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What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

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Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#111

Post by dheera »

microcolonel wrote: post #88
bgee wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

玉 was a variant of 王 (king)[0] thus king in walls (国), it's definitely NOT "only jade". [0]: https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh/%E7%8E%89

Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王. Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.

Unfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not derived.

Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are?

Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and "sandboarding"?

(As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical definitions.)

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#112

Post by spongepoc »

ilamont wrote: post #24

but some time after WWII (I don't remember the exact dates) Japan and Mainland China adopted a simplified form. I lived in Taiwan when I was younger and studied Mandarin there, and can read a limited vocabulary of traditional Chinese characters. I don't know enough about the history of simplified characters in Japan, but it doesn't seem to me that they are as widely used (with a few exceptions like 国) as traditional…

>Maybe someone knows the history?

You'll need to look up shinjitai, which consists of the simplified characters adopted in Japan, which are different to the ones used in China.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#114

Post by interestica »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #62
interestica wrote: post #22

Not mentioned in the article, Hangul (the Korean alphabet) was created in 1443 by the King. It was meant to aid literacy because of the preexisting incompatibility of Chinese characters and the Korean spoken language. It's actually surprisingly easy to learn - you could do it in a really short time. But, because the symbols (24 of them) represent sound only, you won't usually know what you're saying. Also, it was des…

To be exact, Hunminjeongeum (훈민정음) is what the King Sejong actually created. It is, in addition to the stated goal, thought to be the ultimate linguistic geekery by the King because one of the first books printed in Hunminjeongeum was Dongguk Jeongun [1], which set out to standardize the "orthodox" Chinese pronunciation in Korea. As always that didn't go well; the book does tell a lot about the Middle Korean despite…

Thank you for this! The wiki page I linked to definitely doesn't cover this aspect well (specifically, Hunminjeongeum) and I learned something new.

Of relevance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum_Haerye

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#115

Post by microcolonel »

dheera wrote: post #111
microcolonel wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why not just put 王 in the box rather than 玉? As far as I can tell the 王 glyph predates the invention of 玉, and the purpose of this new glyph was to distinguish 玉 from 王. Also isn't a land within borders still a better analogy for a country than a king within walls? Walls bounding a king seems more like a palace.

Unfortunately, vocabulary in languages are defined, not derived. Why isn't "business" a measure of how busy you are? Why isn't "waterboarding" analogous to "snowboarding" and "sandboarding"? (As an engineer I hate these peculiarities and I'm all for fixing them but the majority of the world tends to want to stick to the not-necessarily-logical definitions.)

Sure, I'm not saying everything has to make sense, but buddy here was claiming that 国 had cleaner etymology than 國, and to me it seems like one of these is indirect, and the other is very direct.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#116

Post by pmyteh »

jcranmer wrote: post #85
kazinator wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Subject object verb is the least of your problems if you're learning Japanese. Moreover, English supports that order: it's just not the canonical one. So it is not that alien. "Yoda speak" appears in sentences like "In god we trust". Japanese also deviates from its canonical order at times, by the way. For instance, sometimes the topic is extraposed to the end of the sentence, even after a supposedly sentence-ending…

"Yoda speak" is actually object-subject-verb, not subject-object-verb. (And the sentence "In god we trust" is also OSV order). Subject-object-verb is not really present in English even in archaisms or other weirder contexts.

It's not absolutely unknown: "With this ring, I thee wed" from the Book of Common Prayer marriage service seems to me to be SOV (with an adverbial bit in advance), though it's definitely archaic. I imagine it features a bit in poetry too.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#118

Post by philliphaydon »

stanrivers wrote: post #106
philliphaydon wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The Chinese pronunciations have changed. Some researchers have been known to use Korean pronunciations of words to help triangulate to what ancient Chinese characters would sound like (in combination with poems where you know what rhymes to expect etc)! Modern Korean isn’t a tonal language tho, the length of the vowel changes the meaning. So how does that work?

Korean does not have vowel length change the meaning, however Japanese does. Korean used to be tonal, and you are right it now longer is. Korean is used in combination with other data points to determine pronunciations. This works for old English plays, for example too. You can use poems that should rhyme, plus commentary from linguists at the time, to guess what certain words would sound like “back then”. Just sayin…

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_phonology

> In 2012, vowel length is reported almost completely neutralized in Korean, except for a very few older speakers of Seoul dialect,[14] for whom the distinctive vowel-length distinction is maintained only in the first syllable of a word.[13]

So it does have vowel length change meaning but it’s almost kinda died out like tones?

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#119

Post by porknubbins »

chillacy wrote: post #79
thrwyoilarticle wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Japanese students learned Korean even quicker than the Chinese students - in addition to using Chinese words, Japanese and Korean have the same grammar structure ( Subject Object Verb ) whereas Chinese and English are different (Subject Verb Object) I've never found this a convincing reason as to why a language is difficult to learn. Word order is learned once while vocabulary, speaking and listening need to be lear…

I think you're hinting at the fact that all language acquisition ultimately boils down to vocab acquisition for the long tail to mastery. As for why people complain about vocab, it's probably because the dropout rate for language learning is huge (look at the completion rates on duolingo or popularity of beginner resources vs intermmediate vs advanced). By the numbers I suspect most learners are struggling with gramm…

This has been my experience that in the long run everything else is a distant second to vocab acquisition. I think even within vocab the long tail you have to worry about is overwhelmingly nouns. Verbs are also numerous but can often be inferred from context, replaced by simpler verbs etc. 95% of the time when I’m watching tv news and can’t follow its because they use some finance, politics, medical terms etc that cannot be guessed. There are simply far more ideas/things in the world than anything else. Unfortunately the truth that language learning is a long slow grind to learn nouns doesn’t fit well with those who want to make it a more intellectual exercise or other pedagogical goals of academic settings.

Re: What Chinese looks, feels and sounds like when you're from Korea or Japan (2009)

#120

Post by munchbunny »

adrianN wrote: post #59
laurieg wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A different word order, any different word order, changes language learning from "learn a bunch of substitutions for my native language" to "learn a completely new system". There's a huge mental overhead for the latter.

The effort of learning a different grammar is dwarfed by the effort of memorizing a sufficiently large dictionary to understand everyday speech. To read at an elementary school level you need 5-20k words.

I thought that too, but as a bilingual person who studied Latin for several years... either I'm linguistically handicapped, or the grammar was legitimately tough to wrap your head around. Or both. Some of it was that I really did struggle with the grammar. Some of it was that sometimes we really were reading syntactically complex writing.
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