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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#161

Post by latentsea »

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.

This is because this is how you've trained your brain to process Japanese.

Korean includes white space for this reason, and since everyone gets used to reading it with no Hanja, they don't find it awkward.

So, it's perfectly possible to ditch Kanji and add spaces and have a way more accessible language.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#162

Post by qazxcvbnm »

g9yuayon wrote: post #43
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…

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…

Classical Chinese has nounification... very heavily; vernacular, another thing, of course.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#163

Post by adrian_b »

iainmerrick wrote: post #74
svachalek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think there were a lot of historical contingencies involved. The nature of the language itself (small vs large alphabet, etc) is probably one of the least important. There was an interesting BBC article a while back about the decline of German usage in science: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29543708 They put it down to anti-German sentiment during WWI (not WWII as I would have assumed!) It’s pretty easy to im…

The importance of German as a scientific language was even greater before WWI than claimed in that BBC article.

While the BBC article estimates that of the scientific literature of the 19th century and of the pre-WWI 20th century a third was published in French, a third in English and a third in German, I believe that an estimate much closer to reality would be a quarter in French, a quarter in English and a half in German.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#164

Post by Dwedit »

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.

If you look at old Japanese video games before the hardware could do Kanji, they used spaces to separate words. But when the game was capable of Kanji, the spaces went away.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#165

Post by hnlmorg »

pie420 wrote: post #81
hnlmorg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asia have a massive booming tech industry. They always have done. Surely you’ve heard of brands like Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Samsung, Huawei, Asus, and Acer… to name but a small few?

all of the companies you listed except Huawei are in american colonies

That doesn’t make them American any more than Amazon is Japanese because they have a Japanese division.

The companies I listed are Asian businesses that make hardware in Asian regions for Asian consumers and also have a massive presence in the west too.

I could also list multiple Asian companies that don’t have a large presence in the US but then you wouldnt have heard of them so what would the point of that be?

Some of the comments in this thread smack of “I’ve never needed to use anything outside of America so I just assume English-speaking businesses are the only thriving industries”.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#166

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

beryilma wrote: post #35

Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language. And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'. The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always s…

Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#167

Post by latentsea »

pcwalton wrote: post #119
latentsea wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Kana would be slightly easier to read if we spent as much time reading in Kana as we have in Kanji.

Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#168

Post by qalmakka »

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 am Italian and whenever I go to Spain I usually don't really need to speak English because the languages are close enough that you can go by by just knowing a handful of basic words (and the Spaniards I meet usually prefer it that way). This is both a blessing and a curse; all Italians I met living in Spain (and viceversa, all Spanish-speakers I met in Italy) tend to have a hard time learning the other language "properly" because the threshold for being understood is extremely low. If, perchance, someone speaks an Italian with Spanish grammar, people will still understand you perfectly.

Given that Castillan and Portuguese are even closer (both Western Romance, part of a linguistic continuum, ...) I find it very hard to believe that honestly. I am only familiar with the European variants, thought. Maybe the issues you faced are due to how the Latin American variants have diverged significantly over the years?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#170

Post by aworks »

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…

Reminds me of when I went on business trip of several weeks to Sweden from California. The Swedes spoke English reasonably well. I then went to Scotland for vacation and had a much harder time understanding their dialect than I did with the Swedes.
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