Earlier quoted context omitted.
The F word would all of a sudden lose it's punch. Puck the pucking puckers.
What about the existing word "puck", as in hockey puck?
"copy" would also become ambiguous with coffee :)
If English was written like Chinese (1999)
101–110 of 312 posts
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#102No. Just no. Literacy is incredibly difficult in a language that requires knowing 10,000 characters to learn it.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#103I'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…
I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
> Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language.
The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning.
For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as:
Mandarin: Bǎoluó
Cantonese: bou2 lo4
Hakka: Pó-lò
Hokkien: Pó-lô
Teochew: bao2 lo5
Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
All of which native speakers have no trouble distinguishing between in conversation when there are no Kanji anywhere. It's the same with homophones in any language, usually the context makes it clear because the alternatives don't fit.
The homophones in Japanese and Korean pretty much all come from the vocabulary they share with Chinese which makes up the bulk of the vocabulary for both those languages.
One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it?
Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read. Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#105The 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…
As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.
They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different.
If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly the same way, would it be a different language? Would people who said that they were dialects of the same language have to be saying this for political reasons?
edit: I mean, Chinese is how you would expect it to be. How would two people living extremely far apart in China even know how each other would pronounce a particular character? How would they have communicated those sounds 500 years ago? The wide variance in the pronunciation of words even in English is also due to our dogshit orthography (largely imposed by the French), which often fails to give a decent hint for how to say something. Chinese characters are symbols of concepts that usually have a hint of what it's meant to sound like in the northern dialect, 1500 years ago, by referring to another character that there's no reason one would know what it sounded like.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#106The 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.
Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load.
In Korean, it works similarly as well though, most people nowadays are quite used to not incorporating Hanja in sentences over multiple decades, to the point where it would be impractical to mingle Hanja in Korean.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.
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…
A classic example of this is Hindi and Urdu -- the two languages are largely mutually intelligible when spoken, which is the main criterion for being the same language, but are written with different scripts and of course used in separate and adversarial states.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#108I'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…
> 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. I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner…
i'm bilingual and have absolutely not experienced this. that being said, i think being bilingual - rather than a learner - does make it a lot easier to code-switch instinctively between different languages.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#109The 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'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation. For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period a…
I don't see how your explanation and GP's explanations are mutually exclusive.
To add some detail to this point:
> my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones.
A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#110> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest
This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records.
Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's).
[0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf