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Just 'English with Hanzi'

oldnorthwhale.com

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Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#41

Post by justaboutanyone »

contingencies wrote: post #30
canjobear wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more than that: Romanization was the official goal of the Communist party until Stalin talked them out of it! https://faroutliers.com/2004/04/24/how-stalin-and-the-cultur...

Nice! Didn't know that. I wonder if they Romanized transliterated 'Vissarionovich' as a test case. Regardless, with pinyin they certainly did a better job than the Taiwanese! Pretty chilling evidence for the emergence of post-revolution Mandarin as newspeak, though. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak

While pinyin might be "better", there's still a lot of room for something better than it

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#42

Post by raincole »

connorboyle wrote: post #40
raincole wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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")

Even 們 was used in Journey to The West all the time. I really don't know where the author got the idea that plural suffix is something from English. Perhaps this whole article is AI-generated.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#43

Post by robot-wrangler »

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…

> I think most of the claims about grammar are false.

This part about "forced the English plural We [..] injecting mandatory number-specificity where context once sufficed" really struck me. Sounds cool for poetry to be ambiguous about this, but really now, how is an advanced society handling the practical matters of writing contracts and keeping records without it

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#44

Post by naniwaduni »

picture wrote: post #6

> 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。” Interestingly the "traditional grammar" is much more conversational and natural, while the latter is expected for modern written work.

The latter sounds absurd, nearly as ridiculous as the English it was translated from.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#45

Post by remywang »

There's so much wrong with this article. For starters, no one speaks Classical Chinese/Wenyanwen. Not now, not ever. It was designed for writing only, and the conciseness was to preserve bamboo (but stayed because it conveyed a sense of authority). Most importantly, modern Chinese remains challenging after all of the "westernization" events used as examples in the article, and the difficulty is not just because you get a new set of characters. On top of the writing system, you need to learn the tones, new phonemes like x, zh, q, and an entirely new vocabulary that shares very little cognates with English. And the grammar is different, with Chinese relying on much less conduction and requires much more context to understand.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#46

Post by try-working »

> 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。”

I would say "下雨了，我不去“ or something like that. The second example is perhaps what a language learner would say in order to "speak correctly", but nobody actually speaks or writes like that.

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#49

Post by restalis »

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…

"to Thai, squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are all ปลาหมึก. For English speakers, those are similar things, but all clearly distinct. But for Thai speakers, they're all ปลาหมึก, just different types."

Then, ปลาหมึก = coleoidea? If so, the squid, octopus, and cuttlefish are (in English and many other languages) all just types of coleoidea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleoidea

Re: Just 'English with Hanzi'

#50

Post by contingencies »

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

You seem to be conflating "someone taught it at a university" with the apparently well evidenced view that Lu Xun's overwhelming coverage in popular media and secondary schooling neglects to point out his anti-character stance.
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