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The efficiency of Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5419 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 33 of 81 02 September 2011 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, I guess the fact that Malays no longer use the Arabic Jawi script means that Arabic isn't completely functional as an everyday tool for the storage and dissemination of information. Someone should tell those Arabs to stop using the Arabic script, because the Malays are way ahead of them...
All languages have warts. Take a simple, non-controversial language like Spanish. Its first wart is its needlessly complex plethora of grammatical tenses subject to verb conjugation: 
As if that wasn't enough, its second wart is its plethora of irregular verbs that don't even subscribe to the complex standardized conjugation patterns of all the above tenses, such as ser, estar, ir, decir, dar, saber, poder, poner, tener, haber, querer, ver, and venir. Its third wart is one it shares with nearly all European languages — that of a completely arbitrary gender distinction among nouns. You may ask why it should make any sense that an animal be considered a moving thing, but why not ask why an animal ought to be considered male? You protest that surely there are moving things that aren't animals, but I counter that surely there are animals that aren't male, no? Or take, of course, English. English has neither complex verb conjugation nor arbitrary gender distinction among nouns, but I'm sure I needn't tell you of all the seemingly illogical aspects of the English language. And yet it seems to be functional enough for us to have this discussion, no? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4838 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 34 of 81 02 September 2011 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@Ygangerg
I'm really sorry if that's the impression I gave you or anyone but I can assure you that's not the case. At least for all posts before my previous one. In any case, thank you for your input. I'll try to be more careful with the tone of my writing. @starrye "But I feel your argument rests on the premise that kanji are really that difficult and unwieldy to learn" I understand you and other people that learn Japanese due to admiration for the language find the task of learning kanji just a minor setback but I think you'll agree with me that's not the case for the majority of people who learn the language. And we both know it's not just a matter of learning 2000 words. Words have a meaning, a pronunciation that, most of the time, tells you exactly how it's meant to be written with an alphabet. Each character has a meaning and a pronunciation but these give you no clue whatsoever about how those at least 7 or 8 strokes are meant to be drawn and packed in that small area a character usually occupies, just like you can't before you learn any alphabet how a particular sound is represented in that alphabet. Also I think you'll agree with me that the problems you had while learning English orthography, if anything, signal that, as I've seen so often discussed and agree with, English needs a spelling reform. That said I think we've taken our discussion as far as we could. You think efficiency isn't a prime motive for change to happen while I think it is and we've both made our arguments clear, I'd say, so I guess we'll just have to either agree to disagree or repeat our arguments. In any case, thank you for what you've taught me about Japanese. By the way, can you point to me any good thread about Japanese resources? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6129 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 35 of 81 02 September 2011 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Losing all of your traditional literature is a cultural apocalypse. It's the death of culture. It's not worth it. Maybe to western sociologists, to whom this stuff has no value, it is no great loss -- but, I don't know, I can't imagine people in Japan or China wanting to hop onto this bandwagon. It's not worth it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4838 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 36 of 81 02 September 2011 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
First of all the Jawi script was used by Malaysian which as far as I know has nothing to do with the Arabic language. In Arabic verbs are represented by a 3 consonant stem and vowels are changed accordingly. The Arabic script is evidence to this. Because of the nature of the language it was designed to transcribe, vowels are often simply not written. And this, of course, is just one feature that I, who am not a student of Arabic, have heard of. Can you really not conceive that an alphabet designed for a language with such peculiar characteristics may not serve a different one? Also let's forget that possibility for a moment here. The Malay switched from the Jawi script to the Latin alphabet. The reasons are obviously making the language more accessible to westerners and easier for Malaysians to learn English due to being accustomed to the alphabet with which English is written. So in this case I have a compelling reason to believe the change wasn't made for the sake of efficiency (though I wouldn't dismiss it before actually knowing the Jawi script...). However, and while this might have been the case with Vietnamese, it certainly wasn't the case with Hangeul and Korean. In fact, with Hangeul the purpose was specifically to make it more accessible to the public.
Oh trust me I know. And, in fact, I have no qualms whatsoever in saying that they should be lost. I speak Portuguese as a native language which has genders too. It so happens that with both Portuguese and Spanish the word itself almost always hints to it's gender. Also no student has to make any effort to learn them because by the time they reach school hardly any kid makes any mistake about genders. Yet, they are a stupid and unnecessary concept that provides you with no information whatsoever and as such I'd gladly speak a Portuguese without genders. All the verb tenses? Portuguese too has a lot of unnecessary ones so I'd get rid of them without hesitating, teaching them only to those that were specifically interested (historians, for instance) in reading older texts in which they are used. Also did you know that in both Spanish and Portuguese double negation is the standard? Saying the equivalent to "I didn't do nothing" is currently the proper way to speak these languages. This makes no sense from the point of view of logic. Would I change it? Yes. I'll even take it one step further. In Portuguese the letter h is completely unnecessary. When left alone it's simply not pronounced. It only serves any purpose when it follows an n an l or a c but in all these cases it only serves to slightly mutate the sound of those consonants. That could be easily achieved with a diacritic. So lose the h, I say. English's irregular spelling? I'm all for reforming it. Yet, there's one crucial difference. All these are language imperfections. I'm sure there's a lot about the Chinese language that is imperfect too. But how many of these imperfections require you to study 3000 extra symbols? It seems pretty clear to me that this is a different magnitude of wart. But this isn't what this topic is about. This topic is about a writing system. Now, I know of many cases of societies (two of which are China's neighbors that abandoned the same writing system) for which the usage of characters was a problem and that made such changes, know their reasons and know it worked mostly well for them so I can use them as an example. I don't know, however, of any case in which a society has decided to drop a useless trait of grammar so even though I'm all for it I'd have less arguments to defend it. Feel free to share any cases you know, though. @cathrynm I absolutely agree with you that losing all your traditional literature would be a cultural disaster if, for instance in the cases of Vietnam or Korea, it had happened just for the sake of it. It didn't. It happened for the sake o literacy. Besides you don't lose it for good. Those texts will eventually get translated (or at least that's what I advocate). The difference is that this time around everyone can read them. Not just a select few. Sure, maybe not every single ancient scripture will be translated but still, what do you prefer? That all ancient texts can be read by a select few or that some even if not all can be read by everyone? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6854 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 37 of 81 02 September 2011 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This has been discussed TO DEATH on this forum. I haven't seen a single new insight in this thread that hasn't been discussed before here. And, as usual, there is some serious cultural imperialism at play.
I've expressed my views on the subject at length before. Here it is in a nutshell: you seem to think that writing systems are meant to encode speech. I'm sorry, but that is not necessarily the case. If it were, then a phonetic writing system might be just fine for Chinese. However, written Chinese is a literary language, not a transcription of speech. That is a cultural thing that goes back a few thousand years and is the source of much pride for the Chinese. Indeed, the word 文 means both language/literature and culture. The two are inseparable in Chinese culture in a way unlike any other. Here is an example of the difference between written and spoken Chinese that is seen all over the place here in Taipei: 請勿停車 (qǐng wù tíng chē) 請不要停放汽車 (qǐng búyào tíngfàng qìchē) Both mean "please don't park cars", but the first makes no sense when spoken aloud. It's abbreviated in writing because many of the characters are superfluous when written. Since the characters convey meaning more than sound, they are especially well adapted to being used in this way. It really takes a familiarity with the language to appreciate how great this is. What you're talking about entails a radical overhaul of the way the written language is used, far beyond the obvious visual change in the script. That's an enormous change that goes directly against a several-thousand year cultural force. Anyway, I recommend doing some more research on this, and keep an open mind. You don't have anywhere near enough knowledge on the subject to have formed such strong opinions. A culture is a huge thing, and you have to understand and consider the whole before you can start giving prescriptions to "fix" a cultural bedrock such as language. Edited by OneEye on 02 September 2011 at 8:21pm 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5182 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 38 of 81 02 September 2011 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I think writing is a part of culture.
When it comes to Korean, they still use hanja somewhat. and Korean children are taught to read it. My friend wrote me in mail, that she has taken a hanja test to get a job! The more hanja you know the better carrier you can have! and they use it still as symbols. Also they say that without hanja it may be hard to learn Korean. And as for Vietnamese, well, they are doing well without it... but... me as a foreigner, I like to think about Vietnamese Chinese loanwords as Chinese characters. It's simply easier for me as i know Chinese already. And once I tried to ask my friend if she is a worker, but it came out that I asked her if she is a park :S cong vien I thought this word existed in Vietnamese too. It has no direct corelation with hantu, but i wanted to share my funny story. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4838 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 39 of 81 02 September 2011 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@OneEye
If you read my first post you'll see I never presumed to be sharing any new insight nor ever thought that this issue hadn't been debated before. Quite the contrary. From the very beginning I admitted that most likely this issue had been discussed extensively in this and other sites, that I tried to look for and read some such threads but that one question remained unanswered: How do the Chinese deal with the issue of homophones in spoken language, an issue that I've seen quite often raised against the adoption of an alphabet? I also admitted that I didn't speak the language and that all sorts of clarifications/corrections were welcome. If you could link me to more threads that discuss this issue, please, by all means do so. Also I assure you there's no cultural imperialism whatsoever. I'd define myself as westerner but alphabets are not an invention of the so-called West. In fact they have arisen spontaneously all over the world. Why? Because they are a very good solution to a very frequent problem. If I said something like Chinese characters need to be replaced because they are ugly (which I don't think, by the way) then sure, you'd have a point. All I'm saying is, this current Chinese written standard+Chinese characters system is an inefficient one. Saying this is cultural imperialism is like saying that I'm being culturally imperialistic if I claim that cars' engines should be made more and more efficient. If any doubt remains that all I'm concerned with is streamlining languages by getting rid of features that are objectively unnecessary, please read my previous post and hopefully that doubt will be cleared. It happens that so far only Vlad has really told me something I didn't know which is exactly what you emphasize with your post: The fact that the written standard is different from the spoken standard. Unless I misunderstood Vlad, it seems that this written standard's homophones, proverbs, etc. is the only impediment (from the linguistic point of view alone, of course) for the usage of an alphabet. Yet, like I said in the post in which I replied to Vlad, I researched more on Baihua and found that this written standard has only been used since the 1920s. According to Wikipedia, before that the standard was based on Classical Chinese but, apparently, by that time that written standard was simply out of touch with the spoken language, so many advocated that it should be changed and it was. Also apparently Baihua resembled the spoken language very closely. Is all this information correct? If it is then I think it's safe to conclude that if the written standard was once again updated to meet the current spoken standard in Mandarin (and, apparently, this is a change that China would consider making since it has made it in the past) then there would be no (linguistic) impediment to the usage of an alphabet. Regardless of whether you think they would actually change the alphabet, is what I'm saying correct so far? Edited by MarcoLeal on 03 September 2011 at 1:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5944 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 40 of 81 02 September 2011 at 11:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've heard the homophone argument time and time again, but the fact of the matter is that if your goal in writing is to transcribe speech, then yes, a phonetic writing system would work just fine for any language.
The issue appears to be that written Chinese is an abbreviated & antiquated version of the spoken language, and thus requires the characters. Then again, it might be the opposite: the briefer nature of written Chinese is a direct result of using characters that carry more information than necessary. Either way, transcribing spoken Mandarin using an alphabet would work just fine, if you (1) weren't concerned about speakers of other dialects understanding you and (2) didn't mind using more paper (though I don't think more ink would be needed). I don't buy the slower reading argument since there's no solid evidence for it. (1) shouldn't be an issue because those speakers who have been learning baihua could better spend their time learning Mandarin (besides, young Chinese everywhere are already taught in Mandarin) and then about 1 hour learning its potential phonetic writing system. (2) matters very little in the digital age, and still seems suspicious because hanzi require greater character height and width. As for education inefficiency with characters, young kids have lots of time on their hands without anything to do. That's why the system works as it does now - children have time to waste anyway, and by the time they've become adults, they've already mastered the vast majority of the characters. Plus hanzi/kanji learning is spread out over more than a decade, which makes it a much less noticeable time drain. Edited by w1n73rmu7e on 02 September 2011 at 11:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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