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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#141

Post by Joker_vD »

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.

> I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect

Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#142

Post by wodenokoto »

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…

When I was studying Mandarin Chinese at a school in Shanghai, borrowed a book on Shanghainese. The reason why everyone in shanghai aren’t writing “everything different” is because they are not writing in Shanghainese. They are writing in Mandarin.

I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.

Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#143

Post by yongjik »

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.

I guess it depends on whether Chinese speakers collectively like you or not.

E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation."

But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#144

Post by Ferret7446 »

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.

As someone who isn't even fluent in Japanese, I find it easier to read text with Kanji (in contexts where I am relatively fluent) than without.

Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#145

Post by numpad0 »

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…

No, China literally has multiple dialect continuums[0]. It is the case of "a language is..." saying but the "other" way around.

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Chinese

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#146

Post by localfirst »

krispyfi wrote: post #82
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.

Korean is easier to pronounce, but Japanese is easier to read. Try reading a Japanese children's book that doesn't use kanji. It's excruciating.

Most HN users who are coders should be able to read and write Korean within a few hours...

Good luck with any other language. Japanese is tougher since you have to memorize thousands of what are basically hieroglyphics and learn two separate alphabets (one for native Japanese, another for foreign).

With Korean you can express many sounds phonetically (with some abstractions for non-korean sounds)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#147

Post by lolinder »

numpad0 wrote: post #145
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…

No, China literally has multiple dialect continuums[0]. It is the case of "a language is..." saying but the "other" way around. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Chinese

I don't think we actually disagree.

I'm saying that because China has one single army and navy and at the same time a huge narrative wrapped up in the idea that it's all one China, those "dialects" don't get to be languages because the army and the navy say otherwise.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" implies its corollary, which is that "a dialect is a language without an army or a navy".

(In fact, that's likely what was originally meant by the person who coined the phrase—he was a specialist in Yiddish linguistics writing during WW2.)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#148

Post by numpad0 »

hnfong wrote: post #95
g9yuayon wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounifi…

This is a common claim. But... I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation. Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do " much. I've read an attem…

I can feel a sort of a double translation shims hiding in that example. Chinese "改进" would work as a verb on its own but dictionary wise it will tend to mentally map to noun form "improvement" than the verb form "[to]improve", and that necessitates a "do" verb, which plausibly results in bloated forms such as "进行改进"(forward going [with] improving forward).

Common claims are often common for reasons...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#149

Post by [deleted] »

Ferret7446 wrote: post #144
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.

As someone who isn't even fluent in Japanese, I find it easier to read text with Kanji (in contexts where I am relatively fluent) than without. Japanese without Kanji is like English (or any Latin alphabet language) without punctuation or spaces or capitalization. And also if English had a ton more homophones. You basically need to word-split and disambiguate as part of the reading processing; it's painful.

[deleted]

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#150

Post by numpad0 »

lolinder wrote: post #147
numpad0 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, China literally has multiple dialect continuums[0]. It is the case of "a language is..." saying but the "other" way around. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Chinese

I don't think we actually disagree. I'm saying that because China has one single army and navy and at the same time a huge narrative wrapped up in the idea that it's all one China, those "dialects" don't get to be languages because the army and the navy say otherwise. "A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" implies its corollary, which is that "a dialect is a language without an army or a navy". (In fact, t…

I think our disagreement is in whether there can be fault lines of mutual intelligibility bewteen dialects. If liguists and Chinese languages speakers are to be believed(no particular reasons not to), there are in China.
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