21–30 of 96 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is an extremely mainland-centric view. Cangjie is the dominant IME in Hong Kong.
That's why I said almost all
“Safari can’t open the page because the address is invalid” How strange. More on topic: Considering how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but especially evident in computing) as one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics, I wonder why there hasn’t been an effort to modernize it similar to Hiragana in Japan. Well, considering how Chinese is basically Kanji, why not just…
“Safari can’t open the page because the address is invalid” How strange. More on topic: Considering how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but especially evident in computing) as one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics, I wonder why there hasn’t been an effort to modernize it similar to Hiragana in Japan. Well, considering how Chinese is basically Kanji, why not just…
“Safari can’t open the page because the address is invalid” How strange. More on topic: Considering how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but especially evident in computing) as one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics, I wonder why there hasn’t been an effort to modernize it similar to Hiragana in Japan. Well, considering how Chinese is basically Kanji, why not just…
I'm guessing you are not familiar with how Chinese characters work nor how Japanese Hiragana or Kanji work.
“Safari can’t open the page because the address is invalid” How strange. More on topic: Considering how inefficient Chinese characters are in general (but especially evident in computing) as one of the few languages where characters have no direct relation to phonetics, I wonder why there hasn’t been an effort to modernize it similar to Hiragana in Japan. Well, considering how Chinese is basically Kanji, why not just…
nit: It's not accurate to say that the characters have no direct relation to phonetics. Thousands of them are semanto-phonetic compounds, meaning they combine a character relating to the word's (or syllable's) meaning with a character relating to pronunciation. Sinitic languages tend to have a lot of homophones or near-homophones, so this approach works reasonably well as a memory aid once you've memorized a bunch of the basic characters.
One problem is that many of the pronunciations have drifted from the Middle Chinese pronunciation of the words. Also, some of them have been simplified in Simplified Chinese which makes the components a bit harder to discern.
I've been learning some Cantonese recently and this is very apparent with certain common Cantonese words. For example, the first-person pronoun in Cantonese is pronounced ngo, with a low-rising tone, and written like this:
我 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1/
The word for goose in Cantonese is also "ngo", but with a different tone. Here's the character for that:
鵝 https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/1200...
If you enlarge it, you'll see that the left side is the same 我 from before. The right side is 鳥, which means "bird" (https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/161/). So if you saw this character and knew the basic characters for the pronouns and the word "bird", and you spoke Cantonese, you'd be able to easily understand what it meant.
Here's another one. The word "ngo" with still a different tone means "hungry". How do we write it?
餓: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/740/
In this one the phonetic component is on the right instead, which is a bit inconsistent. The left side is this:
食: https://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/dictionary/characters/116/
What does 食 mean? It's the verb "to eat". So if you saw this 餓 character and knew a couple of other basic characters, you could figure out that it's the word "ngo6" meaning "hungry". Many of the characters still work like this although the sound shift I mentioned above means that some work in some Chinese languages and not others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank God it didn’t happen.
pinyin is the best thing that happened to the language after simplification. Not only did it propel literacy rates to basically 100%, but it added a phonetic component to the language
> it added a phonetic component to the language
Fanqie has been a thing since the 2nd century. Zhuyin was invented in 1913.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…
The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Romanization of Chinese writing was already proposed during the New Culture movement in the 1910s-20s. China's most famous modern writer supported it. However, the Chinese language has evolved alongside the characters for about 3000 years, and it's very difficult to just separate the two. A huge amount of culture is bound up with the characters. Not only that, but the Romanized writing system is viewed as something t…
The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
It’s certainly denser, though. And I agree about the front-loading of learning. It’s like learning vi. An absolute pain at first, then very comfortable.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The nice thing about Chinese is information density of writing. Something nice about seeing how much information can be squeezed into a small space. Feels like you front load more on the learning side, but get rewarded when reading and scanning texts. Not sure how much scientific evidence is behind that, just an anecdotal observation. Relatively few Chinese speakers want to give up characters.
> information density of writing I feel like a proper comparison would not be number of characters, but a kind of pixel-budget, assuming both meet a certain reading speed and accuracy rate.
收天下兵, 聚之咸陽, 銷以為鍾鐻金人十二, 重各千石, 置廷宮中. 一法度衡石丈尺. 車同軌. 書同文字.
He collected the weapons of All-Under-Heaven in Xianyang, and cast them into twelve bronze figures of the type of bell stands, each 1000 dan [about 30 tons] in weight, and displayed them in the palace. He unified the law, weights and measurements, standardized the axle width of carriages, and standardized the writing system.