I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.
If English was written like Chinese (1999)
181–190 of 312 posts
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
It's cute, and gets at something real, but it's overstated. The first question is "are these things mutually intelligible", with an answer on a spectrum between "yes, perfectly, obviously" and "no, not at all, obviously". There is a huge gray area that stretches pretty far from the middle in which contingency, identity, community, and nation building projects (both military and literary) move the lines around quite a bit... but as we near either pole that factual question dominates. I think. I'd be interested to learn of counterexamples.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#183The 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'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation. For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period a…
Via Phoenician (between Egyptian hieroglyphs and Etruscan), the English alphabet is also a bunch of pictograms with reduced pictorial content.
Here is a picture of a fish under water:
M
D
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese
So you're saying that verbal communication doesn't work in Japan and everyone just texts each other? "I'm sorry Mr Honda Kawasaki but due to how Japanese language works it's impossible for me to tell whether you want to buy three oranges or cook prostate cancer, please send me a letter" "Okay I will fight the sky colander"
Most countries at some point had to simplify their languages in order to promote literacy. Korea didn't ditch hanja just for shits and giggles, it did so in order to make it easier for schools. Japan never really had to face this problem at a scale that required complete removal of kanji because by the time people got such ideas Japan was already quite literate, so kanji stuck around. Plus, Japan is an extremely conservative society, they only ever change anything once all other options have been exhausted.
Same reason why English spelling is so ridiculous. It's not that English is such a unique language that it absolutely requires a spelling system that doesn't make sense and effectively forces everyone to memorize each word's spelling aside from it's pronounciation (wow just like kanji), it's just that English spelling has never been a problem to a degree that required a systematic solution, so now we're stuck with what we have. If we suddenly decided to make a giant reform of English spelling to have it reflect actual pronounciation, the resistance would be equally giant.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#185Earlier 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…
Fun fact: Quality of Google translate and Google search in Simplified Chinese and Google maps in mainland China has plummeted over the past decade. Barely usable if at all. I would suggest avoid them at all cost for your peace of mind
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#186Turkish 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…
The issue is the opposite. Chinese has a comparitively small phonetic pallette (depending on how you view tones). Chinese written completely phoenetically can easily become incomprehensible.
https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-...
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#187Earlier 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…
a friend of mine who grew up in argentina went for an interview at a university in brasil. they reported that on the first day, portugese was just gibberish. on the second day they realized they could read a solid chunk of a portugese newspaper. on the third day they felt they were beginning to understand what people were saying to them. obviously, YMMV (and does).
This really what "mutually intelligible" means, I'd say: that the languages are so close you can sort of work it out without explicit instruction. You still need some experience with the other language - and quite often there'll be a geographical and cultural proximity that means almost all speakers have that.
I grew up in a Scandinavian country and visited the others a lot when I was young, and I find I understand most of what I hear in the other languages, but it's quite common for my peers who don't have that experience to understand nothing.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> The real problem of Japanese is the massive amount of homophones coming from Chinese So you're saying that verbal communication doesn't work in Japan and everyone just texts each other? "I'm sorry Mr Honda Kawasaki but due to how Japanese language works it's impossible for me to tell whether you want to buy three oranges or cook prostate cancer, please send me a letter" "Okay I will fight the sky colander" Most cou…
Don't take me wrong, I fully agree with you.
I actually live in Japan, I am trying to learn the language, and it is royal PITA. Heck, every single Japanese person I have asked has complained about their language being so ridiculously difficult. They wish their language was easier, but as you say it is also such a conservative society that it will never change.
In comparison, my mother language is Spanish, a language with a highly phonemic spelling. My girlfriend is trying to learn it, and she always commends how once you learn a few basic rules, you can read anything.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English whi…
> Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji
And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults?
As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.
Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)
#190The 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.
It's worse than that, the US doesn't even use Imperial units, which was only introduced after US independence..
They use their own unique set of units that are different to both Imperial and Metric.