China’s tyranny of characters
economist.com
China’s tyranny of characters
1–10 of 96 posts
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#2Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#3Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non-Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#4In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#5Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#6Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
At least in Mandarin, given enough context, each Chinese character has one correct pronunciation. It's frequently the "context" that trips up non-native speakers.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
Hokkien Taiwanese is no longer particularly prominent in Taiwan, let alone the Taiwanese kana (according to that link they're not even all in Unicode).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin is more relevant, as it's still moderately widely used today in Taiwan.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#8Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#9Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
Generally representing dialog is not a problem. In the case that they want to represent a word/sound that does not have a character assigned to it there are a number of strategies to deal with it: romanization (pinyin), zhuyin fuhao (phonetic notation), non-standard character or pick a character with similar meaning or sound. Generally context is sufficient for native speakers to figure out what they are trying to convey.
Re: China’s tyranny of characters
#10At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...