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Japanese writing system basics

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Re: Japanese writing system basics

#311

Post by muddyrivers »

nbouscal wrote: post #270
imron wrote: post #173

In Chinese 食 is pronounced shí. As someone who speaks Chinese, I got a chuckle out of reading 'put your favorite snack in your 口 and 食t it!' due to the association in my mind of that character and its Chinese pronunciation, immediately followed by a 't'.

Standard Mandarin (especially Beijing dialect) pronunciation of shí is much closer to the American pronunciation of "sure"†, though, so shít would be pronounced more like "shirt". (Sorry to ruin the joke.) †IPA something like this: /ʃɝ/

A technical correction. In Mandarin, shí is pronounced very close to the sound of "shi" in ship and "shee" in sheep. You are right that it sounds close to "sure" when it is pronounced by people with strong Beijing dialect.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#312

Post by andrezsanchez »

w1ntermute wrote: post #145
ggreer wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had Chinese colleagues who, when asked to write a word they'd just used in a sentence, were simply unable to. At first I thought they were playing a joke on me. But nope, they'd just forgotten the appropriate hanzi, and they couldn't even hazard a guess. It's a totally different failure mode than imperfectly-phonetic languages like English.

From Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [0]: > I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends…

To be fair, you can also "come up with something" in Chinese. Since there aren't all that many sounds, you can write in generic characters for the sound of the word that you can't remember.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#313

Post by pmontra »

FabHK wrote: post #283
cthalupa wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Phonetic languages allow you to write out a misspelled word, which readers can understand (or autocorrect can fix). You can certainly write things out in kana. When I was more serious about studying Japanese, I knew less than 1000 kanji, but had a vocabulary several times that size, and would at times write out the word I meant in hiragana. And if we're counting autocorrect, your IME is going to take that hiragana a…

You cannot write things out in Kana in Chinese. As such, GP's point against logographic writing systems stands, notwithstanding mixed writing systems such as Japanese. Even without autocorrect, you can write a word in English such that most people would understand. Of course, in a logographic system you'd just write a homophone (which is what people actually do, write a simpler word pronounced the same). As for looki…

Some upper and lower case letters have no clear resemblance, see Aa Rr Gg Nn, so one has to learn 52 symbols. Add other 52 symbols for script, if you have to. Then in the case of English learn how to pronounce or spell words, because in some cases there are no rules (why ocean and not oshean? Because of derivation from Greek, still...)

Anyway, any alphabet is better than Chinese characters.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#314

Post by andrezsanchez »

I think it would be interesting if there were a Latin equivalent of Chinese characters. Different roots could be represented as different characters, some could be used for each of the suffixes like "ly", "tion", etc., and the characters would be joined together to create words like in Chinese.

Different Romantic languages could be represented this way. In the same way that Mandarin and Cantonese use the similar character sets with different pronunciations, and with some characters specific to each one, different languages that have Latin roots would have a few of their own characters specific to their own language, but mostly drawing from the Latin pool.

The pronunciation for each would have to be memorized of course.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#315

Post by anatoly »

x3al wrote: post #233
etatoby wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What is the advantage of using a different symbol for each word, that offsets the huge disadvantages of having to learn and remember a different symbol for each word? Especially considering that the spoken language already distinguishes between all possible words through pronunciation (and context in the case of homophones.)

There are way too much homophones and you don't always have the luxury of the context. Learning a symbol for each root (not word!) is not that bad, English spelling is almost as bad, actually. Spoken language is quite limited compared to written Japanese.

Do Japanese audiobooks exist?

Assuming yes, do their users have significant problems understanding the written text when pronounced in an audiobook? Are there well-known conventions or shortcuts or explanations that audiobook readers insert into their speech to signal the correct meaning of the word?

Do Japanese audiobooks provide evidence for or against the idea that doing away with kanji in writing would not harm understanding significantly?

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#316

Post by bhaak »

jacobolus wrote: post #62
gizmo686 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have studied Japanese, and still think that a logographic writing system was a mistake. Consider the time and effort it takes for native speakers to become literate. I also think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, which does not contain any sounds that do not have an obvious equivalent in English, and even if it did, we could always repurpose a character or sequence of characters for that so…

> I also do not think that the Latin alphabet could be easily used for Japanese, [...] You stuck an extra “do not” in your sentence * * * As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it. Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler…

> As far as alphabets go, the Phoenician/Greek/Etruscan/Latin alphabet is pretty ad hoc and mediocre. But hey, it’s what we know. At this point, I think we’re stuck with it.

You mix the whole development line of that Latin alphabet into one dismissive argument. I see lots of difference between the Phoenician and the Latin alphabet and FWIW, the Latin alphabet is quite versatile as its wide application shows.

It wonder what do you consider mediocre about them?

> Similar story for modern Hindu/Arabic/European numeral glyphs. Learning arithmetic would be noticeably simpler if the glyphs expressed some of the symmetries of the number system. Alas.

I don't think learning arithmetic would be much simpler with other numerals. Even the Romans could do it and they had one of the worst possible numerical systems.

I find our numerals quite fine. My daughter was recognizing numbers before she turned 2. There is some mnemonic to the first four (1 line, 2 corners on the left, 3 corners on the left, 4 corners overall) and most are quite distinct from our Latin letters. 6 and 9 are annoyingly symmetrical of each other, though.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#317

Post by prewett »

chewxy wrote: post #175
prewett wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to look a bit to figure out how you got "qi" from a word pronounced "chi". 契, the right part of the character is pronounced qi4, as is the character 氣, which does have spiritual meanings. 契, however, has no such meaning (according to wiktionary), so I assume this is another one of those Chinese superstitious puns. Is a preference for 食 a Taiwanese thing? All the mainland Chinese people I've ever heard say 吃.

There was a linguistic shift to prefer 吃. I would say it probably happened in the Cultural Revolution. In Cantonese 食 is pronounced "sek", and is regularly used - "sek fan" as in "eat rice". Since HK was quite insulated from the Cultural Revolution, and evidence from older texts that use 食 all the time (喫 was not really used IINM), it would not be amiss to say that the development to prefer 吃 is quite new. Hence in m…

I learned Japanese first, and it bothered me that 食 wasn't "eat" in Chinese. I'm glad to know to know the history!

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#318

Post by Zakiazigazi »

fenomas wrote: post #227
etatoby wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? What is the advantage of using a different symbol for each word, that offsets the huge disadvantages of having to learn and remember a different symbol for each word? Especially considering that the spoken language already distinguishes between all possible words through pronunciation (and context in the case of homophones.)

It's hard to explain. In English, spelling, pronunciation, and meaning are all more or less interrelated, right? In Japanese, writing (kanji) correlates to pronunciation and to meaning, but pronunciation and meaning are mostly unrelated to each other. Kanji is what disambiguates them. So, obviously learning 1000 kanji isn't easy. But doing that is what makes it possible to learn 100,000+ words whose pronunciations an…

A lot of people think that and personally as someone fluent in Japanese (as a second, well rather something like fourth, language) I also sort of feel the same way. However if you look at it without the learned biases, there is a great example where a country with fairly similar language in terms of grammar and sounds that had used to use chinese characters switched to a phonetic alphabet and are not noticeably worse off for it: Korea.

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#319

Post by cheiVia0 »

throwanem wrote: post #267
ju-st wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interpret that character as "three boxes" so "goods" is a very intuitive translation :)

Yeah, I'm not sure what world you have to live in for "three-mouthed monster" to be a more obvious meaning for that glyph than "stacked crates". But I think I might like to visit.

I see you haven't gotten to the 4th paragraph of TFA...

"口" = mouth, not crate

"品" is a stack of mouth characters

Re: Japanese writing system basics

#320

Post by prewett »

FabHK wrote: post #279
prewett wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Japanese simplifications were pretty good, but a lot of the Communist ones are aesthetically ruinous. 车东气门 have none of the symmetry that 車東氣門 have. 气 doesn't even have its center of mass over its base of support, although at least in this case it is six strokes less. The Japanese simplifications seem to have kept the artistic flavor.

Agreed. Those simplifications appear to have been designed purely for reduction of stroke count (that is, making it faster to write by hand), not for simplification in the sense of making it more simple, logical, and consistent. (As a matter of fact, that "simplification" introduced further inconsistencies, in that certain radicals were written differently when part of a character, while the traditional writing maint…

Yeah, and the radicals sure got uglified. I calmed down a bit when I found that apparently a lot of the simplifications where just officializing shortcuts people were already taking. Kind of like spelling "with" as "w/", I'm guessing.
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