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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#201

Post by hobo_mark »

hexhu wrote: post #185
jzwinck wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any usable alternatives to Translate?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#202

Post by samus »

gleenn wrote: post #92
flextheruler wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc. But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow. My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarit…

How does that work with e.g. French Creole which has French, Carribean, and English in it. What if this feels like a dialect but the percentage of any given parent is less than your cut-off percentage? You make the rule sound very easy to interpret but I think the general principle is that language classification is nuanced and the irony of the "navy and army" language requirement are it kind of has nothing to do wit…

The "navy and army" argument is usually employed when the question arises whether something is a dialect or a separate language. IMHO such Creoles should also be classified as languages, with the caveat of dialect continuums.

Creole is a weird case IMHO because English itself is pretty much a creole between Old English, Norman French, Norse, and some Gaelic and Pictish languages.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#203

Post by swift532 »

hobo_mark wrote: post #201
hexhu wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Any usable alternatives to Translate?

I've found ChatGPT 4o (the voice one) to be useful, I just need to prompt it first by saying `Whatever you hear in Chinese, say in English, whatever you hear in English, say in Chinese`. It refuses to cooperate if you tell it to be a live translator.

Anyways, it seems to understand context really well, I tried it out with a Chinese person and they said it worked really well.

It even works for Croatian which is awesome as it is a really small language that anything voice-related usually does not work with.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#204

Post by samus »

gerdesj wrote: post #65
gpvos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.

Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#205

Post by mbivert »

CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #160
mbivert wrote: post #110

> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records. Meaning, if I understand cor…

I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components, radicals are just an afterthought to make dictionairies work. I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters, they were not around when the characters were created, were not trained to do science and didn't know as much about the evolution of languages as us.

> I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components

The Shuowen indeed already mentions sounds. But the fact that there are sound components isn't contradictory with them being also semantic.

> I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters

Let's say that I enjoy the study of ancient thought processes, and that some of it seems to be recorded in etymology & the like.

> were not trained to do science

I believe their approaches were different, more "naive" perhaps, which might be the source of confusion. Let me give you and example where we currently fall short, and where they did not.

Consider political organisation: from Plato (The Republic) we knew that they studied the way one political system changes to another, and studied the causes of this evolution. Yet, the overwhelming majority of contemporary people have been "in-doctrinated" to think that democracy is paramount.

Not only are we disregarding history and previous data, but most businesses, where we all spend a considerable amount of time, for subsistence, are fundamentally non-democratic: we're also severely inconsistent.

Perhaps ancient Greeks didn't had modern means (e.g. peer-reviewed papers, social "sciences"), but they nevertheless captured the jest of it, while we're essentially not.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#206

Post by School-Cotton »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #198
dllthomas wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are German "dialects" that are completely mutually unintelligible. Take someone who speaks the standard German dialect and drop them into the Swiss Alps, and they will understand next to nothing. It will be much easier for them to learn to understand Swiss German (linguists call it "Allemannic") than it would be for someone who doesn't speak German, but it will still take time and effort to adapt. Why are they…

People do typically consider German and Swiss German to be separate languages, I think.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#207

Post by mmaniac »

pringk02 wrote: post #186
beryilma wrote: post #35

Turkish 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-...

The functional load of tones (that is, the importance of a pronunciation difference for distinguishing words) in Chinese is comparable to that of vowels[1]

"Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones.

[1]https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.p...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#208

Post by ObnoxiousProxy »

lupire wrote: post #115
j7ake wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing. However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.

But it also shows that you don't need logograms. We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.

Unlike with numbers, day to day language needs to convey a larger variety of concepts hence why logograms are still needed. Much like how more advanced math requires different symbols and operators that are akin to mathematical logograms to convey additional concepts beyond the fundamental quantities of 0 to 9.

Alphabets are often linked to sound, and it would be a tremendous challenge to create an "alphabet" analogue that links to a set of fundamental concepts that you can somehow rearrange to form higher level concepts and can still be universally understood without it linking to sound.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#209

Post by simiones »

noirdujour wrote: post #42

The 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…

As far as I understand this, this is quite an oversimplification. The differences between different dialects of Chinese is huge, especially in terms of vocabulary. The writing system isn't as purely logographic as it is often touted. There are only ~4000 characters in common use (university level literacy), but many more common words. So, lots of words are written with multiple characters. In Standard Chinese (corresponding mostly to the dialect of Beijing), each of the characters in a word represents a syllable in that word. This correspondence doesn't hold for other dialects.

Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#210

Post by School-Cotton »

beryilma wrote: post #35

Turkish 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…

Lots of languages are written with the Latin script despite being completely unrelated to European languages. Vietnamese for example, or Navajo.
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