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China’s tyranny of characters

economist.com

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Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#51

Post by est »

tokenadult wrote: post #32

Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How yo…

Cantonese to Mandarin is like Ebonics to English.

https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D....

In your example:

> 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram 時，就寫為「渠係荷蘭礮隊副隊長」。

TL:DR Cantonese is Middle Age "Mandarin" in disguise, plus some Ancient Vietnamese dialects.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#52

Post by panglott »

wolfgke wrote: post #43
guard-of-terra wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"A language is a dialect with an army and a navy" To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language.

> To me, any non-mutually-intelligible dialect is in position to be called a language. The problem is that there is often a continuum of dialects where dialects that are near each other in this continuum are mutually intelligible, but those that are further apart are not. Where do you set the boundary between languages and dialects there. P.S.: I'm not a linguist but because of this fact I would consider to define la…

Conversely, the opposite happens as well, where people have higher mutual intelligibility of different language families than other dialects within their own language. I've heard of this in places like India, where "Hindi" is a standard language of a massive dialect chain that is spoken next to various Dravidian languages. A Hindi speaker might be better able to understand a Dravidian speaker from the same city than a Hindi speaker from a distant city.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#53

Post by jbooth »

wyuenho wrote: post #47

David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics. Case in point: Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japa…

I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin.

That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#54

Post by panglott »

Chathamization wrote: post #40
gbog wrote: post #33

"the boxy prison of Chinese characters" What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over t…

Only a tiny minority of Chinese characters are pictographic, and most characters have a phonetic element. You'll have a better chance guessing the pronunciation of a random Chinese character than guessing the meaning of a random Chinese character.

The value of iconocity in the more pictographic characters is more of a mnemonic tool. It's much easier to remember the meaning of the more pictographic ones.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#55

Post by panglott »

"the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world."

This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#56

Post by gbog »

ralfd wrote: post #37
gbog wrote: post #33

"the boxy prison of Chinese characters" What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over t…

I guess it relates to this: "It is one of many slang or dialect words and phrases that you can say but not write using Chinese characters."

This is not true, Chinese people are very able to find Chinese characters to express slang or dialect words, they do it all the time, and the case of M. Chan's hair is a rare exception.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#57

Post by footpath »

andyjdavis wrote: post #12
cheatdeath wrote: post #4

In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.

Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters. Links for those unfamiliar with those two things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

Although in the case of Hong Kong, neither Pinyin input nor Zhuyin input are likely to be used, as both are based on the phonetics of standard Mandarin Chinese. There are alternative input methods that are shape-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...) such as the Cangjie, and Cantonese-only input methods.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#58

Post by spacehunt »

defen wrote: post #11
jonathankoren wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.

It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).

We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead of the correct "墨丸", "腩肉", "三小辣" ("cuttlefish balls", "pork belly", "3rd little spicy").

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#59

Post by footpath »

Immortalin wrote: post #45
tokenadult wrote: post #32

Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How yo…

The examples you gave are in Traditional Chinese.

Which doesn't really matter in this case. The character for "he" in vernacular Cantonese is "佢", which isn't used at all in Mandarin.

The characters for "don't know how" in vernacular Cantonese are written as "唔識" in traditional Chinese or "唔识" in simplified Chinese, which are used in Mandarin, but never in this context (as the example given, the common way of saying "don't know how" in Mandarin is "不會" in traditional Chinese or "不会" in simplified Chinese").

In a sense, the relationship between various Chinese "dialects" and standard Mandarin Chinese is similar to the Scots language's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) relationship to English.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#60

Post by Retric »

pipio21 wrote: post #35

It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, c…

They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet.

Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.

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