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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#171

Post by 1659447091 »

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…

> Here in Texas ...

I may be way off here, and happy to be corrected. My experience is Texas-Spanish is difficult to use in Spain, and would guess the inverse is true. Which I would deduce making Portuguese-Spanish a non-starter in the state.

I know a very limited amount from having grown up and played soccer in the "Mexican" rec leagues in Tx. While traveling to Spain, English is perfectly fine in cities. But days trips to smaller towns/villages they had more trouble understanding my attempts to communicate with the basic texas-spanish I had picked up, than they did the hand gestures and single english word here and there. I understood next to nothing in Portugal (it might as well had been Dutch to my ears; I had no idea until now that they are kinda similar in the way Spanish/Italian is). Of course, this could be that I'm simply horrible at Spanish. But have heard Texas-Spanish is even weird for Baja-California-Spanish speakers.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#172

Post by ii41 »

gpvos wrote: post #53
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…

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.

Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite.

I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. Accept that there are different ways of thinking and the real world never has to submit to how you define concepts like "a language", and not everything China surprises you with has something to do with politics.

Edit: I realized that my joke was closer to reality than parent's comment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#173

Post by latentsea »

lbotos wrote: post #133
latentsea wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean. I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does. With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think…

Thanks for clarifying. I don't disagree that Korean does seem easier, but I still think you are slightly confusing what the GP is trying to say. I've never seen "仲人" before but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of person. https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%B2%E4%BA%BA 仲 go-between (which I never saw before but I knew the radicals as "person middle" but didn't know what they were combined, but this one made great logical se…

Being able to guess the meaning of new words was neat earlier on in the Japanese journey, but in the end the problem of "gah but the how hell do you actually read this?" was a greater detriment than that was a benefit.

In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially what it means, but if not, then I could simply opt to move on having collected an instance of seeing the word. I might then later hear it elsewhere, or perhaps see it again and if I encounter it enough times I can get curious and look it up.

I could do the same thing with Kanji except I'd have to look it up anyway to be confident I was reading it correctly. Else I just don't know what the word is, so its harder to mentally file it anywhere in my brain. I found this lead to a very long-tail of pain when reading Japanese that didn't abate even when I got up to around 17k vocab in Anki after which I just said bugger it.

So, on balance I prefer the set of problems that no Kanji poses over the set of problems that Kanji poses.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#174

Post by hnlmorg »

jmclnx wrote: post #128
llm_trw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The “first computers” (which can actually mean a lot of different things depending on what you’re defining as a computer) didn’t output text at all.

Even in the digital era, they output binary rather than text. In the 50s it would have been machine code in and machine code out.

Punch cards would have been binary, Initially machine code but later text encodings in binary. Given machines back then weren’t fixed with 8-bit bytes, it meant you have have larger or smaller character sets.

There were plenty of Japanese, Chinese and Russian computers using non-Latin characters. There were also plenty of European computers that supported native characters outside of the standard 26 English letters too. That’s why character encodings have been such a nightmare to work with prior to Unicodes adoption (and frankly, Unicode creates a new set of problems, but that’s a different topic entirely).

Just because you haven’t had to work with non-Latin, or even non-American, encodings doesn’t mean that all machines were English-centric.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#175

Post by samus »

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.

Chinese text takes up about as much disk space as English text though. The high number of Hanzi translates to a high semantic content.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#176

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

mbivert wrote: post #117
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: Chi…

>confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.

As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there.

I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#177

Post by Kolya »

qazxcvbnm wrote: post #158
pessimizer wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Diglos…

Yep. Anybody who’s ever read written Cantonese or Shanghainese would realise they are often unintelligible unless you speak those languages and understand how they’re written. eg 「佢冇做乜嘢」

And yet the incorrect parent comment has been voted to the top of the thread by those who think it’s helped them.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#178

Post by The_Colonel »

aworks wrote: post #170
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…

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.

For me as a non-native speaker of English and German, this is quite normal - I mostly have an easier time understanding other non-native speakers since they usually use "international" dialect/pidgin, speak slower and usually articulate more distinctly.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#179

Post by mytailorisrich »

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…

It's perhaps how it is seen and used in English. But in China Chinese languages tend to be referred as such with Mandarin referred to as the "common language", etc though the character used has an oral connotation.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#180

Post by samus »

jmclnx wrote: post #128
llm_trw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of the lowercase Cyrillic letters are just smaller version of the uppercase ones. And neither the German nor the Russian alphabet is larger to any extent that matters.

CJKV languages are a bit more subtle subject. Vietnamese nowadays uses a romance-inspired alphabet, where only the tone marks are slightly difficult to typeset. Japanese and Korean could have gotten rid of Kanji/Ganja if they really wanted. But in any case printing technology for Chinese characters existed and was in wide use at the turn of the 20th century.

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