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Just 'English with Hanzi'

oldnorthwhale.com

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Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#31

Post by selimthegrim »

contingencies wrote: post #21
cwnyth wrote: post #3

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional…

Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and lin…

I wonder if that’s what led to original Assamese dying out.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#32

Post by krackers »

canjobear wrote: post #25

The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.

It's AI generated, so it's no wonder the facts are a bit off.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#33

Post by QuesnayJr »

krackers wrote: post #32
canjobear wrote: post #25

The article is mistaken on a number of linguistic points. For example 们 was used to mark plurals way before some 19th century translation, if you look at things that were written in the vernacular and not in Classical Chinese.

It's AI generated, so it's no wonder the facts are a bit off.

AI tends towards regurgitating conventional wisdom. I suspect if it was written using AI it required some bullying to get it to go alone.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#35

Post by em-bee »

egeozcan wrote: post #17

I'm not one of those AI haters, and as long as you give it enough love, I have nothing against the usage of AI in blog posts. Actually, I'm even quite disappointed that I'm not allowed use AI to correct my grammar here anymore. That said, this has so much fill-words and weird section titles that reading becomes torture. Not to mention the lack of sources.

incidentally i just made this argument in another forum:

whether a text has substance isn't important to me. what is more important is whether the text reflects the author's thoughts, whether it is original or authentic. an AI-generated text doesn't do that. i want to talk to a real person, not someone enhanced by AI. (let me get this out of the way, that's why i also don't like makeup. apart from special cases or situations, i consider the necessity of makeup to be able to present oneself in public like a mask that hides the real person behind it.)

when i engage with a topic, my engagement is with the person behind the text, not the text itself. if someone writes their texts with AI, then i can no longer recognize the real person behind it. i can no longer see which arguments in the text are important to the author, and what are the author's own opinions.

the purpose of a dialogue with a person is to get to know that person better and to develop a shared understanding of a topic. that's not possible with an AI-generated text. i can neither get to know the person behind it, nor can i see how their understanding develops. there's a high risk that the person doesn't understand everything the AI says.

(this text was originally written in german, then machine translated but manually edited for style (replaced expressions that i would not use myself))

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#36

Post by dwohnitmok »

contingencies wrote: post #23
yorwba wrote: post #20

This article seems to completely ignore the fact that languages change over time on their own and attributes all differences between Literary Chinese and Modern Standard Chinese to contact with European languages, which is rather excessive. Lu Xun was interested in translation, but he was even more interested in writing for the common folk, i.e. not in some relexified foreign language. There are definitely some innov…

Fun fact: Luxun proposed dropping Hanzi entirely. The communist party conveniently forgets to teach that part to the youth because it doesn't fit their nationalist narrative.

We talked about this years ago. This is very much taught in the PRC (and I believe Taiwan for that matter). I specifically gave you examples of standardized tests that go over this material.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33312227

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#37

Post by raincole »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #36
contingencies wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: Luxun proposed dropping Hanzi entirely. The communist party conveniently forgets to teach that part to the youth because it doesn't fit their nationalist narrative.

We talked about this years ago. This is very much taught in the PRC (and I believe Taiwan for that matter). I specifically gave you examples of standardized tests that go over this material. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33312227

Luxun's works and opinions are far, far less well known in Taiwan than in the mainland.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#38

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

contingencies wrote: post #21
cwnyth wrote: post #3

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” Two observations. One, I see this in Thai, too, which might yet preserve that earlier syntax. ไม่เผ็ด ไม่กิน ("No spicy, no eat") is perfectly fine in Thai, though it is possible (and very unidiomatic) to create a formal conditional…

Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and lin…

> written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred

I agree that Thai is in a completely different language family than Chinese, but I don't see what this quoted bit has to do with anything. (And surely it would apply just as well to their neighbors to the west, who do speak a Sino-Tibetan language)

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#39

Post by BigTTYGothGF »

selimthegrim wrote: post #31
contingencies wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tai languages are a completely different language family to Chinese, written using Indian abugidas and largely prisoner to a confluence of religious affectation, court ritual and the popular language of the peasantry as popular literacy never occurred. By contrast, Chinese has an uninterrupted written history spanning thousands of years with world leading poetry, philosophy and science. In terms of historical and lin…

I wonder if that’s what led to original Assamese dying out.

Wiki says Assamese has 15 million speakers. Maybe it "died out" in the same way old English did?

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#40

Post by connorboyle »

raincole wrote: post #16
raincole wrote: post #11

> Traditional Chinese relies on context: “Rain heavy, not go”, “雨大，不去了”. > Modern Chinese demands explicit logic: “Because the rain is heavy, therefore I will not go.””因为雨下得很大，所以我决定不去了。” No, what? Most native speakers today definitely say things like “雨大，不去了” in daily conversations. > Take his most famous poem, Saying Good-bye to Cambridge Again (再别康桥). In Classical Chinese, a farewell to a river might be compressed…

> The constant use of “I” (Wo) is a modern invention; classical poetry usually omits the subject to create a universal feeling. 我(Wo, "I") has been constantly used for a very very long time. Just less in poetry. For example, this is from early 19th century[0]: >> 嫣娘答應著，出來三步兩步，連忙跑到園裡，一進門就高聲說道：「 我 回來了， 我 可也回來了！」 This is from Journey to The West, 16th century: >> 我 等在此，恐作耍成真，或驚動人王，或有禽王、獸王認此犯頭，說 我們 操兵造反，興師來相殺，汝等都是竹竿木刀，如何…

>> 我等在此...

This is also an example of a plural suffix ("-等") which the post author paints as English/Western influence (specifically "-们")

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