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The efficiency of Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5093 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 65 of 81 05 September 2011 at 8:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Some of the comments in this post have brought up some interesting questions for me. The issue of culture has been brought up alot. Since Mandarin Chinese is now the official language of China, what has happened to the other six major dialects? Originally Mandarin was spoken in North East China and around Beijing. Recently Mandarin has supplanted all the other dialects. Has the wrting system in these other dialects been univeral or did it differ? I have heard that Cantonese is somewhat different. If the writing system is different, it would be interesting to know what the cultural implications have been. I would imagine that Mongolia and many parts of western China have only recently been exposed to Chinese characters though I may be wrong.
Not really a question but I found it interesting that the pinyin phase seemed to happen around the time of the great leap forward. Literacy in China at that time was very low, like 30%. The government at that time was also going out of it's way to deystroy a great deal of culture. They have fortunately reversed that stance. The interesting part is that even though the PRC had an opportunity to start with a blank page they eventually opted for using characters and today the literacy rate is quite high about 92% according to the world factbook. That would make it seem as though culture had very little to do with the descision to use characters. Making these kinds of changes in the space of fifty or so years doesn't really seem terribly inefficient either. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4977 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 66 of 81 05 September 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | ||
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As far my quite limited knowledge goes, I think the dialects isnt what we call "dialects", more like the difference between English and French or German. Spoken comprehension of the standard dialect of chinese is for some, non existing, so they simply learn it as an foregin language.
Btw, i just now saw an article who claim lots of rural chinese loose literacy due to not using the written characters in their daily life. http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2011/09/english-china Is this beliveable? The real focus on the article is bad English education, though. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5093 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 67 of 81 05 September 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
The dialects in China are certainly like different languages and not mutually intelligable. Perhaps this is the reason for sticking with characters. It's a little bit like the universal signs for "No Smoking". A cigarette with a red circle around and a line drawn through it. Everybody knows what this means but we interpret into our own language, in mine it's "Cấm Hút Thuốc". An Englishman would think "No Smoking", this becomes a code that is universally understood, but does little to advance communication through the spoken word. Sorry, I couldn't open the link, I am interested in seeing this. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| w1n73rmu7e Newbie United States Joined 5940 days ago 31 posts - 46 votes | Message 68 of 81 05 September 2011 at 10:36pm | IP Logged | ||
connection, so hanzi retention works the same way for Chinese as it does for foreigners - use it or lose it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 69 of 81 08 September 2011 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is probably not directly related to the topic of the debate but still concerns chinese characters and I'm curious about this:
What is (or seems to be) the most important constraint when writing a polysyllabic word in Chinese? Meaning or phonetics? Hopefully the following (fictitious) example will help explain exactly what I mean. Let's say a character for Sun doesn't exist (I know it exists but let's assume for a moment it doesn't) and assume that in Chinese the word for Sun is pronounced like 'abcdef' with the syllables being 'abc' and 'def'. Now assume that one or many characters (with different meanings) exist whose reading is 'abc' and the same is true for 'def' but no matter which 'abc' or 'def' characters you chose, their combined meaning (not combined pronunciation) never even remotely suggests the concept of sun. Now let's assume that several characters exist that when combined suggest the concept of sun, for instance, ball+fire, source+light, etc but no combination of the readings of these plausible combinations of meaning is pronounced like 'abcdef'. So in a situation like this, how would this word written? I'm not asking you to do guess-work, just trying to find out what the "trend" is when it comes to transcribing words. Would the meaning-based spelling prevail? Would the phonetic one? If the choice was based on meaning, would the involved characters be given an extra possible reading so as to accommodate this case? If the choice was based on phonetics, would the characters be assigned extra possible meanings? Edited by MarcoLeal on 08 September 2011 at 9:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 70 of 81 09 September 2011 at 12:50am | IP Logged | ||
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I believe the characters come first, then the spoken language follows. Someone put electricity, 電 and talk, 話 together and made telephone -- 電話. (I think this is the same in both Chinese and Japanese, right?) How the word is spoken came as a result of innovation in the written language.
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| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 71 of 81 09 September 2011 at 1:22am | IP Logged | ||
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@cathrynm - With loan words and words for recently invented/discovered objects/concepts (which, I could bet, are a minority) that could certainly be the case but I doubt it's true in general.
I mean, surely you don't think the Chinese equivalent for everyday words like 'floor' or 'understand' (both of which are compounds of two characters with individual meaning according to this: http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writchin/ciandzi.html) and certainly many others were only invented after characters existed. That same page suggests a few words are just intrinsically polysyllabic and their individual characters don't have any meaning so clearly they weren't created by combination of meanings. Also, according this: http://www.cjvlang.com/Writing/writchin/writchin1.html, words like microphone are written with the characters for grain, conquer and wind. Why? Because when spelled in that order they're pronounced like maikefeng which sounds like microphone, suggesting even loan or recently created words can be generated based both on semantics and phonetics. Edited by MarcoLeal on 09 September 2011 at 1:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6125 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 72 of 81 09 September 2011 at 1:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, Japanese just add in phonetic English words, but my understand is that Chinese construct new words for everything based on Chinese characters. I'm sure someone else knows more about this than me, but I believe Chinese changed from single character words to multiple character words at one point. So yeah, the compounds came about well after the characters. I'm sure there's a Wikipedia article or something about this.
When they talk about 5000 years of history, it's not a joke. These characters have been around a very very long time. To find words predating characters, would be like 3000 BC? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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