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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| munkala Newbie Joined 5558 days ago 10 posts - 9 votes | Message 33 of 80 14 September 2009 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Who here is in favor of abolishing the ancient archaic characters for Romanization? It's a shame too many scholars like to acknowledge themselves as "revered" because they know this many thousand characters. And therefore are so against Chinese written language reform. It seems too many of them are afraid of losing their claim to fame. They claim that Chinese has too many homonyms so romanization would not work. But how come people can understand each other orally and listen to the radio with no problems without seeing the characters? And WenYan is no longer in use so there's no need to worry about monosyllabic homonyms.
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| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6857 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 34 of 80 15 September 2009 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||
The spoken and written languages are not identical. You would have to change the language significantly to do this. Do you have any legitimate reason to impose such a drastic change, or do you just not want to put in the time to learn the characters? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5615 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 35 of 80 15 September 2009 at 6:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I'm just an ordinary Chinese rather than a Chinese scholar, neither my speciality nor my job has anything to do with Chinese languages and characters, in other words, as an observer of Chinese characters, I'm just here to make objective comments about the whole system as detailed as possible, certainly not to show off my knowledge and experience in public. So it's not a shame to lead everybody gradually into the truth about the relations between Chinese characters and languages, if a person doesn't attempt to gain benefits or profits from preaching about the characters or whatever else. Furthermore, plenty of potential elements of classical Chinese (WenYan) have already integrated deeply into modern Chinese languages, especially in the newspapers, the books, the articles, the headlines on TV, and so on, it's considerably different from colloquial Chinese (repetitive conventional patterns) that you have to talk about every day. No matter whether you're Chinese or not, unluckily I don't think you've ever taken account of written form (the soul of Chinese languages) as a whole, in your mind, perhaps Chinese language represents nothing but some oral, vulgar, and slanging conversation.
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| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5772 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 36 of 80 15 September 2009 at 11:23am | IP Logged | |||||
Qian is a widely respected scholar at 音韵 (which I would call philology). Perhaps you have a different authority here. Edited by minus273 on 15 September 2009 at 11:24am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Z.J.J Senior Member China Joined 5615 days ago 243 posts - 305 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 37 of 80 15 September 2009 at 12:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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According to Mr Qián Xuántóng, Lǔ Xùn, and Qū Qiūbái, our Chinese characters should have been completely abolished, otherwise China would eventually die out, but why on earth hasn't China got worse and worse, quite the contrary, China's becoming increasingly powerful. Do you still think of them as qualified, reliable, and long-sighted scholars?
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| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5772 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 38 of 80 15 September 2009 at 1:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes. In scholarship, political opinions are irrelevant, except when the scholar is blinded, like the nationalists in Balkan. (edit: Dunno about Qú, but I would certainly not claim Lǔ Xùn's studies on Chinese fiction and Qián's on Chinese phonological history bad or something.) Edited by minus273 on 15 September 2009 at 1:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5772 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 39 of 80 15 September 2009 at 1:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Besides, Shiga Naoya claimed that Japanese (the language) should be abolished for French. Does this tarnish Shiga's name as a novelist in Japanese language? Most probably not.
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| munkala Newbie Joined 5558 days ago 10 posts - 9 votes | Message 40 of 80 15 September 2009 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
Characters slows down the pace at which you can pick up the written language. And it's virtually impossible to eradicate illiteracy with characters. You can teach an illiterate Spanish speaker to read and never forget how to read in just a few weeks. Most of us cannot learn 3500 characters within a few weeks. I've been learning Mandarin now for about 6 months now and I can only read about 1500+ characters. My biggest problem is learning a character and then a few weeks down the road, recognize it but then forget the phonetic pronunciation. And even if I do learn the 3500+ needed to read a newspaper, it doesn't necessarily mean I know how to read because the characters are only syllables and not necessarily words. And it's not easy to use Chinese newspapers to pick up the language. If you come across 5 characters you don't know, you don't know if it's 2 words or 5 words, etc. And forget about the time it takes you to look it up. I think PinYin would be adequate to replace the written language. Even one of our greatest American scholars of Chinese John DeFrancis was very much in favor of abolishing the Hanzi script. In fact he is one of the very few scholars who was very angry the communists never replaced the character script. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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