The fact of India's strong math skew likely needs explaining in light of your theory. Most (all?) of the subcontinent's writing systems are alphabetic. One possible explanation might be the diversity of languages, and students taking the test in languages that they speak less regularly. Or it could just be that the philosophy of education is just very different there from East Asia. Any thoughts on that? Regardless of the explanation, it's a clever theory and I'm always down for fanboying over Hangul.
Yeah, I think linguistic diversity could cause also cause quantitative tilt. Even within Europe you see that moving from west to east where there are many (often difficult and quite distinct) languages there is less verbal tilt. Think Hungarian, Albanian, Bulgarian, etc. In some of the eastern countries that are fairly verbal the people are speaking two languages that are almost mutually intelligible (e.g., Ukrainian and Russian). Kazakhstan's tilt would also be worth looking into, but I know there is some tension between the use of Russian and Kazakh these days. Not sure what students are taking the exam in.
I didn’t even register the extreme tilt towards math in Kazakhstan. One explanation for that may be that they’re switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. I don’t know which script the test was administered in, but if students had to take it in a different alphabet than they’re used to, it could account for a lower than expected verbal score.
1.) East Asian's appear have significantly higher nonverbal IQ scores vs verbal scores. And I believe this spread is true of Koreans and Japanese too. This being so, it seems to me that the real question is why Korean and Japanese scores skew the way they do; Chinese scores are anomalous in the region, but are consistent with the ability profiles of East Asians.
2.) From a historical standpoint, the imperial examination was a powerful filter. I would guess that the lineages most likely to survive and proliferate are those that were able to consistently produce people who could pass the exam. That being so, it's somewhat surprising that China has a nonverbal skew. The imperial exam was almost entirely a test of verbal reasoning -- of one's ability to master difficult Confucian literary works.
There's no way that #2 would impact anything more than a tiny proportion of the population. Historical data is poor,but it seems infeasible that literacy would have been more than single digit, given it was only 20% or so at the turn of the twentieth century.
Sure, but that tiny proportion of the population seems like it would be disproportionately make up the ancestors of today’s Chinese? I’d analogize here to Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms”.
"Notably, while Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are related languages,"
Who told you this?! I really don't mean to be rude, but this is extremely wrong! They share some vocabulary due to borrowing, but they are NOT related in the way English and French are. In the case of Chinese and the other two, it's not even close!
Yes, I should have been more precise. Korean and Japanese have very similar grammar from what I understand, and Chinese supplies a lot of vocabulary to both. "Some vocabulary" might sell short the influence, though. It's up to more than half that derives from Chinese for both Korean and Japanese. It might not always be obvious or as relevant for the most common words.
I think the bigger point is that I don't see anything unique to Chinese or Japanese that would make reading them inherently much harder than Korean. Chinese actually has easier grammar than Japanese and Korean from what I have been told.
The fact of India's strong math skew likely needs explaining in light of your theory. Most (all?) of the subcontinent's writing systems are alphabetic. One possible explanation might be the diversity of languages, and students taking the test in languages that they speak less regularly. Or it could just be that the philosophy of education is just very different there from East Asia. Any thoughts on that? Regardless of the explanation, it's a clever theory and I'm always down for fanboying over Hangul.
Yeah, I think linguistic diversity could cause also cause quantitative tilt. Even within Europe you see that moving from west to east where there are many (often difficult and quite distinct) languages there is less verbal tilt. Think Hungarian, Albanian, Bulgarian, etc. In some of the eastern countries that are fairly verbal the people are speaking two languages that are almost mutually intelligible (e.g., Ukrainian and Russian). Kazakhstan's tilt would also be worth looking into, but I know there is some tension between the use of Russian and Kazakh these days. Not sure what students are taking the exam in.
Except that Romanians and Hungarians have the lowest rates of multilingualism in Europe.
https://www.europeandatajournalism.eu/cp_data_news/in-europe-speaking-more-than-one-language-is-still-a-privilege/
I didn’t even register the extreme tilt towards math in Kazakhstan. One explanation for that may be that they’re switching from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. I don’t know which script the test was administered in, but if students had to take it in a different alphabet than they’re used to, it could account for a lower than expected verbal score.
India's writing systems are mostly abugidas, not alphabets
No children are taking the exam in a language they are not used to...that would be very silly.
Great post.
Two things:
1.) East Asian's appear have significantly higher nonverbal IQ scores vs verbal scores. And I believe this spread is true of Koreans and Japanese too. This being so, it seems to me that the real question is why Korean and Japanese scores skew the way they do; Chinese scores are anomalous in the region, but are consistent with the ability profiles of East Asians.
2.) From a historical standpoint, the imperial examination was a powerful filter. I would guess that the lineages most likely to survive and proliferate are those that were able to consistently produce people who could pass the exam. That being so, it's somewhat surprising that China has a nonverbal skew. The imperial exam was almost entirely a test of verbal reasoning -- of one's ability to master difficult Confucian literary works.
There's no way that #2 would impact anything more than a tiny proportion of the population. Historical data is poor,but it seems infeasible that literacy would have been more than single digit, given it was only 20% or so at the turn of the twentieth century.
Sure, but that tiny proportion of the population seems like it would be disproportionately make up the ancestors of today’s Chinese? I’d analogize here to Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms”.
"Notably, while Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are related languages,"
Who told you this?! I really don't mean to be rude, but this is extremely wrong! They share some vocabulary due to borrowing, but they are NOT related in the way English and French are. In the case of Chinese and the other two, it's not even close!
Yes, I should have been more precise. Korean and Japanese have very similar grammar from what I understand, and Chinese supplies a lot of vocabulary to both. "Some vocabulary" might sell short the influence, though. It's up to more than half that derives from Chinese for both Korean and Japanese. It might not always be obvious or as relevant for the most common words.
I think the bigger point is that I don't see anything unique to Chinese or Japanese that would make reading them inherently much harder than Korean. Chinese actually has easier grammar than Japanese and Korean from what I have been told.
Will update accordingly.