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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 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 33 of 115 16 October 2010 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I know, right? Those guys are totally ridiculous. Wait, who's saying that, again? 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linc Newbie Macau Joined 5443 days ago 29 posts - 45 votes Studies: English Studies: French | Message 34 of 115 16 October 2010 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
haha, welcome to our party. let me answer ur questions. 1. people choose the most representive characters to shorten it to 2 to 3 characters. For example, "笔记本型电脑", which means "Notebook like computer" or laptop computer in English, is shorten to 笔记本 in mainland or 笔电 in taiwan. 国家发展改革委员会=national development & reform committee is abbrieviated to 发改委. 2. The SMS is not so short in Chinese as in English. The length of SMS in China is physically the same as in other place in the world. That is 144 octets = 144*8bit. However, in the corrent encoding system: 1 latin letter = 8bits (2^8=256=26 letters + punctuations + some other sign, according to ASC II) 1 chinese character =16bit (2^16 = 65,536= around 50,000characters + punctuations + some other sign) so in an SMS, you can have: 72 characters or 144 letters 2 persons have 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 35 of 115 16 October 2010 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
My girlfriend does it all the time in Cantonese. Hell, everyone does it all the time in Cantonese, as nobody learns how to write it in school. People learn to speak Cantonese from their parents, then they learn how to write Mandarin in school. They also learn how the characters are pronounced in Cantonese. Then they're left to themselves trying to guess which characters correspond to which words in Canto. Written Cantonese has increased in later years, however, and a consensus has been reached on how to write a lot of words. This consensus is, however, rarely the same as the original characters you can find out if you look in etymology books. Often the sound has changed during the long time when nobody wrote the words down, which means that nobody will understand you if you try to write Cantonese with the original characters. I've seen a lot less of it in Mandarin, however, but there are characters that have identical sound and pretty much identical meanings and it's a bitch trying to remember when to use which one, like 像 and 象, or 分 and 份. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 36 of 115 16 October 2010 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think its important to be able to write well without a computer. Computers are great but if they all disappeared tomorrow I could still quickly write 'remember'. I read that a lot of younger Japanese and Chinese people have become so reliant on using comps/cell phones that they don't know how to write as well as they should. http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.74f06613ea91a1f1 041b96c96477427f.561&show_article=1 Saying the script is harder isn't a bad thing. The script is what it is and they should not feel it has to be romanized anymore than German should reduce die, der and das to die or the romance languages should reduce the # of verb conjugations to make things easier. I don't think English should reform its spelling either since its a tradition for it to be sort of inefficient. English spelling isn't that bad though. I think that once you know the irregularly spelled words your memory is jogged through how they are pronounced anyway. Edited by fireflies on 16 October 2010 at 3:02pm 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 37 of 115 16 October 2010 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've read that, too, but I've never met anyone like that. I think that they're all northerners who use pinyin (sound) to write characters. This way they don't need to know how the characters are formed. People down here in the south often don't know pinyin and use other input methods such as Cangjie or Wubi, that rely on the shape of the character. As such, if they can write it on the computer, they can pretty much write it on paper (and they often do. I don't recognize at all the "people rarely write with pen and paper" phenomenon). Hell, people down here are pretty poor and many of them can't afford a computer anyway. The ones who have some money have a phone with a touchscreen and often use handwriting recognition to input characters.
Oh, I certainly agree. Hell, in a way I want to give the impression that it's super hard, so the fact that I can read it makes me look super smart. And as I repeated many many times in the beginning of this thread (but apparently not enough; see above), it IS harder than English. I just think the general impression from the outside is that it's harder than it really is. You get people saying that "Mandarin could never be a world language because of its writing system" and "I could never learn Mandarin because of the writing system" and I feel it's exaggerated. Chinese is a difficult language to learn, but the writing system is only a part of that difficulty. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Linc Newbie Macau Joined 5443 days ago 29 posts - 45 votes Studies: English Studies: French | Message 38 of 115 16 October 2010 at 4:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Hi, firefies. You misunderstood what i meant. I didn't deny that the characters are more difficult and complicated. But I meant people have adapted to it and useed it in a more efficient way. The news originally appeared on the offical media not long ago and warn the public this phenomenon might happen owning to overuse of pinyin based input system(another type is radical based input ). The article got translated in English and magnified then proliferated. And I seem to be this kind of people who only use computer(pinyin input) to write after high school(around 7 years ago). I was required to write an 1000-characters article in an exam this year. But I did not meet this kind of problem. However, this kind of problem might happen even if the computer and cell phone never exist and usually happen in daily life. This could be a disadvange of ideograph or a kind of psychological phenomenon.In few case, people may fail to come up the structure of the characters(not the stroke). You knew how to write it, but the shape just does not pop up in your brain, feeling like some cells in brain got isolated. And you will get the character after a while. In this kind of situation, what you can do is ask others. People understand it and wont see it as a shame. Edited by Linc on 16 October 2010 at 4:25pm 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 39 of 115 16 October 2010 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
Or use a dictionary, This thing happens to me in French and English and even Swedish, too. God, I'm totally spamming this discussion. I need to get off the forum now. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Qinshi Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5754 days ago 115 posts - 183 votes Speaks: Vietnamese*, English Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 40 of 115 16 October 2010 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
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IMO every language has its own history and culture infused into it. Not all languages were meant for alphabets. Thus was the case for my mother language - Vietnamese. It was originally written in Chinese characters + characters coined specifically for native words that didn't exist in Chinese. It is now written in a nearly phonetic script. The advantage of switching over from characters to an alphabet was that in a short period of time, the literacy rate grew tremendously. The apparent downside of the current script is that it is by jolly...ugly? Nonetheless, it does its job as a script although there are still a few issues yet to be resolved such as the concurrent use of i/y. Seriously, what other supposedly phonetic script uses three different letters to represent the same consonant just for orthographic reasons? <--- Rhetoric. Ca, că, câ, co, cô, cơ, cu, cư but ke, kê, ki, ky. Then there is qua, quă-, quâ-, que, quê, qui etc... In standard northern Vietnamese (based on the local dialect of Hanoi), c-k-q are the same sound. In the other regions, qu- becomes w-.
To a very very rural southern Vietnamese person, all the following sounds would be pronounced almost exactly the same. dẩn, dẫn, dẩng, dẫng, dẳn, dẵn, dẳng, dẵng, giẩn, giẫn, giẩng, giẫng, giẳn, giẵn, giẳng, giẵng, vẩn, vẫn, vẩng, vẫng, vẳn, vẵn, vẳng, vẵng... Note in the south of Vietnam, the initials written as d- gi- and v- all become /j/ in colloquial speech. The very common name Dũng is sometimes changed into Dzung in anglophone countries for obvious reasons! Then there are two common surnames: Dương and Vương which are pronounced the same in everyday speech. Edited by Qinshi on 16 October 2010 at 4:47pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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