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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#31

Post by brazzy »

PaulHoule wrote: post #20
pavel_lishin wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.

In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese char…

> First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese

No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters that matched the syllables of Japanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana

It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#32

Post by t-3 »

justsomehnguy wrote: post #5
ljsprague wrote: post #3

[flagged]

Pacific Ocean.

For a non-native speaker, sure, that's not obvious. For a native, especially if they're well read and have a decent vocabulary or have studied any Latin it's just fine. The many styles of englishizations of foreign words (romanization just doesn't quite fit here) and obsolete-in-terms-of-pronunciation spellings provide valuable context for pronunciation and meaning to people who have sufficient familiarity.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#33

Post by brazzy »

> I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system. All of the concepts apply

Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#34

Post by hnlmorg »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.

Asia have a massive booming tech industry. They always have done.

Surely you’ve heard of brands like Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Samsung, Huawei, Asus, and Acer… to name but a small few?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#35

Post by beryilma »

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 surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#36

Post by eob »

vunderba wrote: post #24
PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc. The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think. I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with…

This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence.

This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#37

Post by resolutebat »

Eric_WVGG wrote: post #14

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun , a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”

A luminary icon much like Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yerbouti.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#40

Post by llm_trw »

jmclnx wrote: post #7

There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.

As opposed to Russian, German or French?
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