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The efficiency of Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 1 of 81 01 September 2011 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I know some of you must be rolling your eyes after reading the title of this thread and thinking I’m just another guy who either thinks this has never been discussed before or simply didn’t bother to use the search engine. I assure you that is not the case so please bear with me for a “second” here.
Naturally the purpose of raising this issue once again is to seek clarification from students of the language, native speakers, etc. so one would be justified to ask: Why did I write this huge post, filled with information you most likely already have, when I could simply have asked the question I’ll eventually ask you? The reason is very simple. Since I can’t speak the language and don’t know the history of the script in detail, I may have formed some misconceptions or might simply be lacking some crucial piece of information so feel free to correct me. I can’t speak Mandarin and am not studying the language, yet the Chinese script has always intrigued me deeply and recently I’ve spent some time researching about it. It was always apparent to me that a writing system that forces its users to learn in excess of 2000 characters for fluency (with advanced fluency actually requiring much more than that) couldn’t be an efficient one. After all, pretty much every other writing system uses a very small number of characters (at least when compared to the Chinese) and they all seem to serve their respective languages well enough. Even the history of writing seems to suggest that getting an alphabet is a pretty sound decision. To my knowledge, at least, systems based on pictograms and logograms have frequently been replaced by alphabets (and I’m not even counting changes imposed by force, such as by conquerors) but never the opposite. So why could it be that the Chinese kept using their characters? At first I imagined it would have something to do with the fact that “rewriting China” with whichever new alphabet they developed would be an extremely costly process. However, later I learned about the examples of North Korea and how they got entirely rid of Hanja during the 1950s and how in South Korea, despite the usage of some 1800 characters mostly in newspapers, Hanja seemed to be in decay. Of course Hangeul is an alphabet crafted specifically for the Korean language but apparently not even abandoning Chinese characters and adopting a completely alien alphabet like the Vietnamese did with the Latin alphabet was much of an issue. Granted, Vietnam and both Koreas are much smaller countries than China but then again, at least at the time, they were probably much poorer too. Also, in fact, even the Chinese have implemented extensive reforms to their writing system in the past – the introduction of simplified Chinese. Still, simplifying a few hundred characters is not nearly as big a change as replacing them by an alphabet. It looked a lot like the Chinese simply rejected the idea of an alphabet altogether. Later, however, I learned about zhuyin, also known as Bopomofo, a phonetic system devised in the early 20th century, with just 37 symbols and capable of representing all the sounds in Mandarin. This system was used as a teaching tool both in China (from 1910 until 1949) and in Taiwan (from 1910 until the present day). Children were first taught to read these symbols and this knowledge would later be useful when learning the actual Chinese characters. China then dropped zhuyin in 1949 but, according to Wikipedia, only because they decided to replace it with pinyin. The article doesn’t make it clear, however, what role pinyin plays in Chinese education nowadays, if any, so if someone could clarify this for me, I'd be grateful. Regardless of that, however, the fact that Bopomofo was used for at least 40 years in China, means not only that the Chinese themselves seem to recognize (or to have recognized) that learning an alphabet was much easier but also that, in fact, millions of Chinese and Taiwanese students have actually learned an alphabet before learning the characters. Could it be that there are advantages inherent to the characters themselves? Forum members often suggested that the usage of the Chinese script requires fewer characters to spell words. This is true but from the point of view of handwriting what actually counts is the number of strokes and it’s not at all obvious (if even true) that writing with Chinese script requires less strokes. When typing with a computer the number of strokes doesn’t matter but still the consensus seems to be that the input of Chinese characters isn’t exactly easy, at least when compared with the input of alphabets. They also claimed that many characters had shapes that hinted at their meaning and that combining the meanings of the individual characters that a given word was composed of, often would help with figuring out the meaning of the word itself. They would often provide examples of these to back their claims but more often than not these were very contrived and quite a leap of imagination was required to actually see a mountain or a man or a horse in the characters that have these meanings, not to mention that the number of characters for which it is claimed to be possible is very small. Also, on a different website a Chinese native speaker provided this example: “动(move), 物(thing), 人(man), 行(walk), 生(live) Once you have learned the five selected characters, it then becomes an absolute breeze to learn the following words formed with two of the selected five characters: 动物(animal) ,动人(touching),人物(character),人生(life),行动(acti on),行人(pedestrian),生动(lively),生物(living thing),生人(stranger),人人(everybody)” To which a second forum member replied (and I absolutely agree with him/her): “动物 (Thing that moves -how should I know it's an animal?-) 动人 (Moving Man -What does that have to do with Touching?-) 人物 (Man thing -Again, it has nothing to do with Character.-) 人生 (Man that live -I'll give you that one, it sort of makes sense-) 行动 (Thing that walks -Action.. but why couldn't it be "Dog that jumps"?-) 行人 (Man that walks -Ok.. I guess that could be a pedestrian-) 生动 (Live Move -it's pretty hard to figure out that that means "lively"-) 生物 (Living thing -That's the only one that actually makes sense-) 生人 (Alive person -So any person alive is an Stranger?-) 人人 (Two persons –Why is it everybody and not a couple?)” And this is with sets of characters that the native speaker considers good examples! Let alone the more obscure ones! After reading exchanges like this one it became pretty hard to give much credibility to arguments of inherent superiority of pictogram based scripts and it became pretty obvious then that there had to be something about Mandarin that made writing it with an alphabet absolutely prohibitive even if I couldn’t even begin to fathom what it could be. After reading quite a few threads (on this and other sites) in which this subject was debated, it soon became very clear that the problem could be Mandarin’s limited sound repertoire and the resulting abundance of homophones. The reasoning was that even characters with the same pronunciation had different meanings and therefore could be used to distinguish those homophones in writing. Some people even claimed that tones further complicated this problem but surely this can’t be a problem. After all tones make the words actually sound different and any alphabet can easily mark tones by using diacritics. What reading those threads or using the search engine to look for “homophones”, “characters”, “chinese script” or “hanzi”, never helped me with, though, was understanding how the Chinese deal with this issue in actual speech. Surprisingly enough, when confronted with the issue of homophones, proponents of the replacement of the characters with an alphabet never raised the issue or when they did it was simply never addressed and this is the reason that compelled me to start a new thread. Thinking further about this, I reached the conclusion that there were only 3 possible scenarios: - The amount of the homophones is, despite what has been claimed, actually very small and, therefore, not an issue at all; - The problem exists but isn’t as serious as suggested because context allows speakers to distinguish between homophones easily in most cases. - The problem exists and is very serious but the Chinese have decided to do nothing about it; Still, paradoxically, none of these scenarios is particularly convincing. Further reading led me to dismiss the first scenario and if the second scenario was true then that simply wasn’t a reason to keep the characters, after all many other languages (I dare say all) have some homophones but, because most of the time context helps clearing doubts, using a script with a few thousand characters just to solve those minor issues would not be justified. As for the third scenario, well I do know that the Chinese tend to take their culture and traditions very seriously but languages tend to behave a lot like living beings in one crucial aspect: when faced with selective pressures they change. It’s hard to imagine that such a serious problem wouldn’t have been at least seriously alleviated throughout Mandarin’s thousands of years of existence. So what exactly is happening? Chinese speakers don’t speak with characters so what’s the solution they have found that can’t be implemented with an alphabet? Feel free to provide links to threads in which this point has been discussed. If you’re still following me after this wall of text then thank you (and congratulations :P) for your patience and interest. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 2 of 81 01 September 2011 at 3:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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During Mao's time, there was encouragement of familiarity with the Roman alphabet, and it is noticeable that propaganda posters from that time often have inscriptions in Chinese characters with Roman script underneath. Perhaps there was discussion of going over to a Latin-based alphabet like the Vietnamese did, but in the end the idea was shelved.
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| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5273 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 3 of 81 01 September 2011 at 3:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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People find it hard giving up something they grew up with. Would you switch away from the English alphabet of
26 letters and no diacritics to the IPA which is "perfect"? People find it hard to give up something that's objectively beautiful. Chinese characters are lovely. Latin script is so ubiquitous as to have lost all of its charm. To find a beautiful alphabet you have to go a bit to the east, e.g. Greek, Armenian, or Georgian. People find it hard to give up something steeped with tradition, in which their cherished literature is written. See IPA question above. Cultural arrogance: China has not really seen a worthy cultural rival until the rise of modern Europe. Remember that ancient cultures of the Middle East and Europe (e.g. Rome, Greece), had very little penetration into China. For millennia China has had a mentor relationship to other Asian neighbors and thus saw little reason to adopt their "barbaric" practices, e.g. Korean Hangul alphabet or the Mongol alphabet. Finally, Chinese characters have given the Chinese people cohesion. It's no secret that a phonetic writing system drives the tendency for orthographic change. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. are all Romance languages yet very different ethnic groups with distinct identities. Part of the reason why is geographic and historical, but partly its a matter of language. If they all wrote their written language in Vulgar Latin even as their spoken languages had diverged they would probably feel more connected amongst each other. Perhaps Portugal and Spain, to take one example, would be one nation. So it is with China: Mandarin, Cantonese, Min Nan, Hakka, etc. all use basically the same set of characters even if the pronunciation is very different. The writing system holds them together, permits mutual intelligibility in writing if not in speech, maintains their identity as one Chinese People rather than 4 different ethnic groups that speak Sinitic languages (which is a more accurate assessment from the linguistic perspective). 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| nway Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Vic Joined 5415 days ago 574 posts - 1707 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean | Message 4 of 81 01 September 2011 at 5:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I'm a little rushed, so forgive me if I misinterpreted, but you seem to have three principle points:
1. Chinese characters as opposed to alphabets 2. The potential for confusion from homophones 3. Whether the above two issues actually make Chinese inefficient It's perhaps easiest to answer the third point—if a society is functioning well, then its own well functioning ought to validate whatever forms of internal communication it decides to use. In a grand sense, China has existed for millennia. Even along a shorter and more recent chronology, Hong Kong and Taiwan have both had many decades of prosperity, and regions of the PRC have also enjoyed this sort of societal prosperity. Therefore, the Chinese "language"—whether written or spoken—clearly does not impede societal prosperity in any meaningful way, thus rendering the two prior points irrelevant. That said, as for the problematic homophone examples you quoted:
If you take 20 seconds to think about it, it quickly becomes clear that animals are the only beings in existence that have the capacity for intrinsic (self-generated) movement. And if you consider that this terms was coined long before automobiles and airplanes, it becomes even easier to understand why movement would have been considered the defining feature of animals.
Try touching something without involving any movement.
What is a character (in the sense of a figure) but a thing with human qualities? Even if you misinterpreted it as the written character (a case of a misleading English homophone), who creates and writes characters other than mankind?
"Thing" and "walk" are far more ambiguous (and therefore applicable) than "dog" and "jump".
Instead of thinking of it as "live more", think of it as "more life".
99.99999% of the time, yes.
First of all, a "couple" in Chinese would simply be, literally, "two people" — 两个人. Secondly, reduplication is used to create numerically ambiguous plurality in a number of languages, including Malay/Indonesian, meaning "orang orang" would likewise not correspond to a "couple" (and I don't recall anyone ever calling Indonesian difficult). In a similar manner, French uses the term "all the word" (tout le monde) to mean "everybody", but, obviously, most of the time, "everybody" doesn't refer to everybody in the world, but rather "everybody" in a more limited sense. But no one complains about idiomatic French terminology. Chinese is what it is. Due to the combination of 1) the infinite and incalculable nature of life and the universe, and 2) the artificial and man-made nature of language, it is inevitable that every language will have its fair share of idiomatic vocabulary that doesn't necessarily make inherent sense, particularly to a foreigner unfamiliar with how the culture has chosen to interpret any given thing or idea. Edited by nway on 01 September 2011 at 5:13pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 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 5 of 81 01 September 2011 at 5:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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There are quite a few positives about hanzi.
First, the reading speed - you can read characters faster. Second, typing speed:you can type them faster - you just have to type nvhhgx to write "a girl is happy". Also, learning them improves your IQ (according to one website). Moreover you need less paper to write books in hanzi. think about "plane", hat does this word tells a Chinese learner of English？ In Chinese it's "flying machine“ 飛機. So there are good points of hanzi. Not only bad ones. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 6 of 81 01 September 2011 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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@ William Camden
Thank you for the information. Do you know why they shelved the idea, though? @ Merv Yes, people find giving up what they grew up with hard but that apparently that didn't stop the Vietnamese to switch from Chinese characters to the Latin alphabet or the Koreans from Hanja to Hangeul. You can also find other such examples in eastern Europe where many languages have gone back and forth from Cyrillic to Latin. Sure, some of these changes were promoted by regimes that are less than democratic but then again, until very recently that was true for China too and, in fact, it's happening in South Korea too which is a modern democracy. Would I change to IPA? No, I wouldn't but the reason is not the fact that it's different from what I grew up with. The reason I wouldn't is that I don't think the cost-benefit ratio justifies it. I'll give you the example of my native Portuguese. The Latin alphabet plus a few diacritics is perfectly capable of describing its sounds. Of course there are a few ambiguities that using IPA would clear but it would require using many more symbols. It's simply overkill. If anything I would change the portuguese ortography to get rid of a couple of unnecessary features such as, for instance, the letter h, but that's a discussion for a different thread. The reasoning behind my criticism of the Chinese script is exactly the same. 3000 or even just 2000 characters is simply overkill. Now, would I support the change to a more efficient writing system, no matter how different from the one I grew up with? Without even blinking. Saying anything is objectively beautiful is a bold statement to say the least. Even though I agree that the Chinese characters are beautiful I'm not at all sure that that's the view of the majority. Even if it is that's still irrelevant. Why? Because like the examples of Vietnam proves, a writing script is a means for information transmission and storage and for education. It needs to be before anything simple and accessible. The aesthetic value of such an important everyday tool can only be secondary. I mean, It would be pretty awesome if police agents patrolled the streets on horseback and wearing medieval armor but unless you want bank robbers to get away you probably want them to have fast cars instead. Also, I apologize if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you're assuming that I would advocate the usage of the Latin alphabet by the Chinese. That's not at all the case. Quite the opposite, in fact. I think they shouldn't. I think they should use an alphabet specially devised for Mandarin. And then of course this alphabet could be designed to be true to the aesthetic principles of the characters. It could be an alphabet that the Chinese considered beautiful. I understand your argument about cultural arrogance but it seems to me that's in the past. These days Chinese people are very encouraged to learn English, for instance. Also not using something as general as an alphabet (not even a specific alphabet but ANY alphabet) just because other people did the same seems tantamount to saying that wearing clothes or growing a mustache makes you a nazi because Hitler did the same. Either there's something about your last paragraph that I don't understand or the analogy you're making is a false analogy. Mandarin (a language) is to French/Spanish/Portugese (languages) what the chinese characters (a writing system) are to the Latin alphabet (also a writing system) not Vulgar Latin (which is a language). In fact, when you make the proper analogy you can see that the situation is exactly the same. In both cases you have different but related languages that share a common writing system, yet in one case you have a united country and in the other 3 separate nations. Not only that. The world is full of examples of neighboring countries that share not only the exact same writing system but actually the same language but that are, nonetheless, separate as well examples of countries in which a strong national identity exists despite all the different languages spoken in those countries. This suggests to me that similarity of language, or at least its writing system, even though relevant, doesn't have the weight you seem to give it. Regardless of that let's assume for a minute that this mutual intelligibility, that was possible in writing, really was a factor for unity. Even so, it's not at all obvious for me (if anyone has evidence to the contrary, though, feel free to present it) that with an alphabet that intelligibility would be lost. After all those languages simply are related! And just like I as a speaker of Portuguese can very very often understand text written in Spanish, French or Italian with the latin alphabet(even though not necessarily when spoken), it seems very unlikely to me that this intelligibility would just die. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6584 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 7 of 81 01 September 2011 at 5:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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About homophones:
In spoken Mandarin, there are not that many homophones, at least not enough to make a discussion impossible. The problem is written Mandarin (not written direct speech, or MSN chats). Written Mandarin is quite different from spoken Mandarin. Expressions are often shortened down to only one character which makes the number of homophones even greater and would turn reading a text in pinyin into a very difficult event. I can't compare however, because the only texts I've ever read in pinyin were chapters in coursebooks, which I knew the vocabulary from, so that doesn't really count. And..when it comes to spoken Mandarin, even my Taiwanese friends while watching TV sometimes have to look at subtitles (Chinese/Taiwanese TV is subtitled into Chinese characters by default) to understand what people are talking about. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7223 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 8 of 81 01 September 2011 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Enormous logical fallacy; there could be other factors (Cultural, geographic, historical, whatever) that compensate for any impediments caused by the written Chinese language. The only way this proves anything is if you could state categorically that Hong Kong/Taiwan wouldn't be more prosperous if they had used an alphabet. Which you can't. Clumsy: Do you have any actual evidence to support the fact that Chinese is substantially faster to read and type? Because everything I've seen suggests they're at best comparable. Also, the popular methods of word formation used by various languages has nothing to do with the writing systems; the German word for a plane is Flugzeug ("Flying stuff/device"), but that isn't an advantage for the Latin alphabet. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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