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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#41

Post by saagarjha »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

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…

Or romance

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#42

Post by noirdujour »

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 speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.

As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.

https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#43

Post by g9yuayon »

PaulHoule wrote: post #2

I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unre…

Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounification of verbs, something that traditional Chinese never had. In contrast, younger generations love to say Chinese equivalent to something like "do improvement" instead of "improve" (进行改进，instead of 改进, even though it is still considered bad writing style.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#44

Post by aikinai »

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…

This is a great explanation of important points many people fail to recognize. Thank you!

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#45

Post by cynicalpeace »

I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.

A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.

A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.

English is also bad at this, ironically.

Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#46

Post by j7ake »

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…

My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing.

However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#47

Post by rat87 »

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…

> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not.

English? Do you mean the UK? US?

My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#48

Post by seanmcdirmid »

rat87 wrote: post #47
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…

> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. English? Do you mean the UK? US? My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?

newbie take: there is one Chinese language

intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages

expert take: there is one Chinese language

There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#49

Post by akavi »

brazzy wrote: post #33

> 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…

Chinese has fewer inflections than English, but does have 儿 as a nominalizer (and one which is quite productive in northern dialects)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#50

Post by chuckadams »

PaulHoule wrote: post #21
chuckadams wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.

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…

Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.
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