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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#231

Post by cynicalpeace »

basementcat wrote: post #80
cynicalpeace wrote: post #45

I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a n…

Is hitchhiking still … awkward in China? My understanding is hitchhiking was more "accepted" in Japan and the West.

Correct, but who cares lol. I did it and came out a better man.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#232

Post by cynicalpeace »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #230
gomox wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. You owe us at least one fun story from mainland China in 2019.

My next goal was Panzhihua, in Sichuan province. I hitched a ride (I can't remember where) with a group who invited me to a party. I was 21 and they were like late 20s. I graciously accepted their invitation, on the condition that they would take me back to the highway a few hours before sunset. After a fun few hours in the car, we arrive at the party destination- a beautiful plantation of rice paddies and fruit tree…

Also, it was actually 2018, not 2019. Off by 1 error, sorry.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#233

Post by ozmodiar »

geokon wrote: post #200
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…

> It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are flue…

This jives with my experience as well. Chinese has a ton of near homophones that are distinguished by tone. One interesting result of this is that Chinese speakers seem to hate hate hate accents, even just from other parts of China. I hear because it's just mentally taxing to listen to.

Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#234

Post by cynicalpeace »

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?

Learn how to point at something and ask "how do you say?" This will get you way further.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#235

Post by emblaegh »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #215
emblaegh wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I was responding to the assertion that writing Chinese using an alphabet would render the text incomprehensible, not arguing that China or Japan should switch over.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#236

Post by anthk »

School-Cotton wrote: post #213
jmclnx wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

So it's Spanish; but ñ might be decompossed as ny or nn (as in the Medieval times, ñ was nn). But 'connotación' would be fucked...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#237

Post by alentred »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #45

I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a n…

Curiously, French is also good at being "pronounced how its written", but horrible the other way around, writing down what you hear.

With only a few exceptions, you can always read out loud a written word. There is quite a lot of rules, but they are rather strict. Once you know them, you are good to go and read everything out loud.

But if you want to learn French by "listening and looking up the words in a dictionary" - good luck with that. There are multiple ways to write down the same sounds. You hear [ku] and it can be "coup", "cou", "coût"...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#238

Post by kaashif »

School-Cotton wrote: post #212
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?

This isn't language, it's accent, but in America the vast majority of speakers merge lots of vowels - cot/caught are merged, Mary/marry/merry are merged.

It certainly does simplify pronunciation.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#239

Post by CorrectHorseBat »

mbivert wrote: post #205
CorrectHorseBat wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 et…

>But the fact that there are sound components isn't contradictory with them being also semantic

No, I mean only sound, not semantic.

>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.

You're making a very unfair comparaison, the average ancient Greek did know even less about politics than we did. I don't follow your conclusion at all.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#240

Post by lolinder »

ii41 wrote: post #172
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.

Here in China, linguists consider the different Western "languages" to be dialects, and believe that the Western governments, for political reasons, make people think they speak different languages than their neighbors, so that they cannot unite. I'm just joking, but what you say is as absurd as my joke. Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons. A…

> Western linguists don't consider the dialects different languages. If they do, they do it for political reasons.

Western linguists generally view the concept of a "language" as being a political one more than a linguistic one, and so rather than quibble about definitions they just use whichever word the people who speak the language/dialect would use. For example, from a book about Chinese dialects [0]:

> The debate as to whether or not the varieties of speech used by the Chinese should be classified as separate languages or dialects of one language is a difficult one, with reasons on both sides. The main criterion according to which some scholars tend to use the English term 'language' for the varieties of Chinese, is the lack of mutual intelligibility between the various forms of speech, the fact that the "various 'Chinese dialects' are as diverse as the several Romance languages". On the other hand, since there are no extra-linguistic (political, historical, geographical, cultural) reasons to treat these dialects as individual languages, the tradition is to call them dialects of Chinese.

The Chinese language varieties are dialects because it is politically expedient for them to be so. The Western Romance languages are languages because it is politically expedient for them to be. Linguists shrug and move on to more interesting (to them) questions.

[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=lCgnrA7Ke3QC&pg=PA1&source...

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