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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#21

Post by PaulHoule »

chuckadams wrote: post #13
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words.

For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R.

My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#22

Post by lunaru »

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 dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#23

Post by bradrn »

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…

You’re missing the point of the article. The primary aim is to explain how Chinese characters work, using English as a reference point.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#24

Post by vunderba »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc.

The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think.

I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#25

Post by rahimnathwani »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana.

If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write:

A) Churchill

B) 丘吉尔

But they will never write:

C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B)

I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#26

Post by raincole »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #25
PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana. If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write: A) Churchill B) 丘吉尔 But they will never write: C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B) I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).

The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was not invented to spell foregin words.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#27

Post by bobthepanda »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unre…

usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically with China.

The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#30

Post by bad_username »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #14

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun , a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”

Reminds me of Antonio Stella Bottom Tile ( https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 )
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