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

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#121

Post by EE84M3i » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 1:59 AM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #104

fenomas wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Written kana drops intonation information that's present in speech. Writing with kanji makes up for this, and also allows for more complex sentences that aren't as common in spoken Japanese.

I personally find the most difficult part of reading kana-only text to be detecting word boundaries. It's much easier when kanji is used, and I'm not even a native speaker.

An English analogy isthatyoucouldwritewithoutspacesandbeunderstood but it's more difficult to read and unnatural.

Young gen-z types on Japanese Twitter abbreviate everything, but even they don't drop kanji.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#122

Post by pezezin » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:01 AM UTC

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.

> Without Kanji, it severely degrades readability. One has to reconstruct the word from syllables, which introduces another layer of cognitive load.

Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", it is just a different layer, one that can be said to be much lighter or other languages would not have switched centuries/millenia ago.

The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese. It is already a problem in Chinese, but even worse in Japanese due to the smaller phonetic repertoire.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#123

Post by pezezin » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

EE84M3i wrote: post #121

latentsea wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 u…

Written kana drops intonation information that's present in speech. Writing with kanji makes up for this, and also allows for more complex sentences that aren't as common in spoken Japanese. I personally find the most difficult part of reading kana-only text to be detecting word boundaries. It's much easier when kanji is used, and I'm not even a native speaker. An English analogy isthatyoucouldwritewithoutspacesandbe…

That is what whitespaces are for, which Korean also uses.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#124

Post by zzo38computer » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #57

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…

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

I think kanji can make more clear the meaning if it can be understood, but not for pronouncing. Kana is other way around. (In case it is difficult, it is also possible to add furigana.)

I think it is beneficial to have both in Japanese writing.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#125

Post by arcticfox » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:03 AM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #113

gomox wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 peo…

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

Language learning stories are always amazing because the perpetrator of the comedy is almost always entirely oblivious. Love your story.

My shining moment when I was learning Portuguese... I went to the pharmacy because I'd hurt my ankles hiking. They kept everything behind the counter, so I asked for some painkillers that would work for ankle pain.

The cashier gave me the weirdest look and the rest of the line started giggling. Eventually, after several attempts at repetition and variation, they gave me some ibuprofen - perfect. As I was leaving I processed my mistake - I'd accidentally swapped calcanhares (ankles) for calcinhas (panties), so my series of requests (as a male) had come out as: "My panties are killing me, do you have anything to help? ... Sorry, my Portuguese...I'll try again: My panties. Pan-ties. Pain. Pain in my panties. Panties pain. Medicine?"

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#126

Post by School-Cotton » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:08 AM UTC

latentsea wrote: post #91

School-Cotton wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese still uses Chinese characters for native vocabulary that is not derived from Chinese at all.

It does, but the loanwords from Chinese vastly outnumber those, so the influence of Chinese words on Japanese is pretty undeniable.

Fair enough.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#127

Post by lolinder » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:09 AM UTC

arcticfox wrote: post #114

lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Po…

I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak?

I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is accustomed to.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#128

Post by jmclnx » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:18 AM UTC

llm_trw wrote: post #40

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.

As opposed to Russian, German or French?

All 3 languages have a bit more letters that English. Some of those language's letters are marked with inflections.

Plus the first computers used only Upper Case Letters which were designed similar to how Ancient Latin was carve letters in stone. So it was far easier to design a printers, storage, punch cards for when you only care about 26 letters and 10 numbers and a few punctuation marks.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#129

Post by schoen » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:19 AM UTC

lolinder wrote: post #127

arcticfox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Po…

I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak? I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is…

Brazilian Portuguese has some phonological differences that I think confuse people in both directions more than other varieties of Portuguese, like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ for and in various contexts. For example a Spanish speaker would probably have a hard time recognizing that Brazilian Portuguese /dʒi'abu/ is cognate with Spanish . A Brazilian Portuguese speaker who was less familiar with Spanish might similarly have a hard time recognizing /ˈdjablo/ as cognate with Portuguese 'devil'.

Or Brazilian /'sedʒi/ is cognate with Spanish 'thirst'. A Spanish speaker will have to know to effectively ignore the /ʒi/ in order to recognize the word easily!

Maybe more extreme, Brazilian /'hedʒi/ (written ) is cognate with Spanish 'net, network'.

You might also be familiar with a greater variety of Spanish pronunciations as a non-native speaker... if you know Argentine /'ʃubja/ and /'ʃabe/, then you have a better chance to recognize Brazilian /'ʃuvɐ/ and /'ʃavi/ ('rain' and 'key', respectively).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#130

Post by lolinder » Tue, Jun 04, 2024, 2:23 AM UTC

schoen wrote: post #129

lolinder wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak? I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is…

Brazilian Portuguese has some phonological differences that I think confuse people in both directions more than other varieties of Portuguese, like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ for and in various contexts. For example a Spanish speaker would probably have a hard time recognizing that Brazilian Portuguese /dʒi'abu/ is cognate with Spanish . A Brazilian Portuguese speaker who was less familiar with Spanish might similarly have a…

Yeah, I suspect that OP speaks Brazilian Portuguese but I didn't want to assume.

I should have specified in my original post, but I only meant that Portugal Portuguese (and at least a few of the African varieties that are still very close to Portugal's) are mutually intelligible with Spanish. Which actually just further illustrates the complexity of categorizing speech into discrete languages...