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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#211

Post by emblaegh »

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-...

I find hard to believe every language in the planet can be successfully expressed using some sort of alphabetic system, except for Japanese/Chinese (and local variants)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#212

Post by School-Cotton »

grishka wrote: post #93

> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi. English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.

Why? Other than a comparatively small number of different spellings (“color” etc.) how is American English simpler?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#213

Post by School-Cotton »

jmclnx wrote: post #128
llm_trw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to Russian, German or French?

All 3 languages have a bit more letters that English. Some of those language's letters are marked with inflections. Plus the first computers used only Upper Case Letters which were designed similar to how Ancient Latin was carve letters in stone. So it was far easier to design a printers, storage, punch cards for when you only care about 26 letters and 10 numbers and a few punctuation marks.

French and German are both completely intelligible when written in all caps with no diacritics (in French by simply omitting them, in German by replacing e.g. Ü with UE).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#214

Post by simiones »

jameshart wrote: post #84
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.

The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)

The use of 2nd is a better example of the limitations of this system. The reality of written Standard Chinese is that you'd use "2nd" to write both "second", but also "deuxieme", instead of writing "2eme".

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#215

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

emblaegh wrote: post #211
pringk02 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-...

I find hard to believe every language in the planet can be successfully expressed using some sort of alphabetic system, except for Japanese/Chinese (and local variants)

They could be written alphabetically, of course. The question is just what you lose, given that the characters are a massive part of Chinese and Japanese culture.

Chinese has evolved alongside its writing system for about 3000 years, and switching over to pinyin (the standard Latin transliteration) would be a complete revolution in Chinese culture.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#216

Post by omnicognate »

arcticfox wrote: post #114
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…

But the comparison was to Scots, which is (sometimes, not universally) considered a dialect of English rather than a separate language, but is hard for standard English speakers to understand. It's not just English with a Scottish accent. I have no idea how Portuguese feels to Spanish speakers or vice versa, but here's an example of modern Scots from Wikipedia. I'm curious how it compares.

(Edit: And here's a spoken example - https://youtu.be/am1MCJsEGYA)

> Noo the nativitie o' Jesus Christ was this gate: whan his mither Mary was mairry't till Joseph, 'or they cam thegither, she was fund wi' bairn o' the Holie Spirit. Than her guidman, Joseph, bein an upricht man, and no desirin her name sud be i' the mooth o' the public, was ettlin to pit her awa' hidlins.

>But as he had thir things in his mind, see! an Angel o' the Lord appear't to him by a dream, sayin, "Joseph, son o' Dauvid, binna feared to tak till ye yere wife, Mary; for that whilk is begotten in her is by the Holie Spirit.

> "And she sall bring forth a son, and ye sal ca' his name Jesus; for he sal save his folk frae their sins."

> Noo, a' this was dune, that it micht come to pass what was said by the Lord throwe the prophet,

>"Tak tent! a maiden sal be wi' bairn, and sal bring forth a son; and they wull ca' his name Emmanuel," whilk is translatit, "God wi' us." Sae Joseph, comin oot o' his sleep, did as the Angel had bidden him, and took till him his wife.

> And leev'd in continence wi' her till she had brocht forth her firstborn son; and ca'd his name Jesus.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#217

Post by MrDresden »

I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english.

Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#218

Post by noodleman »

arcticfox wrote: post #114
lolinder wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…

Probably not as absurd as you think. I reckon if you dropped an American in a random town in Scotland (or even a northern English town, for that matter), they would also need to use very broken English and hand gestures to communicate as well. Glaswegian or Geordie is near incomprehensible to RP speaking Brits, yet alone to an American who's only exposure to Scottish is Mel Gibson as William Wallace.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#219

Post by llm_trw »

jmclnx wrote: post #128
llm_trw wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to Russian, German or French?

All 3 languages have a bit more letters that English. Some of those language's letters are marked with inflections. Plus the first computers used only Upper Case Letters which were designed similar to how Ancient Latin was carve letters in stone. So it was far easier to design a printers, storage, punch cards for when you only care about 26 letters and 10 numbers and a few punctuation marks.

There is no difference between 26 and 30 letters.

The backspace was used in English for the same purpose in the same period.

There is literally no reason other than luck that the Lingua Franca of computer science is English instead of German or Russian.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#220

Post by Liquid_Fire »

brigandish wrote: post #98
dreamcompiler wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them. Kanji is a very different story of course.

There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of peop…

I can accept ふいんき as an exception, but for 原因 that's just a consequence of the rules for how to pronounce ん, which depends on the surrounding sounds (it's not quite い either). I wouldn't really call it an exception. Consider 一千円, 禁煙 etc all of which are pronounced like that.
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