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If English were written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#81

Post by DashRattlesnake »

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.

Not really. For instance: trough.

I forget the specifics and terminology, but to read English competently, you have to be familiar with at least several hundred different letter-sound mappings.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#82

Post by snaily »

FabHK wrote: post #78
FabHK wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly, though, of all languages written with an alphabet (Latin or no), English is the worst when it comes to mapping from writing to pronunciation. Sure, it might better than Chinese, but flaunting it in public looks rather absurd even when comparing to, say, French.

And that's not even comparing to languages with a phonemic orthography (where the mapping from pronunciation to spelling is essentially injective) like Finnish or Turkish (which is also extremely regular in terms of grammmar, I'm told). English is terrible in this regard.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#83

Post by smallnamespace »

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…

> Thus Japanese had settled on having few syllable sounds _before_ there was any way to write them down, so their syllables _can't_ have been limited by their script (at least initially).

You might be underestimating just how huge an influence Chinese has had on Japanese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Xenic_pronunciations#Ling...

Japanese (as well as Korean and Vietnamese) imported Chinese vocabulary en masse, including a gloss of Chinese translation. That made Japanese much more homophonic since the tones got dropped in the process.

Just compare the kunyomi (native) and onyomi (Chinese-derived) readings for some Kanji and you'll see that the onyomi readings are usually single syllables.

"For example, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines (where borrowings from English are common), over half the words in newspapers and 60% of the words in science magazines."

That said, I don't really agree with GP's contention that using Kanji makes Japanese have a simple sound system. Chinese has a somewhere richer sound system even though it invented the characters (especially if you count tones), and Spanish and Italian have very simple sound systems even though they're written with alphabets.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#84

Post by pluma »

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…

Just a tiny nitpick: the "ng" in "English" is actually a bit more complicated than just "n" plus "g". The "n" is actually a "ŋ" (the "ing" sound without the hard "g") and the actual "g" is often dropped in colloquial pronunciation and part of the second syllable otherwise. So it's either "eŋ-lish" or "eŋ-glish" but never "eŋg-lish".

And don't get me started on English speakers making fun of the Japanese "r"/"l" sounds when English doesn't even have a proper "r" sound in most dialects -- as a native speaker of a language with an uvular ("back of the throat") "r" sound the alveolar ("front of the mouth") "r" feels more like an "l" to begin with.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#85

Post by adimitrov »

FabHK wrote: post #78
FabHK wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Now try pronouncing Lancashire, Gloucestershire, Worcester, Derby, Edinburgh, Argyll… Granted, the latter two are Gaelic in origin, but it's not like English spelling — especially of place names — is terribly phonetic.

English orthograhpy is in fact widely known for having [less systematicity](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) than many of its Indo-European neighbors.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#86

Post by schoen »

schoen wrote: post #59
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…

> 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 Englis…

I might have been unfair to the parent commenter here; I just realized that "you can read any combination of them" might mean "you know the intended pronunciation of any English text" (including words you've seen before) rather than "you are able to pronounce any conceivable sequence letters" (including letter sequences that never occur in English words). That doesn't necessarily represent confusion about phonotactics; it might just be a claim that an alphabetic writing system is always/sometimes easier to learn than the full present-day Japanese writing system. I'm not positive this is true of English orthography, but is probably true for some languages written with the Roman alphabet.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#87

Post by Symbiote »

zhte415 wrote: post #72
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…

> 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.

It's more useful if you say the child's age, since I'm not sure which country "grade 1" refers to. If it's the USA, I'm not sure how old that is either.

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#88

Post by Symbiote »

jshevek wrote: post #28
bleachedsleet wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...horrid color schemes, no support for mobile devices...yeah, what a breath of fresh air.

Looks great for me on mobile. Maybe "supporting mobile" becomes more important when you do things that would otherwise make the mobile experience awful. Keeping it simple seems to support mobile automatically.

Looks fine in Chrome, but the text is tiny in Firefox. I think Firefox should handle this better.

http://m.imgur.com/pReOW6H,lZhlzFL

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#89

Post by disruptalot »

rangibaby wrote: post #58
disruptalot wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the added bonus that it's accurate. Referring to these characters as they are originally: Chinese. Some people don't seem to be very happy about that fact.

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

The original article makes no mention of kanji (Han zi). Instead it ends with: "Well okay, I'll come clean. I've actually been secretly teaching Japanese to you. 口 actually really is the Japanese character for "mouth" and 食 really is the symbol for eating."

Not exactly. Those are Chinese characters and Chinese meanings. The article does not teach anything exclusivly Japanese. For anyone who was not familiar, they would go around with the impression that these characters really originate from Japan. You can imagine how the Chinese people or people who study Chinese would feel being shown this cool new way to learn "Japanese".

Re: If English were written like Chinese (1999)

#90

Post by disruptalot »

rangibaby wrote: post #75
fenomas wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

You can imagine being British and learning the American language. Of course people feel cheated if their culture is not credited where it should be.
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