Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If English was written like Chinese (1999)

zompist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 312 posts

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#111

Post by bdowling »

robomartin wrote: post #61
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…

If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.

Americans use metric where it's required by law (e.g., food and drug packaging), it just takes government force. Government force can also change a population's language. See, e.g.,

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

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

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

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#112

Post by sandbach »

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.

> What did they do in 950AD?

An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China.

The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms:

1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái

This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun').

2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó

This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#113

Post by jzwinck »

gomox wrote: post #73
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…

> I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. You owe us at least one fun story from mainland China in 2019.

I'm not who you replied to, but I have such a story.

I was in southern China for a couple weeks, using Google Translate to try to talk to locals sometimes. The voice-to-voice feature seemed useful and more approachable than asking someone to type on my phone. I'd often start by saying "Talk into the phone and it will translate."

This did not go well. People seemed bewildered, utterly unwilling to try it out. Some people already knew what I was doing but the rest seemed to think I was crazy. One or two tried taking the phone and holding it to their ear like they were going to have a normal phone conversation with someone far away.

I later found out that Google had translated my phrase as something like "There is a phone call for you."

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#114

Post by arcticfox »

lolinder wrote: post #85
gpvos wrote: post #53

Earlier 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…

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Portuguese-Spanish mutual intelligibility to work.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#115

Post by lupire »

j7ake wrote: post #46
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…

My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing. However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.

But it also shows that you don't need logograms.

We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#116

Post by lupire »

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…

You don't need logograms for that. You don't need a phonetic alphabet if all you want is a visual alphabet.

You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#117

Post by mbivert »

lunaru wrote: post #22

If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated. Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialect…

Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.

This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.

If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.

But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#118

Post by latentsea »

GreyMolecules wrote: post #106
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.

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.

Yes, so basically the arguments around lack of Kanji leading to worse readability are actually hitting upon the fact that readability suffers short-term not because Kanji enhances readability,but because they're simply not used to processing the language only through kana, and that were they to acclimatize to that, it becomes readable again and in fact easier to read than before.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#119

Post by pcwalton »

latentsea wrote: post #118
GreyMolecules wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, so basically the arguments around lack of Kanji leading to worse readability are actually hitting upon the fact that readability suffers short-term not because Kanji enhances readability,but because they're simply not used to processing the language only through kana, and that were they to acclimatize to that, it becomes readable again and in fact easier to read than before.

I do wonder whether kana might be slightly easier to read if ん were written as part of the preceding syllable like it is in hangul.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#120

Post by seanmcdirmid »

ThePowerOfFuet wrote: post #52
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

newbie take: there is one Chinese language intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages expert take: there is one Chinese language There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur…

[flagged]

Tibet is a part of China today. Whether Tibet should be a part of China is up for debate, but the fact that it has been completely integrated into the PRC for at least 70 years now isn't really. I'll be the first one to argue that the PRC's moral claim to the territory comes from it being conquered by the Mongolians during the Yuan dynasty is lame. But it still doesn't mean anything when China controls it today. And that's just the TAR, there are plenty of Tibetans living in areas of China that aren't very contested as not being part of China.
Post reply on HN