The Way of Chinese Language

I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated.

I imagine that someone could choose to make deliberate progress on this skill, even though it's not at all a common approach to teaching or learning Chinese. I can report that I know that San Francisco is called 旧金山, and that I know the meaning of each of the three characters as well as their meaning together, but I don't know the sound of any of them. If I heard someone refer to San Francisco in spoken Chinese, I would have no idea what was being referred to, but if I saw it written, I would!

I've also seen Chinese speakers who don't know any Japanese understand the basic meaning of signs in Japanese, and vice versa, because often individual hanzi and kanji continue to share their most basic or common meanings (though by no means always). I realize this is also a far cry from being able to read a newspaper fluently, but I find it very suggestive, since most likely the speakers in question wouldn't be able to read these signs aloud!

Edit: but in support of your intuition about this, Wiktionary, for example, lists 256 Chinese words that use (for example) 市, a huge number of which probably don't have a transparent meaning to a non-Chinese speaker who knows all the individual characters in a given word. And it's a similar situation with other characters, so at least it would require a lot of deliberate study to understand complex texts.

[Shameless plug] My own take on the birth, evolution and Mao's simplification of Chinese writing: https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1

For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU

There's a correlation between (loss of) aspiration and tones in Punjabi.

> But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words.

This is overstated. Both of those concepts are present at a robust level in English. As such, English obviously does have constructs for them.

Measure words are the really obvious one. Any treatment of English grammar will mention the distinction between "count" nouns, which have plural forms, and "mass" nouns, which don't. Mass nouns require measure words in exactly the same manner that Chinese nouns do. They are common; some mass nouns that are almost always used to refer to discrete items, but which nevertheless require their appropriate measure words, are "pants" (you can have a pair of pants, but not a pants), scissors (ditto), and bread (which has its own specialized measure word, "loaf").

Change of state is often not marked syntactically in English, though it can be. But it is very commonly marked lexically -- see the distinction between "being married" and "getting married", or "being on fire" and "catching fire".

I think lexical marking of grammatical concepts is an under-studied phenomenon. There is a traditional division of verbs in linguistics into those that express "states", "activities", "accomplishments", and "achievements". You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect (and just look at what they named the concept!).

It's called "lexical aspect" because the different categories are expressed, in English, by choosing different words. But they don't have to be; the difference between an activity and an accomplishment is expressed in Mandarin Chinese with a syntactic marker. Where English says "look" and "see", Mandarin has 看 and 看到. Where English has "listen" and "hear", Mandarin has 听 and 听到. Where English has "search" and "find", Mandarin has 找 and 找到. It's only a lexical distinction if you assume that English is more Platonically correct than Chinese is.

Similarly, Indo-European languages generally have a syntactic distinction between factual conditionals ("if I'm the king, why do I have to wait?") and counterfactual conditionals ("if I were the king, I wouldn't have to wait!"). (Fun side note: for hopefully obvious reasons, where this distinction exists for sentences set in the future, they're called "future more vivid" and "future less vivid" as opposed to "future factual" and "future counterfactual". We use a different word even though the grammatical distinction is identical.) English makes this distinction syntactically, as you'd expect. But it also makes it lexically -- "hope" and "wish" are the more-vivid and less-vivid equivalents of each other.