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China’s tyranny of characters

economist.com

41–50 of 96 posts

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#41
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.

It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).

Although that is fairly mild, I've seen authors that butcher the language to indicate accents, making their work unreadable. Introduce the character, mention their accent, and move on with your life.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#42
>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state.

The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#43

> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languag…

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language.

> To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language.

The problem is that there is often a continuum of dialects where dialects that are near each other in this continuum are mutually intelligible, but those that are further apart are not. Where do you set the boundary between languages and dialects there.

P.S.: I'm not a linguist but because of this fact I would consider to define languages and dialects in a quite different way (the following concepts and description is my personal invention and not taken from some linguistics literature).

First we define the concept "speak-kind" as a generalization of language, dialect etc. (we use this word so that we aren't burdened by the fact that generally a dialect is defined to be some variety of a language etc.).

Now consider the graph where the vertices are the "speak-kind"s. This graph has an edge if two "speak-kind"s are mutually intelligible. Now we can define the concept of the "cont[inuum]-language": a "cont-language" is defined to be a connected component in this graph.

In this sense Bavarian and Dutch would be of the same "cont-language" (exercise: How would the connecting path in the graph probably look like?), though probably not mutually intelligible, but Hungarian and English would belong to a different "cont-language".

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#44

>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.

"reinforced", not "caused".

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#45

Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How yo…

The examples you gave are in Traditional Chinese.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#46
post #36

Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How yo…

Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.

That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#47
David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics.

Case in point:

Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic.

In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are.

As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census.

All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate.

So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it.

Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#48
post #39
post #24

This is only partially related, but I remember watching the news in the nineties and being dumbstruck on how Académie française policed the usage of language in public life. It was probably about use of Anglicisms in television or by politicians. I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.…

I learned about the Académie Française in French class (1990 or so). I thought they were guarding against anglicisms creeping in through teen slang -- "c'est too much" and that.

Also through vocabulary. 'Le weekend' (vs 'la fin de semaine') is the classic example, both of what l'academie does and how utterly (though heroically) doomed its efforts are.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#49
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as we can tell, all writing systems with independent origins started out as logographs that where stylized representations of the words, and then they started to change by adapting the rebus principle--basically, puns based on homonyms rather than their abstract representation. Egyptian, Sumerian, Mayan, and Japanese all made translations thence into syllabaries, whereas Chinese remained primarily logographic.…

Mayan is strictly CVC and CV? I always assumed that Chinese remained logographic because of the phonology's quick shift to CVC within a thousand years or so of the script's invention. Reading a lot of Baxter and Sagart's papers and monographs I've come to remember many of the Old Chinese reconstructions, but it would have been a nightmare for a farmer to learn.

My recollection is that Chinese remained logographic in large part because its language had a lot of homophones.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#50
post #35

It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, c…

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