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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5174 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 73 of 115 21 October 2010 at 8:56am | IP Logged | ||
I am sure the present Chinese government would not want to make literacy more difficult than it should be - in fact the characters were simplified to make literacy easier, I believe, only Taiwan still has the traditional ones in sole use. However, I think the origins of any writing system was to exclude ordinary people and only taught to an elite. This may explain why some look unnecessarily complicated. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 74 of 115 21 October 2010 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
And Hong Kong. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 76 of 115 21 October 2010 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
Nope. It was thought it would increase literacy, but the general consensus is that it had no such effect. Simplification was a mistake, quite simply. It was possibly introduced as an alternative to romanization, which was attempted but failed. Mao wanted pinyin to be the writing system of China. In fact, simplification has led to full literacy being even more difficult, since to be fully literate nowadays you need to know both the simplified and the traditional character sets. At least here in the south, being close to Hong Kong, traditional characters are not uncommon. I read a flyer for an English teaching program where I was helping out and noticed it was in trads. I asked the boss why, and he said he thought it looked better. He assumed that everyone could read trads (and I have found this to be true, even if most can't write them). Edited by Ari on 21 October 2010 at 4:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 77 of 115 21 October 2010 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||
If "weeding out" (interesting choice of vocabulary!) people is needed, I would have thought it could be achieved with the illogical English spelling system, which makes it so difficult to spell words like disciplined. Until the 20th century, only a tiny minority of Chinese were literate and no government before 1949 made achieving mass literacy a priority. If you managed to get some kind of education in imperial China, you could sit an imperial examination to enter the civil service, but only 5% of those who took the exam typically passed, and some sources say that as few as 1% did. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5961 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 79 of 115 21 October 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_on_traditional_and_simpl ified_Chinese_characters#Deve lopments_in_Recent_Years 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 80 of 115 21 October 2010 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
Are you suggesting that the first writing systems were invented as codes? That's crazy talk. No, the origins of all writing systems were to preserve and pass on information. Some later codes were invented to obscure information, but these all derived from basic written language. The unnecessary complication of some writing systems is a result of their evolution, which I briefly mentioned earlier. To go into greater detail, the history of literacy goes back to cave paintings, where some researchers claim to have identified the rudiments of grammar in the ordering of story elements. They suggest that the paintings were used as a mnemonic illustration to the great tales of the tribes. They may be stretching it, who knows, but it's an interesting proposition. Hieroglyphs over several thousand years show us the evolution of picture-words from concrete representation to a higher level of abstraction. Chinese writing is further abstraction, but as has been mentioned elsewhere, literate Chinese people still believe that these are pictures in their ideographs. The complexities in English writing are the effects of writing a dictionary based on various different spelling conventions in different areas, rather than documenting the words in a single standard orthography. It's all accidental -- there's no great conspiracy behind it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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