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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 17 of 81 01 September 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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@nway
Quite obviously the Chinese language and writing system don't prevent the Chinese society from existing but shouldn't the existence of better alternatives (and that's what really is being discussed here) give you pause? I mean, everybody was happy to ride horses in the past but as soon as cars were invented nobody really questioned that they were a more efficient means for locomotion. Also there are in fact fields in which the prevalent chinese homophones seem to be detrimental. According to this article, http://www.pinyin.info/readings/zyg/homophones.html, for instance, changes had to be to a number of words in technical/scientific terms in order to avoid possibly dangerous confusions. As for the examples of chinese characters I gave, you said: "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." True but keep in mind that "Thing that moves" was what the second poster assumed it to be. According to the native speaker that posted them, the characters simply mean "thing" and "move" respectively. So why is it a thing that moves (in which case I'd have to agree it would be an animal) and not a thing that can be moved (in which case it could be pretty much anything else)? "Try touching something without involving any movement. " Are you even serious? Try speaking without moving. Try eating without moving. Try walking without moving. Try running without moving. Try jumping without moving. Try lifting something without moving. Do you see a pattern here? "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?" Actually I did contemplate that possibility and still it is extremely vague. Why is a man thing not just any object that typically belongs to a man such as a weapon? Or if not specifically a male, why not something made by humans like a tool? Why not a soul? Why not language? All these are human characteristics (or at least characteristics I would imagine ancient chinese associating with humans alone). ""Thing" and "walk" are far more ambiguous (and therefore applicable) than "dog" and "jump"." And why isn't this an animal either? For you it was perfectly clear that a thing that moves had to be an animal. Why not here too? Also the character for thing seems to be used for objects but here it isn't. How am I supposed to figure that out? "Instead of thinking of it as "live more", think of it as "more life"." It's not moRe. It's moVe. Why would "life move" be lively? Why not a nomad? Or, once again, why not an animal? "99.99999% of the time, yes." For a person asked to pick a random human being, yes. For a person living in ancient china in what was most definitely a small community and the poeple they dealt with in a daily basis, definitely not. And also, why not a doctor or just some sort of healer? Why not medicine (as in something that keeps people alive)? "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. " But that's the problem isn't it? Extreme Ambiguity! Even if you assume it means several people then why is it everybody? Why not just a crowd? Why not an army? Why not a marketplace? What you say about languages and how prone they are to have vocabulary that doesn't make much sense in its construction is absolutely true but that's simply not the point. I'm not discussing how the Chinese language or any other languages forms words. I'm discussing the efficiency of their writing system. @clumsy You say characters can be read faster but is it really because of the characters or is it because of the language? Correct me if I'm wrong but I came under the impression that the Chinese words usually have a very low number of syllables (a fact that supposedly made the homophones problem even worse). Also let's assume for a moment that it really is something inherent to the characters and that they allow you to read 50% faster. Still, in order to achieve that you had to learn not 50% more characters but 10000% (aka 100 times) the amount of characters. You'll have a hard time convincing me or most people that it pays off in terms of reading efficiency. Thank you for clarifying the issue of typing Mandarin. It's true that you need less keystrokes to type that but tell me how long did it take you to actually be able to write that fast? In order to do something like that, you had to first learn the characters of course, but also learn to codify all of them and also remember the codes for all those thousands of characters, something which, if I had to bet, you didn't learn in just a couple of hours. By the way could you please write that sentence in Mandarin (both in characters and pinyin)? About the IQ, let's say it's true. Still you're improving you IQ while doing something useless, which is learning an unnecessary (if they really are unnecessary, of course) amount of characters. There are other things that can improve your IQ, that you can have just as much fun with (or even more) and that are probably much more useful if your society is reasonable enough to get rid of an archaic writing system. You do have point when you say it uses less paper. I wonder, though, just how much less? Also, even forgetting for a moment the effort of learning the sheer umber of characters there are other advantages to the usage of an alphabet make it at the very least even with hanzi. Nammely the ease of finding words on a dictionary due to an existing order for symbols (in fact I remember reading somewhere that finding words on a Chinese dictionary is so hard that dictionary contests are held Taiwanese schools), the possibility of hearing a new word and having immediately at least a rough idea of how it's written, which in turn allows you to find on a dictionary, the ease of distinguishing characters that can be made different enough due to their low number, the ease of drawing them correctly, etc. @Vlad If what you say is true then the problem with the current writing system is even worse. It implies that the problem of the homophones is not only not solved by the characters, they actually emphasize it! If there aren't that many homophones in actual spoken Mandarin than an alphabet that actually represented what spoken Mandarain sounds like would solve the problem, no? @Cthulhu Absolutely agreed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5094 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 18 of 81 01 September 2011 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | ||
The Japanese were another culture that adopted Chinese characters, and although they developed a phonetic system/syllabary of their own, they still continue to use characters. Japan has a high literacy rate, despite this fact, so even if an alphabet is more efficient from an objective point of view, I find it hard to believe the cost-benefit ratio really is that great in the long run. But that's just the problem- it's not really an objective question at all. Even if all it comes down to is culture and tradition, these are hardly insignificant reasons, and hardly worth the trade off to many people. Maybe people would be just as happy and well off with an alphabet. But why fix what isn't broken? A linguist can sit and debate the advantages of IPA until they are blue in the face, but at the end of the day, it still wouldn't be worth it to you would it? 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 19 of 81 01 September 2011 at 8:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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MarcoLeal,
I don't think I have expressed myself right. Mandarin Chinese is a diglossic language (hope I'm using the term right. It is not as extreme as Arabic dialects Vs Modern standard Arabic, but still diglossic) which means, that you speak one language but use a different language to write. Written Mandarin is the same throughout China so speakers of all dialects, when they learn to write, the do not write in their own language, or use grammar and vocabulary of spoken Madarin but they all write in written Mandarin (I call it written Madarin, but it is technically called Baihua, a language based on the Chinese language spoken during the Song dynasty). That's why there are hundreds of students from Hong Kong in Taiwan for instance and have no problems studying at Taiwanese universities even thought they speak zero or close to zero Mandarin. All the materials are written in Baihua, just like newspapers in Hong Kong (although I've heard about newspapers in written Cantonese as well). Baihua just really has a lot of homophones, a lot of proverbs, lot of 4 character expressions used only in writing, which would make it difficult to read in pinyin. I could imagine writing down spoken Mandarin in pinyin (no problems texting like that for instance), but not Baihua. I don't see how characters emphasize any problem since only thanks to characters you can read books without having to guess the meaning of syllables in every sentence. As to the mentioned reading speed. I have no scientific proof, but my impression is that reading characters is much faster than reading a script based on an alphabet. Articles in Chinese are much shorter in length then the same articles written in English for instance. Most of my Taiwanese friends do not 'read aloud in their mind' when they read (I'm only guessing that this is because of the nature of the Chinese script), which makes reading faster again. Edited by Vlad on 01 September 2011 at 8:40pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 20 of 81 01 September 2011 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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One word: culture
Just because you can make something more efficient doesn't mean you have to. I would personally hate to see Chinese characters be abandoned. The characters are ridiculous from the western perspective, but it seems to fit Chinese pretty well, and why fix something that isn't broken? 2 persons have 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 21 of 81 01 September 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think most language reforms just lead to pain and chaos, really. The problem with any drastic change is you cut off the current generation from the writers in the past. Or at least, you limit them to those books that get translated to the new form. That there's a political utility to this -- that the writers of the past may have said things which could be interpreted as critical of the current political order. So if you dump all that old stuff, well, problem solved. If that's your goal, fine, but I don't like it.
My take on the practical aspect of this -- is that Chinese characters work good enough with Japanese. I find the language written in roman letters pretty difficult to decode though this might be non-native speaker handicap. I've seen this in chat rooms, where Chinese diaspora kids who know the language but can't write type in Romanized Chinese, and then the Chinese guys are totally and utterly baffled. I'll say this much though, in Japanese, the characters for the names are just crazy. The given names and the family names and the place names, they'll crazy hard to read. I think I could spend a year doing nothing but learning how to read names, and still not be done. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 22 of 81 01 September 2011 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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@starrye
To my knowledge, Japanese keeps the characters mostly because homophones are also a serious problem in that language but I could ask you the same question I asked for Chinese. How do Japanese speakers deal with homophones in spoken Japanese? @ Vlad I had no idea the written standard was so different from the spoken standard. I read wikipedia's article about Baihua. They say this standard was adopted in the 1920's because the standard based on Classical Chinese was out of touch with the spoken language. This makes me wonder. If the current standard is so different, isn't it time for another change? Is this debated in China? I also found a wikipedia article called written Cantonese that suggests that, even though the usage of characters does allow for some intelligibility between Chinese varieties, it's not all fun and games. Quoting that article: "Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin, but when spoken word for word as Cantonese, it sounds unnatural because its expressions are ungrammatical and unidiomatic in Cantonese" So my question remains. What if an alphabet was developed that was based on the spoken standard of Mandarin and used to write the different Chinese varieties? Would this intelligibility be lost? @ DNB "Just because you can make something more efficient doesn't mean you have to." When that something is perhaps the most important tool for information storage and education yes, you have. "I would personally hate to see Chinese characters be abandoned." I, You and probably most people that post in this forum study languages for pleasure. We're certainly not the majority and even among us there's people like that would rather learn the language's grammar and sounds instead of memorizing symbols. I bet most learners of Chinese would gladly not have to learn 100 times as many characters as they would if Chinese had an alphabet. "The characters are ridiculous from the western perspective, but it seems to fit Chinese pretty well, and why fix something that isn't broken?" Ridiculous from a western perspective and apparently from an Asian too. Just ask Koreans. And why do you fix something that isn't broken? For the same reason people buy new cell-phones or computers or update software even if their old ones weren't broken or try to be fit even they were already healthy. @cathrynn The natural evolution of the language is enough to guarantee you can't read anything that is ancient enough. Very few Chinese can read ancient Chinese anyway. So what do they do about it? I'm guessing they translate older texts. A transition to a new writing system could be just as gradual. It's precisely what's happening in South Korea. Hanja and Hangeul coexist but the former seems to be slowly fading away. 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 23 of 81 01 September 2011 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Old writings sometimes just get lost. I'm not an expert on this, but I did read an article about old Vietnamese books, and my understanding was that a lot of this has been in a very precarious situation -- sitting in libraries unread, and one fire away from being lost. That some scholars have been making heroic efforts to save these old books.
Romanization in Vietnam came with Christian Missionaries and European colonialism. I'm willing to speculate that the shift in writing change away from Chinese characters to the Roman alphabet suited their political purpose -- that is it cut off the current generation from the writings and beliefs of the past, and thereby making it easier to indoctrinate people into monotheistic religion. I mean, maybe it's the natural tendency of old writings to become unreadable, but that doesn't mean I have to like it or go along with it. I'm just relieved that Japanese doesn't have the situation Chinese has with the Simplified versus Traditional script. Edited by cathrynm on 02 September 2011 at 12:42am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5094 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 24 of 81 01 September 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
In the spoken language, homophones can be distinguished through context and intonation, same as they can in other languages. More specifically, Japanese uses pitch accent. Japanese writing is different in that it uses a mixed system, though. I would say the contrast created between kana and kanji in written text makes Japanese easy on the eyes and good for skimming. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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