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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#281

Post by localfirst »

latentsea wrote: post #101
grishka wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the existing word "puck", as in hockey puck?

"copy" would also become ambiguous with coffee :)

i was thinking about this for a long time

but some sort of indicator, maybe an accent or symbol to indicate the F sound

this would radically expand the number of pronouncable words in Korean.

with the goal being able to describe phonetically as accurately as possible any spoke word in human history.

Scandinavian languages need not apply. There should be no alphabet that describes the sound of spitting.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#282

Post by kaashif »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #251
kaashif wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which consonant merger is that?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#283

Post by [deleted] »

latentsea wrote: post #269
vunderba wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) th…

In Chinese tho with extremely rare exceptions all the characters have only one reading. Japanese has onyomi and kunyomi. The onyomi also come from different periods in Chinese so there's multiple onyomi for most Kanji. Then you get two Kanji words that come in all varieties. Most are onyomi + onyomi, but you get some that are onyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + onyomi. There's also not really any solid…

[deleted]

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#284

Post by russdill »

simiones wrote: post #250
russdill wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pronouncing two identical sequences of characters differently depending on dialect doesn't appear to be a problem in English.

The dialects of English (such as Scots) most certainly do not spell words the same as a general rule. The fact that there are slight pronunciation differences between different accents of standard English is not at all the same as writing entirely different words with the same sequence of characters. For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih n…

The influence of loan words on English give vastly different pronunciations of words even regionally. For extreme examples see "shibboleth", especially in the UK.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#285

Post by fenomas »

latentsea wrote: post #275
fenomas wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's the same with homophones in any language, It really isn't. In conversation fluent JP speakers tend to avoid compounds that would be ambiguous, or add distinguishers like "学校の校歌". Honestly, try converting a paragraph of text from a newspaper to all kana, and having a native speaker read it.

Try have them be educated in a kana only system and then have them try read it. They'd probably do just fine. You'd expect anything you've spend a decade doing to be easier than the thing you've spent much less time doing. かんちょうが かんちょうで かんちょうに かんちょう された。 Is probably a sentence that definitely requires Kanji to understand the precise meaning given how many homophones かんちょう has, but it's a toy example.

> Try have them be educated in a kana only system and then have them try read it.

I can't, because there are no native speakers who learned that way, as I'm sure you know :D

But there are many learners like that, and my experience in Japan is that anyone who doesn't learn kanji has a very low ceiling on their vocabulary, even if they use the language daily for decades.

Because the reality is that it's hard to memorize 1K kanji, but if you do it then it's relatively easy to learn 10K+ compound words. Without kanji, to reach fluency somebody would have to memorize 5-10 completely unrelated meanings for "kouka", then 5 more for kakou, and so on for every combination of common single-kanji readings.

I mean - if you're in Japan, you surely know people who try to get by without kanji. Do you know any who've reached fluency? Like who could use and understand 5-6 different "kouka"s without any idea of the kanji they use? If your premise here is true then people like that should be the norm, since learning would be so much easier for them compared to those wasting their time on kanji?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#286

Post by pezezin »

latentsea wrote: post #269
vunderba wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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) th…

In Chinese tho with extremely rare exceptions all the characters have only one reading. Japanese has onyomi and kunyomi. The onyomi also come from different periods in Chinese so there's multiple onyomi for most Kanji. Then you get two Kanji words that come in all varieties. Most are onyomi + onyomi, but you get some that are onyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + kunyomi or kunyomi + onyomi. There's also not really any solid…

And then you have nanori, the non-standard readings used for people and places names that are impossible to read without furigana or already knowing the name. One that really surprised me was a village called 愛子 (a common female name read as "Aiko") near Sendai but in this case read as "Ayashi".

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#287

Post by qalmakka »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #272
qalmakka wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am Italian and whenever I go to Spain I usually don't really need to speak English because the languages are close enough that you can go by by just knowing a handful of basic words (and the Spaniards I meet usually prefer it that way). This is both a blessing and a curse; all Italians I met living in Spain (and viceversa, all Spanish-speakers I met in Italy) tend to have a hard time learning the other language "pr…

The big difference between ES and PT is the accent/pronunciation of letters and matching words. Secondarily, is the differing vocabulary. But a lot of these are still understood as archaic/uncommon alternative words. (see shoen's post below.) So, if you learn the accent of the other language, all of a sudden a large portion of the language is unlocked. This happened to me, almost like a light switch. I don't have a l…

> I don't have a lot of experience with Italian but it seems like the pronunciation is closer to Spanish.

Yeah the phonetics are very close. Castillan has more fricative sounds like [ð], [θ], [x] and [β] and no open vowels, but that's it.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#288

Post by mcmoor »

jameshart wrote: post #245
simiones wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta? Als…

> seemingly completely unrelated number words for different context

I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#289

Post by simiones »

XajniN wrote: post #274
simiones wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Those are language-specific, the common way to write an ordinal (outside of English) is with a dot - 2. = 2nd.

I don't think any "common way" of this kind really exists. In my country, the common way to write "second" ("a doua") is either II or II-a (so using roman numerals). In French, either 2eme or 2e are the common ways. I've never even seen this "2." spelling for ordinals.

Regardless, my point was that Chinese spelling is not as universal as it is made out to be, that different Chinese dialects/languages just use the Standard Chinese spelling, even when it doesn't match their own spoken language, just like a French person using "2nd" to spell "deuxieme".

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#290

Post by simiones »

mcmoor wrote: post #288
jameshart wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta? Als…

> seemingly completely unrelated number words for different context I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.

I think the GP is referring to a different part of the Japanese numbering system: the two different numerals used with different counting words for 1-10; e.g. the fact that you say "muttsu no koto" [6つのこと] for "six things" but "rokko no retasu" [6個のレタス] for "six heads of lettuce".

This is what they are comparing to the difference between "first" and "one" in English, which are obviously two different origin words for the number 1 (unlike sixth and six, where sixth is clearly just derived from six).

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