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If English were written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#31

Post by muddyrivers »

visarga wrote: post #19
wodenokoto wrote: post #2

This article is actually a lot better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time pr…

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese."

We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you put a lot of practices. It escalates to another level to speak a whole sentence, that is, a sequence of sounds. That is why it is easy to tell if a person is a native speaker of a language in most cases.

It is true that Indo-European languages are difficult for Japanese and Chinese to learn. It is due to other reasons, which would be a long answer.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#32

Post by yorwba »

drhodes wrote: post #15
WalterBright wrote: post #7

The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)

An icon? no. There are however, online hanzi dictionaries where the user draws a character, here's one: http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home See the paintbrush next to the magnifying glass in the search field.

Also not for icons but for math symbols: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

Really useful when you want to use "that squiggly thingy" but don't know the TeX command.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#33

Post by visarga »

muddyrivers wrote: post #31
visarga wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time pr…

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese." We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you…

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English because their brains are trained with much fewer possible syllable sounds and they can't make the jump.

But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them. Being limited to much fewer ideographs you can memorize, you are also limited to fewer sounds you can use. On the other hand, with English, after 26 letters you can read any combination of them, and they form many more possible sounds. So you learn to make all those sounds as a kid. Even if you come from another phonetic language you will probably have a similarly diverse sound vocabulary which will help you transition to English.

So, memory limitations -> fewer characters known than possible English syllables -> a kind of mental straightjacket in producing other sounds that fall outside the allowed ones in their native language -> difficulty in learning English -> cultural isolation. Sad story.

Just look up Japanese people who have learned English from grade 1 to 12, and see how great their pronunciation is. It's so damn hard for them to make the sounds.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#34

Post by millcoo »

kwhitefoot wrote: post #5

Is this meant to be serious (surely not) or rather like Mark Twain's take on spelling reform?

As regards Twain: the take you are thinking of was probably not written by him, but wrongly attributed to him after his death.

He did, however, write an article[0] about spelling reform later in life, in which he sincerely advocated the use of a simplified "longhand, written with the shorthand alphabet unreduced." That is, he proposed the use of Isaac Pitman's phonographic alphabet—the basis of what was then the most popular shorthand in the English language—without the brief forms, phrasings, and abbreviations that allow stenographers to write (by omission) at the sound of speech, but slow down the reading back of what they've written; in Twain's preferred shorthand, every sound would be on the page.

[0] - https://books.google.com/books?id=KoBYAAAAYAAJ&dq=what%20is%...

(Unfortunately, the Project Gutenberg transcription of this essay does not include the plates of Twain's shorthand. This is why I've linked the Google Books scan.)

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#35

Post by w1ntermute »

WalterBright wrote: post #7

The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)

This is already encouraged in the latest iMessage, which highlights emojifiable words and makes it easy to emojify them: http://i.imgur.com/r26ABsw.jpg

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#36

Post by yorwba »

gfaure wrote: post #16
labster wrote: post #14

[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix -tion . That's what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7? Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.

That is a part of the analogy which definitely applies -- Chinese script (even Simplified) often completely ignores Huffman coding-like principles. Otherwise we wouldn't have words like 繼續 "continue" (41 strokes).

For comparison, the letters in "continue" have approximately 15 strokes total.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#37

Post by leemailll »

Kirth wrote: post #30
WalterBright wrote: post #7

The increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)

I'm not sure where you've seen this "increasing use of icons and emoji". When I encounter people (this is pretty much limited to teenagers) use emoji, they have very little communicative value. In the modern era the use of pictographs has become Chinese's Achilles' heel: the hanzi are not sortable. The very things that define the Chinese are what makes it stupidly difficult to get computers to grok the language.

By which way you mean Chinese is not sortable?

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#38

Post by justinpombrio »

bleachedsleet wrote: post #17
jl6 wrote: post #12

What a breath of fresh air is a 1999-era web page. Fast loading, simple, readable.

...horrid color schemes, no support for mobile devices...yeah, what a breath of fresh air.

I'm curious: what do you mean by "no support for mobile devices"? It loads on my phone and is readable; so you must mean something beyond that?

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#39

Post by yoz-y »

Gracana wrote: post #20
bleachedsleet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...horrid color schemes, no support for mobile devices...yeah, what a breath of fresh air.

The background is light colored and the foreground is 100% black, and the text is full width and large on my phone. What would mobile support mean, a hamburger menu and no zooming? No thanks.

Luckily there's the reader mode. Those fonts are tiny and the background is too dark. But since there aren't any JS tricks this works very well. thumbs up.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#40

Post by leemailll »

visarga wrote: post #33
muddyrivers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese." We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you…

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English…

I love hacker news. Some personal anecdotes soon summaries into neuroscience theory, and sticks to it
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