If English was written like Chinese (1999) • Hacker News Board

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#11

Post by pessimizer » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:08 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #6

ljsprague wrote: post #3

[flagged]

I think English spelling is a pain but overall I think 中文 is worse. There are an awful lot of characters to know for one thing. My understanding is that you have to work pretty hard to be literate in 中文. Also I understand that the horizon where 中文 gets hard to read is closer in time than it is English, that is even 150 year old texts are difficult to read and reading Confucius is harder than reading Chaucer. Contrast…

The curse of Chinese characters is that they unite the country. You can't get rid of them because Chinese then becomes 10 languages, and they're suddenly broken up like Europe. If everything were Mandarin, you could Romanize or Bopomofize no problem (although with much grumbling of course.) But it's not, and probably not going to be as far as I know; it's like Hindi. It's the writing that makes China one country.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#12

Post by kibwen » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:10 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

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…

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.

This is basically how we got to alphabetic systems in the first place.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

"Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#13

Post by chuckadams » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:11 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

"Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#14

Post by Eric_WVGG » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:40 PM UTC

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.

reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#15

Post by dang » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:42 PM UTC

If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments)

If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#16

Post by raincole » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:46 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

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…

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.

Just use the closest Chinese characters to represent a syllable / sound, and slightly modify it if they have to distinguish them. Actually this is not just for foregin languages. It was how Chinese itself evolved.

Search "borrowing" in this page:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#17

Post by svachalek » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:49 PM UTC

jmclnx wrote: post #7

There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.

Computers developed by English speakers for English speakers tended to use English, I am very skeptical that any more thought went into it than that.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#18

Post by beardyw » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:54 PM UTC

> So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi..... We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme.

They already are aren't they?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#19

Post by bmacho » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 7:59 PM UTC

If Japanese was written like Chinese https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#20

Post by PaulHoule » Mon, Jun 03, 2024, 8:03 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

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…

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.

In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana

then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically.

The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at)

Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles

the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.