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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#291

Post by simiones »

russdill wrote: post #284
simiones wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What I've found with some cursory googling is mostly place names, which I agree often have major differences between spelling and pronunciation. Even there, many of the examples on the Wikipedia page are still plausible spellings for the pronunciation, especially given how ambiguous English spelling is in the first place. Others seem more like nicknames that have essentially replaced the original full name of the place, while the full name is conserved in the spelling.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#292

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

samus wrote: post #258
DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 vari…

> 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.

Standard German is not that old. It was largely developed in the 19th Century, and it was not until the 20th Century that most people in Germany were able to speak it. Standard German is also heavily based on a regional dialect of German (in particular, central German dialects).

Standard Chinese is a product of the early-to-mid 20th Century, so about 50-100 years younger than Standard German. This just reflects the fact that German unification was in the mid-1800s, while China's modernization occurred in the early 20th Century.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#293

Post by kayodelycaon »

kaashif wrote: post #282
kayodelycaon wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Some D and T sounds.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#294

Post by gs17 »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #278
gs17 wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly. Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differentl…

Pinyin

Yes, anyone can sightread pinyin after an hour or two, but turning everything into it won't really help me learn to read Chinese as the language is actually used.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#295

Post by sajforbes »

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-...

Curious to know how you think it's possible that Chinese people are able to speak with each other if you think writing their language phonetically would render it incomprehensible.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#296

Post by Anthony-G »

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…

I hitch-hiked around Europe in the mid-nineties (when English wasn’t commonly spoken in Central/Eastern Europe) so I appreciated this story. I stayed in a hostel most nights (unless I was offered a place to stay) so my experience was nowhere near as adventurous as yours. Thanks for the anecdote.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#297

Post by latentsea »

fenomas wrote: post #285
latentsea wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 memoriz…

So... how do Koreans and Korean learners do it? Not to mention other languages that used to use Kanji but dropped it?

You have to imagine the entire education system and everyone in it got changed to Kana only and Kanji was subsequently removed from modern literature from that point onward. That's the thought experiment. It was even tried successfully in places...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#298

Post by gerdesj »

samus wrote: post #204
gerdesj wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That sounds like a carefully worded response and I will respect it as such.

Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#299

Post by mcmoor »

simiones wrote: post #290
mcmoor wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Ah so it's about onyomi and kunyomi (Chinese and Japanese reading)? It screws me up sometimes too but there's only two choices. What I heard lots of people cries about sometimes is the counter words, that's indeed so many, so I'm referring to that instead.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#300

Post by PinkSheep »

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…

Not Chinese, but I might call myself trilingual and this is exactly something that has wondered me. Language "pair": ru>de>en

In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net.

It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts.

The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two.

English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies.

Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent.

Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.

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