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If English was written like Chinese (1999)

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Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#81

Post by pie420 »

hnlmorg wrote: post #34
jmclnx wrote: post #7

There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.

Asia have a massive booming tech industry. They always have done. Surely you’ve heard of brands like Sony, Sega, Nintendo, Samsung, Huawei, Asus, and Acer… to name but a small few?

all of the companies you listed except Huawei are in american colonies

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#82

Post by krispyfi »

latentsea wrote: post #57
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.

Korean is easier to pronounce, but Japanese is easier to read. Try reading a Japanese children's book that doesn't use kanji. It's excruciating.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#83

Post by filleduchaos »

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…

> 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.

I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner finding it hard to write "French" instead of "Le français" in an English sentence would come off as more than a little overzealous to me.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#84

Post by jameshart »

j7ake wrote: post #46
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…

My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing. However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.

The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#85

Post by lolinder »

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.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect.

This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#86

Post by lbotos »

latentsea wrote: post #57
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.

I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese.

I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps:

たまねぎ 玉ねぎ

いつつ 五つ

In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying to convey imo)

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#87

Post by robjan »

chuckadams wrote: post #50
PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.

People from Hong Kong tend to use Cangjie or the number pad when entering Chinese characters. Pinyin is only really used on the mainland.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#88

Post by raincole »

chuckadams wrote: post #50
PaulHoule wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia…

Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.

Very few people from Hong Kong know bopomofo. Your coworker is an exception.

Re: If English was written like Chinese (1999)

#89

Post by flextheruler »

lolinder wrote: post #85
gpvos wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…

I could believe this is true if you’re only comparing languages that have the same root or parent language such as Latin languages, etc.

But I don’t see how anyone could describe the difference between Chinese and English as arbitrary or as two dialects even if the apocalyptic collapse of all major nations which spoke such languages occurred tomorrow.

My understanding is that theres something called lexical similarity and if it’s over a certain percentage it’s a dialect.

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