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Chinese cannot be Latinised ! | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 41 of 77 15 July 2009 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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To: minus273
逐家 (tak-ka)? or 逐個 (tak-ke)? Lí sī Tai-oan lang (汝是台湾人)? Edited by gaa1gaa1 on 15 July 2009 at 2:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 42 of 77 15 July 2009 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I've seen it only written as 逐家. But I heard both pronunciations. No, I'm from Sichuan. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 43 of 77 16 July 2009 at 12:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Of course you tried, that was the whole point. Intelligent as you appear to be, I just don't see what made you think you were going to get away with it without being discovered and questioned on it.
You can base your thinking on "wanting" if you want to. Some of us prefer to build our thinking on a reasoning process, made up of the available elements of information, which is why I presented such reasoning alongside the views I expressed. I do feel it makes for a much more fruitful discussion, and an interesting exchange of ideas, on any subject, if we go a little deeper, and beyond the "is" - "isn't" - "is too"-level of dogged repetition of our pet views. I certainly try to be flexible, and be prepared to change my views if presented with different facts than before. And even when there isn't reason enough to change them, they are often refined, or have a new spin added to them, thanks to the different sources of input. Edited by Hencke on 16 July 2009 at 12:43am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 44 of 77 16 July 2009 at 1:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Now, back on the actual subject, there have been a few quite confusing claims made above, and some very valid ones too, that I would like to address.
On the subject of different Chinese dialects, or imho more correctly, languages, a phonetic writing system would certainly allow some of these to be more precisely represented in writing, but at the same time they would become disconnected from the standard written language, increasing the communication difficulties between different areas. In short, it might easily bring more negative effects than positive ones.
This seems to me a very valid point. The dialect/regional-language-speakers can write in their own language, perhaps with the odd additional character, Cantonese has some of its own characters I believe, and enjoy the full flavour of their regional variant, while the same writings are largely comprehensible, as they stand, to mandarin speakers from all other areas, even if they might miss a few of the finer regional points.
Another very valid point. I find it fascinating that even some new coinages from Japan, based on the same symbolic writing system adopted from China in ancient times, are finding their way back into Chinese now, several centuries on. As I understand it, though I might be wrong, the word 地铁 (di4 tie3) for "underground" (="subway" in the US) is an example of such a coinage. New coinages made along English, or generally western, phonetical patterns are possible, and a limited number of those are taking place even now, but they are of course just an ugly artificial box on the side of the graceful thousand-year-old tree, totally alien to the inner logic, and beauty, of how Chinese concepts combine, to form new branches on the tree. Interpreting such tendencies as "cultural imperialism", and being sensitive about it, makes total sense to me. Finally, it is a misconception that a phonetical writing system would make it easier to transcribe western names. All such names are transcribed even today, with a specific subset of the existing characters, and, if needed, there is always the possibility to use latin alphabet abbreviations, say "DVD" in the middle of a Chinese-character text. Both of these techniques are in use today, and this is no kind of issue at all to make any difference on either side of the argument. In fact I would be very wary of webpages or books or other kinds of publications touting such patently irrelevant data to underpin their views. It would look suscpiciously much like a desperate clawing for ever thinner straws, in the absence of more substantial material to support their predetermined agenda. Edited by Hencke on 16 July 2009 at 1:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 45 of 77 16 July 2009 at 2:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I do not speak Chinese apart from a few phrases, but I really admire the language, I think it's beautiful. I just want to ask two questions:
1) Why did this question come up? Surely there is no serious discussion in China about switching to latin script? 2) What, if any, is the relevance of this to how you type Chinese on a keyboard? I am not sure if the Singaporean Chinese are representative, but there, people type Chinese on English keyboards in latin letters which is somehow converted into characters like in predictive texting on a mobile. Do people in mainland China enter Chinese text the same way, or use some different method? If one billion people input the text in latin, then it is understandable that a few extremely practically minded people reflect on whether the signs are necessary. I have no experience of IT work with Chinese, but have done plenty professional work with Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic etc. From an IT perspective, anything other than standard English alphabet is a recipe for problems. Chinese would mean "unicode" settings and plenty of scope for things to go wrong on databases and with web servers and user interfaces. IMHO, this risk is a small price to pay for using the beautiful signs, but there my be many who disagree. Is the IT/electronic side of this something that people consider a problem? 3) Yeah it's surely right that the same message can be conveyed in less space using signs. In bilingual signs in Chinese and English, the Chinese text always takes up less space. Peoples names are shorter when written in Chinese. In an electronic world this consideration probably doesn't matter much though, but I guess it's convenient for pepple who walk around with a dictionary or the Bible or a student who needs to carry a lot of books. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 46 of 77 16 July 2009 at 2:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
There were. Late Tokugawa/Early Meiji for Japan, and late-Qing/early Republican for China - i.e. regime changes with general cultural reflection.
Yes.
You strike fewer keys with a character input method, than inputting any of the current Romanization schemes.
CJK seemed to be the next easy language apart from West European/Cyrillic/Monotonic Greek. In the good old pre-Unicode days, 1 byte = 1 column in a terminal. No wonder Arabic xterm came a gazillion years after the CJK xterm.
If they're Chinese / Chinese-like. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 47 of 77 16 July 2009 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The whole modern journalistic translationese was coined by the Japanese, more or less. The genesis of both the modern Chinese and Japanese written languages is an extremely interesting and subtle story, with a common literary heritage, extensive mutual borrowing, language politics, and eventually defining effects on the vernacular spoken language of both nations. Indeed, if it was not for the glorious efforts of the early-Meiji Japanese translators, it would be relatively straightforward to write Japanese in a phonetic script. (Written Japanese in Meiji was done by Dutch-scholars (rangakusha), who are mostly the same bunch of people as the Chinese-scholars (kangakusha). (There were National-scholars (kokugakusha - note the modern appelation itself is in Chinese; real kokugakusha's would prefer to be called in Real Japanese as mikuni-manabi-mono or something similar) also, but they for obvious reasons rejected Confucianism and Buddhism, and remained suspect of the new Western learning.)) Edited by minus273 on 16 July 2009 at 3:20am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 48 of 77 16 July 2009 at 3:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Since cordelia isn't as acquainted with Chinese I'll add a bit of information here that may help: The most popular input method in the mainland is to write pinyin, the official romanization method for Chinese here, and then the software does it's best to predict what you want to write. Occasionally you have to choose which of the character(s) you wanted. What minus is hinting at here is that there are other methods too, that work along different lines. For example describing the form of a character (as in: left is a metal radical, right is a mouth radical, and so on). This requires more effort to learn but is faster once you know it. However, the standard is pinyin input.
And to answer your question: Nowadays characters pose no problem for IT. Sometimes people are to stupid to program ("your name has to be longer than 4 characters".. sort of sucks if you're Chinese. Or the other way around for Chinese websites). The character/alphabet debate has no background in IT :) Edited by Pyx on 16 July 2009 at 3:28am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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