Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer) • Hacker News Board

Re: Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer)

#21

Post by wickedchicken » Tue, Feb 22, 2011, 12:41 AM UTC

bane wrote: post #18

the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s. And somehow they missed a far better target of Zhuyin Fuhao. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo It would have not only vastly simplified the written language problem in China, but forced the nation to standardize on Mandarin as the spoken tongue (with th…

Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D...) so it's tough to claim a purely phonetic system is 'far better.' It certainly has advantages, but the issue is not as clear cut as, say, arabic numerals vs. roman.

Re: Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer)

#22

Post by robert_mygengo » Tue, Feb 22, 2011, 2:20 AM UTC

xiaoma wrote: post #17

I'd be very wary of paying any translator who messes up simple translations that they put into marketing materials. This is how the phrase "traditional characters" is written in each script: (written in traditional): 繁體字 (written in simplified): 繁体字 Also, the bit about traditional characters being harder to learn reads like propaganda. Traditional character-using areas have higher literacy rates. Also, my own persona…

Above error has been fixed. Designer's error, not the author of the post :)

Re: Chinese: Simplified, Traditional, Mandarin or Cantonese (The Simple Answer)

#23

Post by bane » Wed, Feb 23, 2011, 5:21 PM UTC

wickedchicken wrote: post #21

bane wrote: post #18

the People's Republic of China attempted to make learning characters easier through a series of simplification rounds that took place between the 1950s and 1970s. And somehow they missed a far better target of Zhuyin Fuhao. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo It would have not only vastly simplified the written language problem in China, but forced the nation to standardize on Mandarin as the spoken tongue (with th…

Mandarin has a lot of homophones (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_D... ) so it's tough to claim a purely phonetic system is 'far better.' It certainly has advantages, but the issue is not as clear cut as, say, arabic numerals vs. roman.

I remember seeing a proposal years ago that dealt with that problem by producing a standardized listing of Chinese homophones, numbered and ordered. In Pin Yin or Bopomofo one could clarify a homophone with a simple numeric subscript that somebody could simply look up in a dictionary. Most of the time you could leave them off and just rely on context. It had applications outside of China as well for countries with large Sino-loan word lexicons like Korean (a language which deals with the homophone problem routinely but has no standardized system for sorting it out without putting the Chinese root in parens).

Most of the homophones are sorted out with the tonal marks anyways, and in cases where that doesn't clarify enough, there's usually less than 9 homophones anyways making a single numeric subscript a reasonable clarifier.