If English were written like Chinese (1999) • Hacker News Board

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#71

Post by dismantlethesun » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:14 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #33

muddyrivers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese." We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you…

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English…

> It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them

As an aside, one side-benefit of a language that doesn't have so many phenomes is that automatic speech creation is much easier.

That's speech creation, not speech recognition.

Using software to speak Japanese fluently, at a given pitch, with a given emotional context is a solved problem. There's even software that can be used to create singing voices.

It only takes about 1000 recorded sounds to do so. In english, it'd take 10,000 multiplied by the number of emotional contexts and speech patterns you'd like to mimic.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#72

Post by zhte415 » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:24 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #19

wodenokoto wrote: post #2

This article is actually a lot better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time pr…

> on the other hand, in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters

A child exiting reception grade in China, i.e. entering Grade 1, is expected to know 1000-1500 characters. They certainly don't know all combinations of characters these words form, but the learning starts young.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#73

Post by philovivero » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:31 AM UTC

justinpombrio wrote: post #44

visarga wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English…

> But in turn why is it that there are so few syllable sounds in Japanese? It's because each syllable has to have its own ideograph (usually there are multiple ideographs) and you can't easily learn 10000 of them. Please don't make up facts just because they seem plausible to you. A quick internet search reveals that the Japanese language predates any writing system for it: "Before the 4th century AD, the Japanese ha…

I have a couple things to add to this thread, not everything directly related to your comment.

1) Knowing the 26 letters is not remotely enough to be able to read the newspaper in English (earlier commenter made this assertion). Example: "She caught a cough. Such is life and death, dear!" How does knowing the letter "u" help you pronounce half those words? What about "g"? What about "h"? What about even if you put "gh" together? What about "e", "a", and if you shove "ea" together? In this single paragraph I've ballooned the number of letters and letter combinations needed into the 40's, and I've barely just begun. Don't get me started with borrowed words from French and Spanish (c'est la vie!).

2) Your comment: "You should see English speakers try to pronounce Chinese" - From direct first-hand experience, this is tough for a completely different reason than this comment thread is talking about. You've gone off on a tangent here. The reason Chinese is hard for English speakers is that tonality suggests overall sentence semantics, it does not directly affect any single word, whereas tonality affects every single word in Chinese. I thought we were talking about how syllable pronunciations were expressed by the writing system.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#74

Post by rangibaby » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:40 AM UTC

bunderbunder wrote: post #68

rangibaby wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? The word kanji literally means "Chinese characters" lol

My understanding (as a speaker of neither language) is that Japanese usage has diverged a fair bit from Chinese roots. The phonetic bits, for example, are based on how Japanese speakers of the time thought the equivalent Chinese sounded, with allowances for Japanese and Chinese having radically different phonics. And then you do that a few more times because the language both evolved in parallel, and you end up in a…

Japan certainly adapted kanji to fit the Japanese language, but I was not aware of a dispute about the origin of the characters.

Obviously they have diverged; Japan has made efforts to simplify kanji forms, although not to the extent of zh-cn, unless you count hiragana and katakana, which are derived from kanji:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana...

As a side note, I was taught that Japanese "Chinese" readings have more in common with the Chinese spoken at the time than modern Chinese.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#75

Post by rangibaby » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:49 AM UTC

fenomas wrote: post #64

rangibaby wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who? The word kanji literally means "Chinese characters" lol

In that 口 article yesterday, several commenters seemed angry that the author referred to kanji as "Japanese characters". So apparently this is some kind of thing, that some people take seriously. New one on me.

"This is your brain on nationalism"

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#76

Post by dou4cc » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 3:59 AM UTC

gfaure wrote: post #16

labster wrote: post #14

[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix -tion . That's what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7? Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.

That is a part of the analogy which definitely applies -- Chinese script (even Simplified) often completely ignores Huffman coding-like principles. Otherwise we wouldn't have words like 繼續 "continue" (41 strokes).

People like you looking for less strokes in China mix both English and 中文 words in a passage, which is silly in my opinion.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#77

Post by FabHK » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 4:06 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #19

wodenokoto wrote: post #2

This article is actually a lot better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time pr…

It's a remarkable fact, I think, that spoken modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) has only about 400 distinct syllables ignoring tones. With the 4 tones plus neutral pronunciation, there are about 1300, maybe 1500 (including rare ones) distinct syllables. They're basically all of the form

  consonant (optional) + vowel/diphthong + n/ng (optionally)

(typically called "initial + final" in this context).

(Note that older Chinese "dialects" such as Cantonese or Teochew retain many more distinct syllables. For example, the infamous "shi shi shi shi" "poem", consisting only of "shi" sounds in Mandarin (neglecting tones), contains 11 distinct syllables (neglecting tones) in Teochew.)

English or German, on the other hand, have somewhere around 8000 distinct syllables. (Think of "strict", "fractal", "Angstschweiß", "Hampsthwaite", "strengths", etc.)

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#78

Post by FabHK » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 4:09 AM UTC

FabHK wrote: post #77

visarga wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time pr…

It's a remarkable fact, I think, that spoken modern standard Chinese (Mandarin) has only about 400 distinct syllables ignoring tones. With the 4 tones plus neutral pronunciation, there are about 1300, maybe 1500 (including rare ones) distinct syllables. They're basically all of the form consonant (optional) + vowel/diphthong + n/ng (optionally) (typically called "initial + final" in this context). (Note that older Ch…

By the way, you may not have encountered "Hampsthwaite" before, but you probably know how to pronounce it. This doesn't work in Chinese.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#79

Post by fenomas » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 4:17 AM UTC

rangibaby wrote: post #74

bunderbunder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding (as a speaker of neither language) is that Japanese usage has diverged a fair bit from Chinese roots. The phonetic bits, for example, are based on how Japanese speakers of the time thought the equivalent Chinese sounded, with allowances for Japanese and Chinese having radically different phonics. And then you do that a few more times because the language both evolved in parallel, and you end up in a…

Japan certainly adapted kanji to fit the Japanese language, but I was not aware of a dispute about the origin of the characters. Obviously they have diverged; Japan has made efforts to simplify kanji forms, although not to the extent of zh-cn, unless you count hiragana and katakana, which are derived from kanji: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana... As a side note, I was taught that Japanese…

> Japanese "Chinese" readings have more in common with the Chinese spoken at the time than modern Chinese.

Yup. There are even names for the various readings based on which era/dynasty they were borrowed during. E.g. for the readings of 明, "myo" was borrowed first, then "mei" a few centuries later, then "min" most recently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Sino-Japane...

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#80

Post by dilemma » Sun, Aug 21, 2016, 4:25 AM UTC

visarga wrote: post #33

muddyrivers wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese." We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you…

What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them. If you try to see how many possible syllables there are, there would be many thousands. Combinations like "eng" "lish" can't be properly put in Japanese phonetic characters because you can't put "eng" directly, you have to use "en gu ri shu", inserting vowels all over the place. Japanese can't properly learn English…

>What I am saying is that in English, after learning 26 letters, you can read any combination of them.

No. After learning 26 letters you're no better off than before. You can't read, because you don't know the meaning of the words. Vocabulary is learnt separately from the writing system, unlike in Chinese or Japanese. On the other hand, with 26 kanji, you'd be able to read and write, but not necessarily speak.

Neither system is better - they're different.