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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 25 of 115 16 October 2010 at 11:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wrong?? Lol. Are you telling me that an English speaker cannot read a word, he already knows how to pronounce, the first time he encounters it written down????
English spelling is not as irregular as some tend to think. For example you could argue that a possible spelling for fish is ghoti. gh=f as in tough, o=i as in women and ti=sh as in nation. No normal person, however, would ever read ghoti as fish!!! If you know the word and know how to pronounce it you will be able to read the word. No matter how it is spelt. I m shure that u kann read thys. Did u knowtice the badd speling??? Cann Chineze speakerz do this wen youzing karakters??? It is qiute surpising jsut how mcuh you can do to an Egnlish wrod wtihout mkaing it ileligble.
I can't believe people are actually trying to argue that learning how to read Chinese is as difficult as learning how to read English. Are you people for real??? Edited by John Smith on 16 October 2010 at 11:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5697 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 26 of 115 16 October 2010 at 11:38am | IP Logged | |||||
Of course you can. This would be akin to using similar sounding or similar looking characters—just as in the English example, context and similar overall word shapes would render it legible. Edited by egill on 16 October 2010 at 11:40am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linc Newbie Macau Joined 5443 days ago 29 posts - 45 votes Studies: English Studies: French | Message 27 of 115 16 October 2010 at 11:42am | IP Logged | |||||
You must mean the Martian script. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martian_script 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6043 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 28 of 115 16 October 2010 at 11:43am | IP Logged | |||||
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^^ not just similar sounding and looking. Jumbled up too.
The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, reports that his Chinese colleagues estimate it takes seven to eight years for a Mandarin speaker to learn to read and write three thousand characters http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Old Chemist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5174 days ago 227 posts - 285 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 29 of 115 16 October 2010 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Surely this is true for Chinese too? There must be semi-literate people in China who muddle up ideograms and so make malapropisms or just simple mistakes which most people can read because of the context. It would be interesting to have the input of someone bilingual/diglot in the two languages to comment, as I think we are all philosophizing at the moment - interesting and intelligent comments,probably except for unworthy self!
As a digression can you read this: Tihs is an eamxlpe of eglsih wirtetn wtih olny the lsat ltrets saytnig in pacle. If you can read it without struggling then your brain supposedly works faster. This gem of information is buried somewhere on youtube, I think. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 30 of 115 16 October 2010 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Since I've come late to this party and have no knowledge of Chinese, I can't comment on the relative difficulty of English and Chinese writing systems. Two things come to my mind, however. Firstly, in English (and I assume in most alphabetic languages), one can abbreviate words by chopping off certain parts and leaving some sort of recognizable stem. So, we have "am" and "pro" for "amateur" and "professional". Note that we also have "prof" for professor. How does this work in an ideographic system?
The other thing that comes to mind is the increasing importance of SMS or text language in English (and presumably in other languages). As most people know, this is an extreme form of abbreviation or shorthand that replaces entire words or parts of words by single letters that have similar sounds or by acronyms. Thus, 121 "one to one", 4 u "for you", IMO "in my opinion", etc. Again, I would be curious to know how this works in other writing systems. Edited by s_allard on 16 October 2010 at 1:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| BiaHuda Triglot Groupie Vietnam Joined 5364 days ago 97 posts - 127 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Vietnamese Studies: Cantonese | Message 31 of 115 16 October 2010 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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China has a 73% literacy rate for what it's worth. In the 1940's it was less than 20%. That says enough for me.
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 32 of 115 16 October 2010 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, the vast majority of Mandarin words consist of one or two characters, so the need for abbreviation is less pressing, but there are interesting parallels. For example, a bus service going from Canton 廣洲 to Foshan 佛山 will use the acronym 廣佛 to describe the route. Most country and Chinese city names can be abbreviated to one character in contexts were the context makes it evident. Some longer words of things like diseases can also be abbreviated to two characters. For example "influenza" in Mandarin is "流行性感冒", but just as it's often shortened to "the flu" in English, it's shortened to "流感" in Mandarin. There's also, especially in places where traditional characters are used, the phenomenon of using characters with less strokes, especially when writing by hand. For example, "wonton noodles" (a kind of noodle dish common in Hong Kong) should be written as "餛飩麵", but is commonly seen written as "雲吞麵". Hell, some people might even replace the "麵" with "面". That's what the Chinese government did when they simplified the script.
In Cantonese, many characters can be replaced by Latin letterforms when it comes to SMS. "啲" can be written as "D", for example. Hong Kong Cantonese is also ripe with English loanwords, and some of those are shortened, like "fd" for "friend". 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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