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The Way of Chinese Language

thevivekpandey.github.io

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#21

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

>don't have constructs for... counting words

Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as a counter there. And while venery terms are not counters, and many of them are unused in modern English, those that do persist occupy a niche that you would notice the absence of, while being decidedly absent in other languages (or in Japanese, I can think off-hand of mure as a catchall for a collective of animals, and it is less specific than English venery terms).

Overall I agree with your assessment of "interesting but a lot of the things are wrong". For instance the statements:

>And some people have used less used English letters to denote specific chinese pronunciations: Eg. in Xi Jinping, "X" is pronounced as "sh", and in Qing, "Q" is pronounced as "ch".

I was always taught that English letter choices in pinyin were not just because "some people had used" them, but as a deliberate choice by Chiense to teach each other proper putonghua, especially speakers of other dialects. And additionally, to accomplish this it borrowed from a Russian perspective on Anglicized sounds, with Russia being both a geographic and political neighbor. I don't know any Russian, but it was taught to me that the "zh-", "q-" and "x-" in pinyin were Russian in origin, albeit in a filtered, haphazard way.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#22
post #11

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated. I imagine that someone could choose to make delibera…

> San Francisco is called 旧金山

Interestingly, this is only true among Chinese people. In its own official documents (which it has to issue in Chinese), San Francisco uses an entirely different name to refer to itself.

I've always been a little bemused by that choice.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#23

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not.

Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating".

There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" means "real(ly)". This does not make sense at all.

Still, most of the words are just between these two categories. For example "自然" means "nature", and "自" means "itself" and "然" means "happened". So "nature" means "it just happened itself". This is kind of make sense somehow but it is actually pretty blurred for most people.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#25
Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification.

Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#26
post #12
post #2

In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult…

English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey mean…

> We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史]

To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#27
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There aren’t pairs... That is quite a claim. Off the top of my head: digest, digest regress, regress contract, contract implant, implant etc.

That's to do with stress, not tone. For tone, think about the difference between English "(I know) you want to leave." vs "(Do) you want to leave?"

English does have lexical tone in a single case, the three-tone sequence for "I don't know".

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#28

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…

天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#29
post #21

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated m…

> don't have constructs for... counting words Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as…

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

Re: The Way of Chinese Language

#30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not. Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating". There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" mea…

天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.

It’s not just a translation issue, but that the composition is just archaic. The constituents had real meaning a long time ago when they became a word, but today you just understand 天真 as its own word and move on. If you didn’t know that word but understood 天 and 真 you wouldn’t be able to figure out the word’s meaning.

The same is true with many English words as well actually: many of them started out as composites that were meaningful in the last but today are not. For example, “understand.”

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