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> like Chairman Mao Zedong, who seemed to equate Chinese modernization with the Romanization of Chinese script One of Mao's better ideas
Thank God it didn’t happen.
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Thank God it didn’t happen.
pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification. Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language
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pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification. Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language
Uh... no. Bopomofo which is used in Taiwan is a phonetic script that is used as a popular IME. And simplification's only "arguable merit" is that it saves a fortune in ink at the expense of losing its historical roots. But guess what? We mostly use computers now. So great job Mao, now we have two competing standards. (Nod to XKCD). Unrelated but to those of us who started with 繁體字, simplified just looks ugly. (龙 vs 龍…
For example 竜 is a fairly common simplification of 龍 and imo not nearly as ugly
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The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
I’m not sure how much evidence there is for that either — a Chinese friend couldn’t believe that I could just look at a paragraph of English and instantly know roughly what it was about; she, despite her fluency in written English, thought only Chinese characters would allow for such rapid comprehension. It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute…
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There are a lot of underlying assumptions here: 1. That Chinese writing is inherently inefficient. It's actually very efficient...to read. And nothing beats the efficiency of having a script that maps perfectly to the language. Also as sibling comment notes, UTF-8 is a thing. 2. That there is no relation between written characters and phonetics. Incorrect, as several sibling comments point out. 3. That Japanese kana…
It’s really bizarre to see someone claim kana has anything to do with “modernization”. The Japanese modernization and industrialization period is famously associated with translating Western concepts and terminologies into Sinitic words that later spread to China, Korea and Vietnam.
Also it's not uncommon for words like ろ過（濾過）to be written in part kanji especially in news... if that trend continues beyond the 常用 kanji we might end up with a Japanese that is closer to Korean.
> like Chairman Mao Zedong, who seemed to equate Chinese modernization with the Romanization of Chinese script One of Mao's better ideas
Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…
How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?
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I was reading a Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Metal_Colossi ) and was struck by the difference in length of the Chinese quotes and translations. E.g.: 收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字. was translated into He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, an…
I just started learning Chinese about 2 months ago, to me it seems they stuff whole concepts into characters. For example, "去" (pronounced "Qú") is "going to the". "超市" (prounced "Chao Shi") is "supermarket" "去超市" (pronounced "Qú Chao Shi") is "going to the supermarket". 3 syllables vs 7 syllables. To me, it seems that instead of composing letters into words to convey meaning, they have more letters that are mini-wor…
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Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…
> However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. How did that work out for Korea when they switched to Hangul?
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It’s really bizarre to see someone claim kana has anything to do with “modernization”. The Japanese modernization and industrialization period is famously associated with translating Western concepts and terminologies into Sinitic words that later spread to China, Korea and Vietnam.
That was true like 100 years ago, but nowadays katakana words are extremely popular and increasingly used over their Sinitic counterparts, so I feel it's a valid argument. Also it's not uncommon for words like ろ過（濾過）to be written in part kanji especially in news... if that trend continues beyond the 常用 kanji we might end up with a Japanese that is closer to Korean.
The Japanese economy has been stagnant for over 30 years with no end in sight. Following the same logic, Japan should perhaps “modernize” their language by following China, which is a ridiculous conclusion as you can tell.
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Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…
Almost all digital communication is written using pinyin, which today is almost all written communication