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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#91

Post by latentsea »

School-Cotton wrote: post #77
latentsea wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.

Japanese still uses Chinese characters for native vocabulary that is not derived from Chinese at all.

It does, but the loanwords from Chinese vastly outnumber those, so the influence of Chinese words on Japanese is pretty undeniable.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#92

Post by gleenn »

flextheruler wrote: post #89
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc. But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow. My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarit…

How does that work with e.g. French Creole which has French, Carribean, and English in it. What if this feels like a dialect but the percentage of any given parent is less than your cut-off percentage? You make the rule sound very easy to interpret but I think the general principle is that language classification is nuanced and the irony of the "navy and army" language requirement are it kind of has nothing to do with the actual language spoken.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#93

Post by grishka »

> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi.

English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#94

Post by fenomas »

latentsea wrote: post #57
noirdujour wrote: post #42

The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

Not for beginners. But for fluent speakers, kanji are very necessary to distinguish all the homophones.

E.g. 効果, 硬化, 降下.. are hard to learn, but they're clear. こうか is much easier to learn, but it could mean any of 10-15 unrelated things.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#95

Post by hnfong »

g9yuayon wrote: post #43
PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unre…

Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounifi…

This is a common claim.

But...

I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation.

Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do " much.

I've read an attempt to connect the dots here: https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/2017...

Which was ridiculous if you read carefully, and I've gleefully written an article shredding it apart -- https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#96

Post by lolinder »

flextheruler wrote: post #89
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc. But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow. My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarit…

What's arbitrary isn't that languages are different from each other, what's arbitrary is where you draw the line. When you take two languages on opposite sides of the world they're unquestionably different languages. But as you transition slowly from one language to another, how many languages you spin off and which dialects fall under which languages is arbitrary.

> My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.

Even if you tried to use a method like this to draw lines, it requires you to pick a "center" dialect that you compare all other prospective dialects/languages to. Which dialect you pick as your "center" dialect will determine which dialects end up under your umbrella language, and picking a different center would yield very different results. Which language you pick as your center is inherently a political question, one which would be settled by a sovereign state.

And aside from that problem, lexical similarity is not used to define languages. All it measures is how similar word sets are, and language variations are way more complicated than just vocabulary. No serious linguist would ever try to use a single metric like that to draw lines between languages (and again, most serious linguists aren't actually interested in drawing general-purpose lines because they understand that the lines are not real).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#97

Post by latentsea »

lbotos wrote: post #86
latentsea wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese. I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps: たまねぎ 玉ねぎ いつつ 五つ In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying…

I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean.

I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does.

With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think you know how to read it correctly, can never quite be sure, look it up every time as a consequence and are surprised often enough at the reading that you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks.

In contrast I was able to score 50% on the reading section of TOPIK II after only 4 months of study.

So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#98

Post by brigandish »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #67
cynicalpeace wrote: post #45

I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a n…

Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them. Kanji is a very different story of course.

There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of people when spoken. Even the auto-kanji-conversion of my keyboard respects the variants.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#99

Post by brigandish »

grishka wrote: post #93

> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi. English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.

All us Brits agree with you, though I'm not sure the Scots can be called native speakers.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#100

Post by latentsea »

krispyfi wrote: post #82
latentsea wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

Korean is easier to pronounce, but Japanese is easier to read. Try reading a Japanese children's book that doesn't use kanji. It's excruciating.

That hasn't been my experience of both languages.
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