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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4961 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 97 of 132 18 February 2012 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I don't know whether this has already been said numerous times, but to me the characters
bring something aesthetic to any piece of writing. Is efficiency all that is important? Or isn't beauty something that ought to be preserved? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| firearasi Triglot Newbie China Joined 5757 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, Japanese, English Studies: Italian, Korean, Sanskrit | Message 98 of 132 11 November 2012 at 10:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Pinyin is bad and hard to recognize for Chinese natives. While it's not hard to glance 10 lines of a chinese
novel at the same time when written in Chinese characters. That is efficiency.. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 99 of 132 12 November 2012 at 7:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Phonetically spelled English is bad and hard to read for English natives. While it's not hard to glance at 10 lines of an English novel when written in English spelling. Therefore English orthography is efficient. Actually, people who are trained to read and write pinyin do it quickly and efficiently. It's hardly surprising that people who have spent years and years learning how to read characters would be good at it. The Chinese writing system was decent at writing the language it was developed to write, but it's not at all suitable for writing modern Mandarin. I'm in no way advocating the abolishment of the system, in fact I'm quite fond of it in many ways, but to claim that it's efficient is patently absurd. It's inefficient and difficult (yes, demonstrably difficult even for natives), but that's not the be all end all of writing systems. It's pretty (at least the traditional characters, haha), it's loaded with historical and etymological value, it's culturally and symbolically extremely significant and it's the heart of one of the world's most extensive calligraphic traditions. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4531 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 100 of 132 15 November 2012 at 9:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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One of the most unique aspects of Chinese is that each syllable of every single word, has a meaning of itself. Without characters, this is lost completely.
Take the word 翻译 (fan1 yi4) to translate, 翻 (fan1) has the meaning of "turning over", and 译 (yi4) has the meaning of "translate". With characters, you can see right away that there are two words that form a larger, compound word. Without characters, all you see is fan1 yi4. Well, you might know that fan1 yi4 means to translate, but what does fan1 on it's own mean? And what does yi4 on it's own mean? For yi4, for example, it could mean: 1. Meaning 2. Justice 3. To translate 4. Also 5. 100 million 6. To remember 7. Easy 8. Benefit 9. Different 10. Forced labour Etc... With a system like pinyin, this quality of Chinese, which is so unique and unlike any other language that exists to this day, will be lost forever. Here is the list again, but with characters: 1. 意 Meaning 2. 义 Justice 3. 译 To translate 4. 亦 Also 5. 亿 100 million 6. 忆 To remember 7. 易 Easy 8. 益 Benefit 9. 异 Different 10. 役 Forced labour Without characters, all these shades of meaning in the one sound yi4 will be lost. Do you really expect every Chinese person to remember that the sound yi4 has ALL of these different definitions? And in fact, remember every single definition that comes with every single sound in Chinese if they're only written ONE single way? The fact is, these CHARACTERS give all these meanings something to exist in, without characters, they cease to be WORDS, but instead become one of many many definitions of ONE SINGLE word. Chinese cannot exist without characters, if Chinese abolishes characters, it will no longer be Chinese. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6586 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 101 of 132 16 November 2012 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Let's not exaggerate. "Every single word"? Hardly. You might say that the 蝴 in 蝴蝶 means "butterfly", but since it only appears in the word 蝴蝶, which means "butterfly", claiming it to have a meaning on its own is just something done after the fact. "hu2die2" is not a compound word, but the writing system makes it look like one. There are lots of these words in Mandarin and other Sinitic languages. And lets not forget names and loan words. Or characters with multiple-syllable pronunciations and multiple-character words with single-syllable pronunciations (uncommon though they are).
Why? English "their" and "they're" are completely different words that are pronounced the same. English doesn't use characters and yet most educated people don't conflate the words with each other. Don't think that just because you use a phonetic writing system it has to have completely regular spelling. But anyway, you have a good argument here about how the Chinese writing system preserves etymological information. I don't deny that, though it doesn't mean it's "efficient". I wouldn't argue that the system should be abolished, but it's still not efficient. Also, one needs to be aware that there's a huge amount of characters in Mandarin that are more or less arbitrarily assigned. There are characters that have changed their meaning (來 used to mean "wheat") and there are huge numbers of characters that are phonetic loans. Grammatical characters like 的，得，著 are written with characters arbitrarily chosen for their sound value; they originally meant completely different things. I seriously doubt that the 花 in 花錢 has anything to do with flowers. In fact, the writing system often obscures correct etymological information. There are lots of Taiwanese people who think the name of their country means "Table bay" just because it's written 臺灣, or that the district 萬華 in Taipei means "Ten thousand splendours" (it probably means "canoe", but the etymology is uncertain).
翻 and 译 aren't words, they're morphemes. 翻译 is a word. This confusion is common amongst speakers of Chinese languages, and it's another consequence of the writing system.
Of course not. They should all learn Cantonese instead, where the sounds are differentiated more. :) Joking aside, there's no need to know all of these meanings. Illiterate Chinese get by fine without them. I completely agree that it would be a great loss to lose them, which is why I'm opposed to the abolishment of sinographs. But just like the circumflexes of French, while they provide extra etymological explanation, they don't serve any practical purpose in communication. I love the Chinese writing system, but that doesn't mean I think it's perfect. It has several downsides and several upsides. The downsides are mostly practical and the upsides mostly cultural. Let's be honest about it and love it for what it is, not pretend like it's perfect. I love cookie dough ice cream, but I'm not gonna pretend it doesn't make people fat. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ZombieKing Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4531 days ago 247 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* | Message 102 of 132 17 November 2012 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
In reply to your example of 蝴蝶, if somebody saw 蝴 on it's own they would know it means butterfly. This is because the character 蝴 allows the sound hu2 to carry the meaning of butterfly. Without the character 蝴, hu2 could be 胡，湖，壶， etc. The characters allow the meanings to exist within them. I could write 蝴飞走了。 Would people understand that as the butterfly has flown away even though I only used the character 蝴？ Yes. What if I said it out loud though "hu2 fei1 zou3 le", I don't think anyone would understand that. If I heard that, I'd be more likely to think "The beard has flown away." So to say 蝴 on it's own has no meaning is untrue. As for the comparison of "they're" and "their" to the situation in Chinese... That's quite a stretch considering nearly every word in Mandarin has multiple synonyms, while in English, there are only so many words that have synonyms, and the amount per word never reaches as high of an amount as in Chinese. Chinese see their language through characters, without characters, the language is gone. Tell me how pinyin or anything else could be more efficient than characters when A) they work already (99% literacy rate in Taiwan for example, and Taiwanese use complex characters) and B) using another writing system would drastically change the language. By the way, you're wrong about 翻. I would know. It's an actual word.可以帮我翻成中文吗？翻到那一页啊？ Both sentences are examples of 翻 (fan1) being used as a verb to mean "to turn over" or "to translate". Edited by ZombieKing on 17 November 2012 at 2:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6913 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 103 of 132 17 November 2012 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Synonyms? I think you mean homophones.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Tropi Diglot Groupie Austria Joined 5435 days ago 67 posts - 87 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 104 of 132 18 November 2012 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
While you are right that "yi4" has no meaning, "yi4" also doesn't occur isolated. One must not forget that spoken Chinese doesn't have characters and sometimes not even the tones are very clear, yet people can express their meaning. Obviously there are huge downsides if one would want to abolish characters in favor of Pinyin (homophones, not able to use a dictionary, ...). Let's face it, chinese characters have huge downsides. Yea, it's great that characters/words are composed of different components each having it's own meaning, but you can have that in other languages as well. In English you have triangle = three angles and we could also call a taxi "rent-car" (＝出租车). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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