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China’s tyranny of characters

economist.com

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Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#81

Post by kafkaesq »

Retric wrote: post #79
kafkaesq wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects). As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.

You can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols. long A sound = vr in language 1. Z sound = vr in language 2. But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word. This means if you have 10 language…

Except that mappings between real languages and writing systems don't work that way (being in general far from truly phonetic).

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#82

Post by wrp »

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…

The above post repeats some widely believed but inaccurate statements about literacy in Japan. The frequently mentioned 9x% literacy rate is a myth. In the premodern period, it was much less than 1% of the population. In 1948, the rate of full literacy was reported to be 6.2% of the population. In 1955, a literacy census reported that functional illiteracy ran at 60% of the adult population. See Rubinger[1] for the premodern period and Unger[2] for post-WW2. Unger also maintains a bibliography on Japanese literate on his web site.[3]

[1] Richard Rubinger. 2007. Popular Literacy in Early Modern Japan.

[2] J. Marchall Unger. 1996. Literacy and Script Reform in Occupation Japan.

[3] https://u.osu.edu/unger.26/books/literacy-and-script-reform-...

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#83

Post by Retric »

kafkaesq wrote: post #81
Retric wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols. long A sound = vr in language 1. Z sound = vr in language 2. But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word. This means if you have 10 language…

Except that mappings between real languages and writing systems don't work that way (being in general far from truly phonetic).

Sure, they are not perfect, but you don't want rainbow and monkey to both be spelled VVKX because they are homonyms in another language so they must be homonyms in all your languages.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#84

Post by Nadya »

spacehunt wrote: post #80
Nadya wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You aren't biased - just educated in the languages. ;) To illustrate the difficulty of Japanese for others, I'll provide an example: 生 - raw (nama) 生まれる - to be born (u・mareru) 生きる - to live (i・kiru) 生活 - living; life (sei・katsu) 生地 - cloth; fabric (ki・ji) I'll stop there. There are more readings for that single kanji but they are obscure or an "alternative" to a more commonly used kanji. To my understanding, this pr…

There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation

I stand corrected, thank you. I had Mandarin in mind, although that fact was unclear since I only mentioned it in my example. I'm unfamiliar with Cantonese and lack any knowledge at all of other Chinese dialects. So at least for that character - it has one reading in Mandarin. The two readings in Cantonese are a single (and similar) vowel apart, nothing like the differences between "nama" and "ki". So I'll change my argument: even though Chinese has multiple readings - Japanese takes it a step further in complexity.

According to this page [0], most sound differences in Mandarin are a variant opposed to a completely different sound. Variant sounds are easier to memorize because they often "make sense". In Japanese, variant sounds often occur because it is "easier to pronounce". If I had to wager a guess, Chinese variant sounds are done for the same reason - though I could be wrong on that as well. :)

Thank you for the correction.

[0] http://pinyin.info/chinese_characters/

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#85

Post by andyjdavis »

footpath wrote: post #57
andyjdavis wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#86

Post by spacehunt »

Nadya wrote: post #84
spacehunt wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are lots of characters that have more than one reading in Cantonese, Mandarin and other Chinese languages -- in fact 生 has 2 readings in Cantonese: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%94%9F#Pronunciation

I stand corrected, thank you. I had Mandarin in mind, although that fact was unclear since I only mentioned it in my example. I'm unfamiliar with Cantonese and lack any knowledge at all of other Chinese dialects. So at least for that character - it has one reading in Mandarin. The two readings in Cantonese are a single (and similar) vowel apart, nothing like the differences between "nama" and "ki". So I'll change my…

I agree, the multiple readings in Cantonese/Mandarin are nowhere near as different as the different readings for the same Kanji in Japanese. I never meant to imply otherwise, sorry if I sounded I was.

As someone trying to learn Japanese, it is one of the harder parts of the language for me to learn. Conjugations frustrate me more though. :)

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#87

Post by echaozh »

jbooth wrote: post #70
wyuenho wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family na…

Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certa…

Hmm, characters are square and have fixed width. The fonts are automatically fixed width when printed or even handwritten (well enough). With pinyin, you know, like any other phonetic languages, even Japanese, you can hardly match line width with syllables so perfectly. And that's why the Chinese classic poetry, in my biased opinion, is a level higher than, say, its English counterpart, as it requires more effort to not only rhyme the lines, but also match the length of each line.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#88

Post by [deleted] »

jbooth wrote: post #70
wyuenho wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family na…

Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certa…

[deleted]

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#89

Post by echaozh »

allemagne wrote: post #42

>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.

> They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters

I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character.

As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.

Re: China’s tyranny of characters

#90

Post by wyuenho »

jbooth wrote: post #70
wyuenho wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the aim is to improve literacy rate, focusing so much energy into to changing the entire set of characters for a written language is just incredibly stupid. It has a small marginal improvement but an tremendous repercussions. The Chinese simplification process has produced so many characters that completely changed the meaning of the character. The process has also merged so many characters that people's family na…

Learning the radicals does allow a certain amount of 'chunking' and makes things easier, but it's by no means a consistent system like an alphabet. Sometimes one radical is sound and another is meaning, sometimes neither, sometimes there's like 5 of them crammed in there, and every character has a different little mnemonic story. Alphabets with consistent rules are objectively much less work to learn. Anyways I certa…

Listening is very different from reading. When you are reading phonetic symbols, at least when you first learn the language, you have an extra step of mapping the symbols to the sounds, then the meaning. Familiarity of a language is achieved by removing the step that maps to sound, essentially by mapping the "shape" or the combination of letters in a word to a token of meaning. With pinyin, since the Han script has almost an exact 1-1 mapping from syllable to character, but far less number of commonly used syllables in Mandarin, you simply cannot reconstruct the meaning by looking at the pinyin spelling of a Han character and retrieve the meaning of the character the pinyin spelling maps to. That's what I mean by context.
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