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 new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
English is also bad at this, ironically.
Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
> 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”
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 unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.
The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
Related:
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 - March 2022 (7 comments)
If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments)
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)
In English, of course, the title of this might be "If English were written like Chinese"
Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language.
And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.
The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
I'm not sure we all that much need a (1999) on an article inflecting "bodacious" without apparent irony. I suppose it helps in the "before" direction, but I certainly wasn't going to assume this was written much after...
I'd prefer to switch to Korea's hangul.
I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english.
Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.
I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.
> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest
This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records.
Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's).
[0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf
> The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning
The problem is that the English language does not have this structure, whereas Chinese does.
The individual syllables in Chinese words have their own independent meanings. If you break apart the English word "random," "ran" and "dom" don't independently mean anything. The reason why Chinese characters work well for Chinese is because the fundamental unit of Chinese is really the syllable, rather than the word. English isn't like that, so a Chinese-like writing system would be a very poor fit to the English language.
That being said, I sometimes wonder whether this property of Chinese comes from the writing system, or whether it preexisted writing. In other words, to what extent has Chinese been influenced by its writing system?
> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi.
English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.
> I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system. All of the concepts apply
Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).
If Japanese was written like Chinese https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.
If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling.
The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘
Or writing in English can go the other way and become ortophonetic like Italian and Romanian, where each letter denotes a sound and "to", "too" and "two" will become "tu".
> So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi..... We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme.
They already are aren't they?
Could anyone find a live link to the "Belorussian translation" mentioned at the beginning? I wasn't able to find another version with search engines or Waybach machine.
As someone, still planning to tackle learning Chinese (mandarin) one day, this is very interesting!
can someone explain the linguistic logic to me like I'm five? I've read it through twice and I don't understand how the connection is made between the characters and the english language?
I loved that I got tricked into learning something about Chinese!
meaning + sound = a well coded language system
so meaning+sound = well coded language system
"A type of speaking that rhymes with purse-- curse, of course."
I was actually thinking "verse" :-\
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.
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No. Just no. Literacy is incredibly difficult in a language that requires knowing 10,000 characters to learn it.
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 speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...