: The signifier, you have not reached the signifier, you are still at the level of the signifieds! The signifier is the only thing that gladdens their hearts. But this master signifier remains what it was in ages past, a transcendent stock that distributes lack to all the elements of the chain, something in common for a common absence, the authority that channels all the breaks-flows into one and the same locus of one and the same cleavage: the detached object, the phallus-and-castration, the bar that delivers over all the depressive subjects to the great paranoiac king. O signifier, terrible archaism of the despot where they still look for the empty tomb, the dead father, and the mystery of the name! And perhaps that is what incites the anger of certain linguists against Lacan, no less than the enthusiasm of his followers: the vigor and the serenity with which Lacan accompanies the signifier back to its source, to its veritable origin, the despotic age, and erects an infernal machine that welds desire to the Law, because, everything considered—so Lacan thinks—this is indeed the form in which the signifier is in agreement with the unconscious, and the form in which it produces effects of the signified in the unconscious.* The signifier as the repressing representation, and the new displaced represented that it induces, the famous metaphors and metonymy—all of that constitutes the overcoding and deterritorialized despotic machine.

The signifier (phonetic abstractions of symbols) “overcoding” the signified (pictographic representations of concepts) is described as “imperial” or like violent structuralist arbitrary rule-making and creates this kind of atmosphere where the meaning of a fundamentally meaningless string of letters is policed? As if by law, only to be redirected to the original “signified” (the actual concept)., which now, in extension, has become an “empty tomb”. It’s just as easy to argue that writing can never be a real representation of anything and language through speech is more natural and has been around for much longer. That it’s a core part of what makes us human, and so phonetic characters are not any more arbitrary than pictographic writing outside of their made up concept of what graphism is. But i think what they care about is moving away from representation entirely to a model of “production”. Like with Chinese characters there are ones that “produce” its represented effect - there are a lot especially ones with the 心 heart component:

• 忘 (forget/neglect) has the component meaning “lost” above it
• 忍 (endure/hard-heartedness) has a blade’s edge
• 愁 sorrow has autumn, 秋 autumn itself being a combination of a crop and a fire

They are images that produce or conjure up thought directly. Outside of 漢字, I think emojis are a decent foil to understand the concept by,, as in the emoji doesn’t require a cultural authority to be understood, it just is. Universally. And so it is able to transcend a single culture or state as long as it is intuitive or legible enough. Chinese characters do the same in a more abstract form, which is why so many countries used to use classical chinese to communicate with each other and write despite their languages coming from completely different families. Because Chinese pictograms are derived from literally thousands of years of carving and handwriting, for the “production” side of things to work for you to interpret it there still has to be an “authority” deciding a certain abstract stroke represents a concept. An emoji doesn’t really have this problem - it exists in a “perfect” digital form. In this process of mistranslation, many many chinese characters have been completely divorced from the meaning of the original pictogram (such as 我 which I will get to in a minute). Part of this project is to amend this in some way. D&G does not describe the problem with phonetic writing as literally signification itself, but the way in which phonetization degloves the “sign” to hang up the skin.

With this, D&G invites us to imagine how an “A-signifying” orthographic system might look.

Why hasn’t 漢字 been signified like the rest of the world?

Are the big brained Chinese just on a higher plane of literacy as Deleuze implies? With reference my first few paragraphs the answer is a resounding No. I like to imagine what the conversation between Mao and Stalin could have gone. Despite it all, there’s a reason its so hard to imagine Mandarin without 漢字. The first issue is that Mandarin has very little phonemes at all — 29 while English has 44. The fact that Mandarin uses very short words oftentimes just containing 1 syllable, switching to a phonetic system would make many words very hard to distinguish from one another. In English we have the buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo debaucle but in Chinese we have this monstrosity of words which are all pronounced “shi”:

Cooking

In my eyes the obvious solution is to combine the advantages of a phonetic system and a logographic system together. Replacing all the inconsistent phonetic compounds with an actual alphabet while keeping all the beautiful pictograms on the side. I decided to use Hangul to help with this because it’s another script that is arranged into blocks (and not just because it’s really cool) .

It’s really simple, I just had to repurpose and adjust the Korean Hangul system to fit the phonemes of Mandarin.

Note that:

• The final -i is transliterated as 이 (i) in most cases (e.g., li -> 리). However, after the initials z, c, s, zh, ch, sh, r, it is pronounced as a syllabic consonant and is written as 으 (eu). For example, shi -> 스, zi -> 쯔.
• Korean, much like the southern Chinese accents I grew up with, does not distinguish between the dental (z, c, s), retroflex (zh, ch, sh), and alveolo-palatal (j, q, x) initials, so here they are merged.
• It’s kind of whatever. Whatever phonetic system you use to replace Chinese components will be more coherent than the reality of the situation.
• You can use existing hangul-hanja transliterations if they fit into one block better and they sound similar enough.

The hard part is figuring out which components in every character were phonetic. I haven’t been alive for all of ancient Chinese history so for this I had to check every character in the Yellowbridge dictionary or Wiktionary. This can be a really bleh-ifying process but until LLMs replace us all I just have to do it manually. The final step is to just construct the hangul and replace it with the phonetic component!

Because my idea for this was to make Chinese Characters immune to any phonetic changes that will come with time, and to make it more easily adaptable to any language that uses Hanzi, I call it 훈鬼骨티 ツ한字 “Huoonty Hantze.” 魂 “hun” meaning spirit/immortal, which ironically has an outdated phoneme itself (云 now pronounced “yun”) .

This is the result of my experiment with Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, used to demonstrate scripts on Omniglot . “人人生而自由﹐在尊嚴和權利上一律平等。他們賦有理性和良心﹐並應以兄弟關係的精神互相對待。” and chapter 25 from the Tao Te Ching

Kaomojifying

Digitizing an idea like this (accelerationist huoontification, if you will) would prove to be difficult but I still have a couple of ideas. I could either make a font which has a very limited use case and would take a lifetime to create (still might do it anyway & if I do I’ll document some cool etymology findings), or use a system that makes use of existing hangul unicodes besides the Chinese component, like 應 “yin” as written above could be represented by 인♡ instead of in one block… Spaces, like in korean, can be reintroduced to separate words. In a recent study involving Mandarin Chinese, adding spaces to separate words helped participants read faster anyway. Of course this leaves out the fact that there is still debate on what a word even is in this context. It would also have the potential to make certain characters less dense and more readable when made smaller. As much as I’m team traditional characters (because the abstraction of simplified chinese has a habit of stepping into signifying territory) they can be quite hard to read as embedded bold subtitles in 360p.

This deconstruction of characters also gives way to a whole new way of inventing words and neologisms in the modern era, bringing back creativity from territorial state standardization. For example with 散 (san / sam) the Shuowen dictionary declares it to be a phono-semantic compound with a semantic 肉 + phonetic 𢽳, but the ways in which characters have been used, adapted and interpreted since 2000BC paints a much more nuanced picture. The 肉 meat compound simplified to 月 is a reference to its original meaning - to kill or to clear out vegetation, but today that interpretation has been lost entirely. A semantic interpretation of the “phonetic” components 𢽳 has overcoded it, 𣏟 bamboo and 攴 knock to mean messy or scattered. This what makes attempting to identify the leftover appendix component so difficult - because for 99.9% of writing there was no central authority at all. The signified diagram itself produces meaning. So what are the leftovers here? 龷 is a component that has become an abstracted form with various meanings depending on the character. It used to be used as a simplification of a flood 𡿧 but here it actually represents the forest 林 or bamboo 𣏟, and we don’t need 肉 anymore, so a Huoontified version might look like 𢽳산 or 𣏟산. When we uncover abstracted components or use archaic characters, we can add a Huoonty block just for clarification. .

There are other characters like 性 (nature / disposition) where the now outdated phonetic component used in Old Chinese 生 (life) very clearly works as a pun for its semantic meaning today. Even when less obvious, phonetic components can become ingrained as semantic in the subconscious. For instance, 們 in 我們 as in “we” contains the door 門 I mentioned earlier. It is clear to everyone that the function of this component is phonetic, but to me, when I think of this door in context to the word, an image of an open house inviting multiple people comes to mind, giving it semantic meaning. As we have observed, when we use pictograms, the intended meaning strays, and it seems to do so in different ways to everyone. By Huoontifying we can all become artists again and draw our own landscapes.

Some components look quite lonely on their own and have weird gaps that can be confused for spacings, so we can borrow some look-alikes from wherever we can find them, especially if the component lacks unicode support or has no “full” version at all. In the case that the “full” character (like 水) is still widely used on it’s own, a look-alike to represent the component provides more clarity:

• 氵 = シ for 水 or ツ for 川
• 辶 = え / 辵 (Not widely used anymore so I use the full component)
• 宀 = ウ / 𰃦 (Barely supported by Unicode)
• 忄 = ♡ for 心
• 亻 = イ for 人
• 艹 = 艸
• 扌 = も for 手

and so on…

The problem with Huoontifying characters too methodologically is that characters that are pronounced the same AND share the same semantic component will basically be merged. An example of this would be the 漢 (Han chinese) diagram in 漢字 (Hanzi) itself. When Huoontified like this: シ한 it could very easily be confused with 汗 (sweat) because 干 like 𦰩 are both Old Chinese phonetic elements (well, kind of. This is up for debate. There’s an interpretation that involves 𦰩 being a pictogram involving a human sacrifice being burned at the stake in hopes of rain, but maybe that’s a topic for another day). We can amend this by looking closer at the etymology of each character. 汗’s シ obviously indicates drops of water, but why is there a シ in the character for Han Chinese people? Are they uh… Wet? No. The 漢 actually refers to the Han River. The name passed on to the Han dynasty which then passed on to a general demographic of people and then to refer to an entire system of writing. Knowing this, we can use the component for river 川 / 巛 instead of the one for water 水. Luckily for us, the Japanese have already created a simplified version of 川 –> ツ! The smiley! And it happens to loop back into looking similar enough to 氵to make the connection. Therefore, ツ한 = 漢, シ한 = 汗. I want to make clear that the “point” of something like this is not to necessarily to “fix” anything, but to break conventions to find new ways to chain them together again.

The digitized version of the Declaration of Human Rights would look something like this:

人人 生而 自由﹐째土 尊吅얀 わ헤 木뛴利 上 一律 平竹등。他イ믄 貝푸有 王리性 わ헤 良心﹐並 ♡잉 以 兄弟 門관イ시 の 精神 互相 對ㄔ대。

We can go further and experiment with a whole set of new interpretations of characters, for instance:

窝/窩 - temperamental 我

ï like using 窝/窩 in place of 我 (meaning I or me) b∵c it lꙭks more like a person. w/ ϑ’simplified 窝 it lꙭks like a face with a ૮ ,◕ ﻌ ◕ა-type nose and a mustache. ϑ’traditional character 窩 can simultaneously be used to express discontent, ϑa̍ňk̍s to the top part resembling ϑe 囧 agony emoticon… just except ϑeyԙ wearing a lil hat 宀. For example:

• 窩餓死了！(ïm starving 囧)
• 窝覺得牛肉麵最好吃の~ (ï ϑink beef noodle soup tastes ϑ’best :3)
• 窩想你 (ï miss ᴜ̊ 囧)
• 窝の丈夫好可愛喔 (my husbant sou cute :3)
• 窩ゐ你瘋了 (ᴜ̊ drive me crazy 囧)
• 窝ゐ你瘋了 (ᴜ̊ drive me crazy :3)

The actual meaning of 窝 is a bird’s nest, composed of semantic 穴 (empty) and Old Chinese phonetic 呙 (skull). If we take both components literally, it definitely does sound and feel like me… head empty. If we want to make it more quirky XD coded, iṋ writing we could replace ϑ’bottom bit 咼 with a 骨 body and maybe add a 心 heart component, referencing ϑ’bodymind or body without organs. HereꝬ what it wůld lꙭk like:

If we try to Huoontify it we might get something like ♡囧骨, but for the most commonly used pronoun it’s probably too long. 我 iꝬ actually an ancient pictogram depicting a barrier of swords or someϑiŋ similar which iꝬ cool, ⅋ut ï find ϑ’adoption of it to use for ϑ’most common pronoun of all time as a phoneme quite uninspired. So non-bidenary of me. Characters like this, that are completely divorced from their original diagram’s form, seem to be the most open to adaption, because turning it into an A-signifying sign involves replacing the whole thing for anything we might want. 窩 iꝬ already used & recognised iṋ Chinese post-irony innerweb circles, where itꝬ used phonetically as a lazier more casual sounding 我 “wo” b∵c it lacks tone, so that’s my personal favorite. Woe is me 囧!

の - possessive 的

ϑis ones a raϑer low hanging fruit since itꝬ already widely used & even legally recognised in Hong Kong. From my understanding, itꝬ used as a 草書 cursive script rendering of the bopomo character ㄉ, ⅋ut it cůld also be ϑat の in Japanese iꝬ used ϑ’same way. 的 has been on̅e of ϑ’most baffling characters to people trying to understand chinese writing logograφically. ItꝬ used 99.9% of ϑ’ time as ϑ’possessive particle “de” ⅋ut b∵c it was adopted as a phoneme like 我, ϑ’character suggests it’s related to l̗i̗gh̖t̖ - 白 means white and 勺 iꝬ a ladle w/ someϑiŋ iṋ it. When used as “dì” (instead of de) meaning aim or clear, ϑis makes total sense, ⅋ut oϑerwise… nøt so muɕh.

草書

Speaking of 草書, ϑ’only cursive script characters we ԙ able to use remain culturally exclusive to Japan ϑa̍ňk̍s to ϑeir adoption of rushed characters as hirigana. Lets make use of what we have. We can’t be letting ϑem have all ϑ’fun, ï mean ゐ什麼日本人可以用草書字但是窩用の事後你們叫窩一个 traitor. 窩ふ要給窩の婆婆 ww2 flashbacks 但是やふ窩の錯 technology killed ϑ’whimsy out of writing. Ahem.. Anyway, ϑere are plenty (& even more if ᴜ̊ count ϑ’unicodes for 變體假名 hentaigana) ⅋ut ϑese seem to be ϑ’most legible:

• ゐ - 為
• ふ - 不
• わ - 和
• や - 也 (personally helps me distinguish 也 & 世)

Classical Chinese & Translingualism

Using classical chinese in place of more modern mandarin carries a higher degree of universality. So for example, with 我們 (meaning we) the plural marker 們 can be replaced with its more classical synonymn 等, this way it would be more consistent with Korean hanja (我等 - 무리), Japanese (我等 - われら), and various chinese “dialects” like Hakka (𠊎等 - ngai den). If we keep going with the pronouns theme we find that 你 (meaning you) can also be replaced with it’s literary form 尔, so 你們 -> 尔等. I don’t think 你 needs 人 particle at all… 等 on the other hand could definitely be confused with it’s other meanings. To deal with this we can give the 人 particle to it instead -> 𠎬. While 𠎬 exists in unicode, it’s pretty much completely unused so it might not display properly on some devices. On the subject of rare characters from the CJK Unified Ideographs Extensions, many of these are quite incredible. 𠀝 is an ideogrammic compound containing 下 (meaning down) above 上 (meaning above) and is a variant form of 空 (meaning void). 𠀊 is a blend of 大 (meaning big) and 小 (meaning small) from Wu. ï also just find that certain variations of characters just make more sense, like 髙 for 高 meaning high, b∵c it has a ladder.

Applications in other languages:

Like I hinted at earlier, this project was meant as a new way to see Hanzi beyond just it’s use in Mandarin. I’ve just used Mandarin prior to this section as an example because it’s currently the most wide-spread use of Hanzi. The same methodology could be used in all other languages that have a background in classical Chinese — Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese; or other Sinetic languages (aka Chinese dialects… it’s political & relates to the very first bit of this article) — Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc.

Korean and Vietnamese have stopped teaching Hanzi in their official education curriculum, both largely due to colonization. Japanese occupation of Korea caused Korean literacy to plummet, and post-occupation Korea grew to associate Hanzi with imperial Japan. Because of this Korean newspapers that exclusively featured Hangul became much more popular, and it eventually became the status quo. While in Vietnam, Christian missionaries and the French flat out ruined 𡨸喃 (Chữ Nôm) for everyone.

Apart from traditions sake, there could also be practical reasons. In Schwar’s video on Hanja , he explains how the sudden disappearance of Hanzi in Korean caused many words take the exact same written phonetic form, and how in official documents where specificity is crucial, Hanja is still used in conjunction with Hangul today, but much more rarely. It’s yet another great example of the signifier “overcoding” the signified. Many would think this to be purely thanks to its ease of use, but there was an organized attempt on Hanja’s life by the infamous dictator and anti-communist CIA puppet Park Chung Hee (朴正熙). In 1968 he enacted the 5-Year Plan for Hangul Exclusivity (한글專用 5個年 計劃案) which of course everyone remotely literate at the time hated. It banned Hanja in education and the military (which of course was his home base). In 2013 Hanja was brought back into schools, but the damage had already been done - There already an entire generation with extremely low Hanja literacy. Interviews in South Korea about Hanja normally cast “I hated ts in school but I can read my own name I guess” zoomers against “our writing has lost all colour and it’s over” boomers. Historically, Chinese characters are read out phonetically similar to kanji. In this arrangement, it’s one or the other. But all I’m asking is for Korean to bring semantic symbols back into their words while preserving the phonetic blocks in full. They’ve already figured out the use of spaces so they’re practially much further ahead than the rest of East Asia. .

Besides, just aesthetically I mean I can’t be the only one that thinks Korean mixed script looks awesome and wishes it could make a comeback.

As for Vietnam, a comeback for Chữ Nôm as it is would prove very difficult. The construction of their characters are quite complex, often adding phonetic components just like in Chinese writing. Because Chữ Nôm was never standardized, these phonetic components caused a lot of inconsistent variation. On top of that, much of Chữ Nôm specific characters are purely phonetic to express Vietnamese specific word extensions, and like I expressed earlier, this can cause confusion as to which components are pictographic and which are intended to be phonetic. Here’s Schwar again with his demonstration of how Vietnamese phonetic characters work in Chữ Nôm.

For both these countries, Huoonty Hantze could create a comfortable middle ground for them to reconnect with their forgotten culture and traditions. It would make Korean mixed script much much more accessible and easy to learn for Koreans, and standardize phonetic components for Vietnamese.

If you’ve been following along, you can probably imagine the possibilities of this being used for other Sinitic languages. Coincidentally Hokkien shares a very similar set of spoken phenomes as Korean , and also has a dire literacy rate. My grandma, who’s Hokkien is literally her native tongue, genuinely still believes to this day that there is “no way to write it.” Well she’s wrong, but yes it’s just as “difficult” as you’d expect (at least to me), having a similar clutter to Chữ Nôm:

Hokkien

I debated bringing up Hokkien at all because the discussion around it is complicated and is too focused on keeping Hokkien alive at all to care about reforming a traditional writing system, seeing as to how close it is from going extinct in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. My Grandma’s native language is Hokkien, and when asked how she writes it she simply replies “it can’t be” - for context, she grew up in Hainan between Japanese occupation and what I’m just going to call the Great Mandaring from now on for laughs. The same is true of my parents who are also Hokkien speakers. I’ve only ever met one person who can read Hokkien, and upon discovering she was literate in it I was just in total awe. The splitting image of the dodo in front of my eyes. She said she picked it up watching Hokkien dramas with subtitles on as a kid, on a now-defunct Taiwanese TV channel. In a desperate situation like this many people argue that the standardization of Hokkien using the latin alphabet, like Pe̍h-ōe-jī, might be ideal. I’d even make the case that Pe̍h-ōe-jī is too complicated and convoluted to the average English and Malay educated Malaysian. It’s still interesting to note that a Pe̍h-ōe-jī and Hanzi mixed writing system exists too, and it’s a lot more readable than Pe̍h-ōe-jī by itself to most Malaysian Chinese people, but they’d still just read it as Mandarin because the Hanzi unHuoontified fails to preserve Hokkien specific pronunciation. It looks like this:

翻 tńg 工，我 koh hap i tī Hotel ê 餐廳食西式 ê chái 起，我講 beh tò 去稅厝 ê 所在，i beh 送我去，我 kā 拒絕，mā 無 beh hō͘ i 知我 ê 地址、電話番，講若有緣就會 koh 再相會。I 講人海茫茫，我若無 tī hit 間跳舞、唱歌，i beh 去 toh 位 chhōe — 我？「就是 án-ni m̄-chiah 講是緣」，我嘴是 án-ni 應，心肝內知影 kap i 自細漢到這時 ê 牽連、綿纏無 hiah 簡單就煞。

The Hangul & Huoontification is so obvious I’m weary to even point it out.

On top of this, Hokkien phonemes are almost perfectly matched with Korean, with plenty of shared vocabulary and preserved middle Chinese pronunciations between them. Taiwanese linguist Hsu Tsao-te had already developed a Hangul based writing system for Hokkien by 1987 called 대끼깐뿐 Tâi-gí Gān-bûn. They proposed a mixed script to fill in gaps for uniquely Hokkien words with no (known) ties to literary Chinese, and even included tonal markers. But I think by Huoontifing it, we could do better.

First lets just steal that table from Wikipedia for reference:

Initials

Vowels

Coda endings are provided too but they’re probably unnecessary for a Huoonty Hokkien script

Using this, we can finally start Huoontifying. Because standard Mandarin pronunciation is assumed, we can be a bit more liberal with it. These are some common Malaysian Hokkien phrases just to get started:

Because of the sheer amount of phonetic blocks I choose to preserve here, it’d probably be more interesting to construct them into their own character blocks in writing like was originally proposed, but either way Hangul was quite literally designed to be put next to Hanzi and I’m just quite happy with it from a purely aesthetic standpoint

Be free my fellow linguacel~