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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#251

Post by kayodelycaon »

kaashif wrote: post #238
School-Cotton wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is dependent on regional accents. For my Midwestern accent cot and caught are most definitely not merged.

However I did notice that in Seattle, no one can hear my name properly due to a merged consonant.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#252

Post by lukeschlather »

omnicognate wrote: post #216
arcticfox wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

As a native speaker of English and having conversational ability in Spanish I would describe both Scots and Portuguese as separate languages. Portuguese feels like it has as much in common with Spanish as Italian or French to me, and I can't remotely carry on a conversation in Portuguese. (Or Scots really, though with the somewhat mutual intelligibility I can speak English or Spanish and maybe that's workable, but I'm definitely not going to understand the Portuguese.)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#253

Post by zumu »

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.

If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling.

The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#254

Post by perilunar »

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…

> English is also bad at this, ironically

Yes. English desperately needs spelling reform.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#255

Post by mmis1000 »

latentsea wrote: post #167
pcwalton wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder whether kana might be slightly easier to read if ん were written as part of the preceding syllable like it is in hangul.

Kana would be slightly easier to read if we spent as much time reading in Kana as we have in Kanji. Hangul has some funny rules around patchim that need to be memorized. Kana does a great job avoiding this, so on balance kana is probably just fine compared to Hangul.

I don't think so. Kana just don't have enough entropy compares to Kanji. A kanji can be compose with up to twenty strokes with high variety of stroke patterns. Those excessive complexity make it identifiable even in extreme situations. (Blurry or tainted or whatever situation). In some case, a kanji with half of its size masked still be decoded without any ambiguity. But this will never work with an voice based language.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#256

Post by dfxm12 »

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…

Given the context, you'd probably have an easier time talking Portuguese with someone from Vigo than, say, Juarez, but even then, that might depend on you not having a Brazilian dialect...

After all, Spanish & Brazilian speakers in the new world have their own dialects (not languages).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#258

Post by samus »

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…

There is Luxembourgish, which is basically the local dialect codified as one of the official languages of Luxembourg. It's otherwise perfectly understandable for people from adjacent parts of Belgium and Germany. But I guess the locals would see that it really is almost the same.

Similarly to Chinese, Germans see themselves as mostly the same culture. Standarddeutsch is pretty much a fusion between the different varieties and has evolved along with them for a long time; differently from 普通話, which is much younger and the standardized form of a northern variety of Chinese. Germans also really cling to their dialects, and Switzerland and Austria both use slightly different versions of Standarddeutsch.

The opposite example are the varieties of Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin, which are quite inter-intelligible, but which are considered as different languages by their speakers.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#259

Post by vunderba »

pezezin wrote: post #189
ChainOfFools wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which is what every language with an alphabetic writing does, and it works just fine. It is not "another layer of cognitive load", Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji, and did not learn to visually parse (except very briefly as a young grade school child) nearly all of the words that you see regularly as logograms first, and groups of sounds second, the experience would be akin to reading English whi…

> Disagree. Once you get accustomed to reading kanji And how many years does it take to? What about words that you have never seen before? What about ambiguous or uncommon readings that require furigana even for fully educated adults? As I said in the sibling comment, I live in Japan and every Japanese person I have met complaints about the massive effort it took them to learn how to read and write.

Sounds like an education problem. Traditional Chinese, which is the defacto language used in Taiwan doesn't even have any comparable phonetic alphabet (beyond a phonetic pronunciation alphabet in the form of bopomofo) such as hiragana and katakana.

It's effectively "all kanji" as it were, and yet Taiwan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world, and I never met any Taiwanese when I lived there (for years) that complained that Chinese was too difficult.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#260

Post by vunderba »

latentsea wrote: post #173
lbotos wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for clarifying. I don't disagree that Korean does seem easier, but I still think you are slightly confusing what the GP is trying to say. I've never seen "仲人" before but I'm pretty sure it's some kind of person. https://jisho.org/search/%E4%BB%B2%E4%BA%BA 仲 go-between (which I never saw before but I knew the radicals as "person middle" but didn't know what they were combined, but this one made great logical se…

Being able to guess the meaning of new words was neat earlier on in the Japanese journey, but in the end the problem of "gah but the how hell do you actually read this?" was a greater detriment than that was a benefit. In contrast if I saw なこうど I could at least be perfectly confident I was reading it correctly even if I didn't know what it meant. Sometimes I may be able to guess from the context at least partially wh…

I vastly prefer the ability to potentially infer the rough meaning of an unrecognized word, then the ability to pronounce it.

As an ESL CELTA certified teacher for years, their rubric also seems to back this up in order of relative importance: it's meaning, then form, then finally pronunciation.

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