Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

If English was written like Chinese (1999)

zompist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 312 posts

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#61

Post by robomartin »

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…

If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#63

Post by PaulHoule »

raincole wrote: post #26
rahimnathwani wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana. If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write: A) Churchill B) 丘吉尔 But they will never write: C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B) I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).

The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was not invented to spell foregin words.

I understand it they incorporate foreign words by matching up with Chinese characters bearing the matching syllables with some preference for preserving semantics, repetition, and an implied semantic anyway that is in the consciousness of the reader for either the native or foreign word: it must matter that a person’s name is spelled “stream creek creek” but in the end it is best kept in 中文.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#64

Post by PaulHoule »

brazzy wrote: post #31
PaulHoule wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese char…

> First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters that matched the syllables of Japanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.

Thanks for the correction!

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#65

Post by gerdesj »

gpvos wrote: post #53
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.

On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English.

When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#66

Post by justsomehnguy »

resolutebat wrote: post #37
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”

A luminary icon much like Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yerbouti.

Just yesterday I found out why there was a fine German gentleman in Stunts/4D Sports Driving

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#67

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them.

Kanji is a very different story of course.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#68

Post by gerdesj »

syntaxing wrote: post #56
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 natio…

"unified the language". I think you mean script, rather than language, given the plurality of those extant even today.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#69

Post by localfirst »

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…

this was a big reason why Korean alphabet was invented because the literacy was so poor for the reasons you mentioned.

Lot of terms/loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you'd have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.

Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#70

Post by Aloha »

raincole wrote: post #51
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?

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

"A language is a dialect with an army and navy"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Post reply on HN