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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#151

Post by numpad0 »

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.

VTubers and ~15 years. Media, in generalized form. The velocity of weebs internalizing fringe Japanese concepts is astonishing.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#152

Post by lolinder »

numpad0 wrote: post #150
lolinder wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't disagree that there can be fault lines of mutual intelligibility between dialects. I'm not even commenting on how we define dialects at all—all I'm saying is that the distinction between a dialect and a language is an arbitrary one that is made for political reasons more than linguistic ones, and that's something that even the sources for that Wikipedia page agree with me on. For example (emphasis added) [0]:

> The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese.

In the absence of nation states I suspect that we'd mostly talk about dialects and dialect continuums. Discrete languages are only really relevant as a concept because of the non-linguistic ties that bind a nation together.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#153

Post by adrian_b »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

This is the modern usage of hiragana and katakana.

Earlier, e.g. in the books written a few hundred years ago, hiragana was used like today, i.e. inlined with kanji, for writing verb and adjective terminations or various grammatical particles, but katakana was used as furigana, for showing the pronunciation of the more seldom used or ambiguous kanji, especially when the Chinese reading was used for those kanji.

The use of katakana for the writing of foreign words has developed from its use for writing the approximate pronunciation of Chinese words.

The writing reform enforced after WWII has introduced significant changes in the use of hiragana and in the correspondences between kanji and hiragana (and also many kanji have been substituted with simplified variants), so reading a pre-war book can be challenging for someone familiar only with modern Japanese.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#154

Post by latentsea »

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…

Adding whitespace is a pretty simple solution. Heck if you really, really absolutely needed to resolve tonal ambiguity in kana you could add something to Kana to do that. That'd enhance the readability even further since, it's basically impossible for foreigners to learn correct intonation in Japanese unless they explicitly study it and that's on top of memorizing all that Kanji, but it would become explicit. I can recall exactly once in the last 10 years having a conversation where the there was ambiguity between two homonyms and someone asked a clarifying question to resolve it. The vast majority of the time it's just clear from context.

So.. I would say even that ambiguity isn't something people would actually have much a problem with.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#155

Post by adrian_b »

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.

The amount of Chinese words is usually much greater in written Japanese or in legal/technical/scientific jargon than in casual spoken Japanese.

The proportion of Chinese words also depends on the manner of accounting the compound words and the inflected words.

I have seen the claim that the modern Japanese vocabulary consists roughly of 45% Chinese words, 45% native Japanese words, 8% English words and 2% words borrowed from other languages, mainly from Portuguese or other European languages.

I do not know what assumptions have been used to compute these percentages, but they are similar to the frequencies of the words encountered in many modern Japanese texts.

There are a lot of modern Japanese words that are composed from two or three or four or even more Chinese words. If all the compounds would be counted separately, the proportion of Chinese words in the Japanese vocabulary could increase a lot.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#156

Post by g9yuayon »

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…

Yup, 余光中 is one of such authors who urge people to write authentic instead of "westernized" Chinese. I wouldn't call it "blame", though. Just like in English, there's certain standard on good writing. In Chinese, 白话文 is really the way to go. That's why among the authors in the May 4th movement, 钱钟书´s modern Chinese is just so much more pleasant to read than Lu Xun's. If you don't believe me, try reading his translation of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls. Oh my...

Joan Pinkham wrote a book titled The Translator's Guide to Chinglish[1]. It's a fun book to read and really teaches native Chinese speakers how to write good English. Interestingly, a lot of the lessons in that book can be applied to Chinese writing too, such as avoiding nounification, and removing duplication. For instance, just say "dislike" instead of "to have a dislike for". And instead of saying "give guidance to", just say "guide".

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Translators-Guide-Chinglish-Joan-Pink...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#157

Post by chuckadams »

raincole wrote: post #88
chuckadams wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.

Very few people from Hong Kong know bopomofo. Your coworker is an exception.

He was definitely an exceptional and somewhat eccentric person, but it's probably my recollection that's muddled. He gave a presentation on Chinese character sets and encodings like big5 vs gb2312 vs unicode (we were an antispam shop, so very useful info) and also covered input methods, mentioning bopomofo and pinyin. The bopomofo topic segued into the four tones of Mandarin, so we spent the day saying "mā má mǎ mà" a lot, probably sounding like a Chinese kindergarten :)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#158

Post by qazxcvbnm »

pessimizer wrote: post #105
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.

They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different. If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly t…

The phonology differs. Vocabulary differs. Grammar differs. Speaking Cantonese and Mandarin natively, I have no idea what Hokkien or Sichuan people say, whether or not you write it down.

This is especially apparent when speaking to less educated people with less exposure to the standardised, official Chinese language, which is what people do actually write down when intending for a broader audience, of course. Diglossia is real.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#159

Post by latentsea »

jack1243star wrote: post #131
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…

> One doesn't use Kanji anymore, and no one seems to struggle to read it? Chinese/Japanese has a level of written mutual intelligibility. Korean lost it. > Japanese on the other hand I have seen even natives struggle to read. It's like a native English speaker encountering new vocabulary. Happens quite often. > Heck even the existence of furigana in novels is an admission of this. I'd agree that manga use of furigana…

Sometimes furigana can be used artistically,sure, but that's the exception to the rule and it's by and large a reading aide in the vast majority of cases, and the inclusion of it in novels aimed at adults indicates that without it the author expects a certain percentage of readers may struggle with how to read the Kanji otherwise.

Why does this tool in the language need to exist? The answer cannot be because Kanji make things easier to read, else you wouldn't need tools to help you read Kanji you at times otherwise wouldn't be able to.

If you come across a word you don't know as either a native speaker of English or Korean, you can at least sound it out, which ups the probability you can connect it with a word you've heard before, otherwise since you know how to type it out it's trivial to look it up in a dictionary. If you come across a word you don't know in Japanese as a native speaker and there's no furigana it's a guessing game. The meaning is slightly more obvious to you, so you might be able to guess, but if you can't guess and you care to know and the word is in print then looking it up becomes a bit more of a pain.

Korean didn't completely lose the mutual intelligibility aspect entirely since the underlying pronunciation of the words still remains and can be used to correctly guess the word in a lot of cases. Like 시간 and 時間 as an example, but there's many, many words I've been able to guess in Korean based off knowing Japanese. I was able to score 50% on TOPIK II reading exam after only having studied Korean for 4 months in large part because of this.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#160

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

mbivert wrote: post #110

> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records. Meaning, if I understand cor…

I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components, radicals are just an afterthought to make dictionairies work.

I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters, they were not around when the characters were created, were not trained to do science and didn't know as much about the evolution of languages as us.

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