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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#51

Post by raincole »

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?

The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#52

Post by ThePowerOfFuet »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #48
rat87 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

[flagged]

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#53

Post by gpvos »

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…

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#54

Post by dllthomas »

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?

It seems pretty well known that Mandarin and Cantonese are different languages. It turns out there are a whole bunch.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#55

Post by dllthomas »

bad_username wrote: post #30
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”

Reminds me of Antonio Stella Bottom Tile ( https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 )

... and the bard Elron Hu, from a PKD story.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#56

Post by syntaxing »

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…

It’s worth noting that the first emperor of China was the one that unified the language. The country was at war for about 250 years during the warring state period. One of the main pushes to maintain unification was standardized writing system throughout the country, increase of commerce, and unified monetary system.

Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#57

Post by latentsea »

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…

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#58

Post by latentsea »

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…

It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#59

Post by mcmoor »

cynicalpeace wrote: post #45

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 n…

> English is also bad at this, ironically https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#60

Post by canjobear »

akavi wrote: post #49
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)

Also -们 as a pluralizer on pronouns and animate nouns.
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