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The efficiency of Chinese characters | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| JLiechti Newbie United States Joined 5347 days ago 1 posts - 1 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Spanish | Message 41 of 81 03 September 2011 at 1:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Hey, I just finished reading through the thread and have a few points to bring up that I don't think have been
mentioned yet: MarcoLeal, my guess is that you've already come across this is your research, but some 80-90% of Chinese characters contain a phonetic component that give hint to how the character is pronounced (I'm not sure how this works for various dialects, but I know it does for Mandarin). I study Mandarin now, and one the questions I've always had was, how do they know how to pronounce characters they have never seen before? The answer is recognizing these phonetic components. Albeit, my understanding is that they aren't 100% reliable, but usually they can get you pretty close. Being able to recognize the radicals (bùshǒu) and these various phonetic components makes learning the writing system a lot less cumbersome once one learns the patterns in how they fit together. You also may find this interesting: http://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/stonelion.php An entire story using only the phonetic sound "shi" and the various tones. I think it shows a good example of some of the difficulties involved with trying to use a phonetic script (be it a roman script or zhuyin, or etc...) for the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6659 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 42 of 81 03 September 2011 at 3:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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There’s more to life than efficiency. Removing genders, tenses and h’s from portugese, well, just by saying you
would to that makes me think that you should perhaps study lojban and stay there. Languages are not made for mere efficiency but has many more levels than that. Tradition, beauty, and fun. We have many words that are polysyllabic when they could be shorter, many words that are hard to pronounce when they could be easier. We make verbs irregular by using them. Habere is a regular verb in latin but irregular in French. Everywhere where writing has been invented it has forced the scribes into diglossia, because the written word has never ever been the same as the spoken language and eventually the written language is so far from the spoken one that they’re different languages. The scribes in Egypt wrote Early middle egyptian during the Later dynasties, a language that by then was maybe 1000 years old. Akkadian lost its cases quite early on but they were kept in writing for a very long time. Even though the difference today is not as vast as they once was between the written and the spoken language they’re still two different things that do the same thing: they encode thoughts. A big part of Chinese and Japanese culture are built upon the characters. Their thoughts and their way of thinking are in a way based upon characters. I’d say that perhaps Japanese and Chinese children have better vocabulary as they have to learn the words they write, n’est-ce pas? I’ve met natives that had no idea what mononucleosis, osteoporosis or TB were - yet these words are the only one’s that I know of that are stilisticly okay in formal or semi formal writing. Kissing decease, weak bone decease and epidemic-lung-infection-that-killed-a-lot-of- people-and-sent-them-to-sanatoriums are fine when you’re just doing chit chat.. But come on? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| MarcoLeal Groupie Portugal Joined 4834 days ago 58 posts - 104 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 43 of 81 03 September 2011 at 3:19am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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@w1n73rmu7e
I mostly agree with you but concerning the time drain I do have to say that it is a time drain, nonetheless. I'm sure you'll agree that during that time they could be learning more about music or maths, practicing more sports or even learning more about their extensive history. @JLiechti Thanks for the input! Yes I did know about the phonetic cues but I've read contradictory opinions about just how common and useful these clues are. According to some they are very useful. According to others they are overrated. I really don't know what to make of this. Perhaps someone would like to clarify this? Oh and I know the poem. Yes it's a curious case but in all fairness it should categorized along with the famous "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo." as very contrived. Also I think it's relevant to say that according to wikipedia that article is written in classical chinese and can't be understood when spoken in Modern Mandarin, so in a sense, it's a problem of the past. Quoting from the article: "The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken in Modern Standard Chinese or when written in romanization." The page also includes a translation of the poem to Vernacular Chinese (Baihua) and it's romanization. In that version you can see the problem no longer arises. @Hampie While I most definitely understand that anyone would assume, after reading my posts, that I'd reject any language that wasn't perfectly efficient, that is not the case. The point of this thread is not to rant in hopes of getting the Chinese or the Japanese to drop the characters so that I would have an easier time learning them. I'm a language enthusiast, learn them as a hobby and have absolutely nothing against anyone that takes Chinese or Japanese as such and would like them to study them the way they currently are. If any evidence to this is necessary then I guess this should be enough: I'm learning German right now and as we both know, with its 3 (completely unnecessary) genders that force you to at best make educated guesses about the gender of a new word and it's many ways to form plurals, it's ridden with inefficiencies. Still I learn it because I like it. Yet, just like an old car collector likes to keep his antiques the way were back in their time but agrees that modern cars should have ABS and better engines, I too realize that you can and should be pragmatic about languages when you realize they are tools used by, quite often, millions of people that don't share this enthusiasm and that are absolutely justified to demand efficiency in a subject like this. The reasons for pointing out what I perceive as flaws in my native Portuguese were the following: First, showing that I'm not oblivious to the shortcomings of what I'm used to and don't criticize the Chinese writing system because it's different and secondly, to show that even though I do consider these features more of a burden than anything else they still can't compare (for the reasons I stated in that post) with the Chinese characters when it comes to the time and effort it's necessary to invest to deal with them. I think this sums it up: When it comes to language, in an ideal world everybody would learn Lojban (because it draws influence from six of the world's most spoken languages and has a highly streamlined and unambiguous grammar) as a lingua franca but then everybody would be highly encouraged to learn any other languages that pleased them. Edited by MarcoLeal on 03 September 2011 at 4:16am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6850 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 44 of 81 03 September 2011 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
It works like this: The word yǒu could mean 'friend' or it could mean 'to have', 'europium', a ritual bonfire, 'to lead', or any other of a number of things. On paper the meaning is made clear by the character used. In speech, the meaning is often made clear by appending another word to it. In the case of friend, 'péng' (meaning companion) is added, making 'péngyǒu', which can only mean friend. Similarly, 'dì' could mean 'younger brother' or 'ordinal number', but when it means younger brother it is reduplicated, so "dìdì" is younger brother. These aren't really the best examples but they'll do to illustrate how it works. This sort of thing is made less necessary in writing by virtue of the characters. Now, 'friend' is usually still 'péngyǒu' in writing, but if you look at my earlier example you'll see how written Chinese is abbreviated compared to the spoken language.
There was one a while back with almost the exact same title as this, though I don't remember how informative it was. Otherwise, you're on your own. I don't have time to be doing your research for you.
"Cultural imperialism" doesn't just mean East vs. West. This is very much a cultural thing, and you're suggesting that this system which has been in place for thousands of years and has served its people (billions of them) perfectly well somehow needs to be overhauled simply because you think you know a better way.
You're not qualified to make that assessment. You yourself admit that you don't know the language and it's obvious that you don't know much about how the language works. Yet you have these strong opinions about how to change it to make it "better". I'll put it this way: I've never met a native speaker who thinks the characters should be done away with. Sure, there was talk from the communists in the early-mid 20th century about replacing them with an alphabet, but this process was resisted by the people intensely. The writing system is a great source of pride for them, like I said earlier. Just yesterday I was at the National Palace Museum, and by far the most popular exhibits among both the Chinese and Japanese visitors were those about calligraphy, the history of the writing system, etc. By the way, Chinese calligraphy has been a high art form in East Asia for millenia. Some would say the highest. You're suggesting taking that away from them (that is certainly what would happen within a few generations), because of some notion you have about efficiency. Again, the characters are an intrinsic part of the culture in a bigger way than you can understand from the outside. It's much more than simply "a way of encoding and storing information". That's very utilitarian and it misses the big picture (the culture as a whole).
There's no objectivity about it. You don't know enough about any of it to form an objective opinion. Besides, it isn't any outsider's opinion that matters anyway. If it were, the writing system would have been forcibly changed a long time ago. The only people I ever see arguing that the system needs to be replaced with a phonetic one are those who don't know the language at all and those who are in the beginning stages and are irritated at how many characters need to be learned. It isn't a problem for the native speakers, who are the only ones that matter when it comes to language reform. When you decide to learn another language, you don't get to decide how the language it. It's you that has to bend, not the language (that is of course, a figurative 'you').
No, this is not entirely accurate. Classical Chinese had not resembled the spoken language for over two thousand years. It was a literary language almost from the beginning. It took the Chinese Classics as its literary model and as such was a highly formalized language that took a lot of education to master. In other words, only the elites of society could afford to learn it well. Do some reading about the imperial examination system and you'll see what I mean. The movement to change the written standard was just as much about democratization as it was about dissatisfaction with the written language. Do some reading on the Xinhai Revolution, the May Fourth movement, the New Culture Movement, etc. The new standard (Baihua) was also a literary one. It was based on the works of Lu Xun, who wrote in a style called (as you now know) Baihua. The term means "clear speech" and the style is intended to imitate the spoken language. This is a tradition going back to the Ming Dynasty. But let's be clear: the style does not, and never did, accurately transcribe speech. It wasn't meant to be speech written down; it was meant to more closely resemble speech so as to make it easier for the common people to learn. If you look at Lu Xun's writings (get back to me in a few years when you've learned enough of the language to do so), you'll find that the language is not 普通話 putonghua, the common speech. Now, it isn't that the spoken language has changed so much in the past 80 or so years as to have diverged from the written standard again; it's that the written standard was intended to be a written standard. Based on speech, but not a transcription of it. And the more formal the register of what's being written, the more it resembles Classical Chinese in terms of brevity of writing, vocabulary choice, &c.
The problem here is, you're demanding it for them and assuming that's what they want. That is simply not the case. Not to mention the fact that language is so much more than simply a tool. Again, that's very utilitarian and does not take into account how the culture itself views the language. And the culture views the language in quite a different way than you do. Edited by OneEye on 03 September 2011 at 1:40pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Nguyen Senior Member Vietnam Joined 5093 days ago 109 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Vietnamese | Message 45 of 81 03 September 2011 at 7:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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I would say that Chinese Characters are quite efficient for someone who grew up using them; particularly Mandarin speakers (the PRC wants everyone to speak Mandarin anyhow). There is little doubt that for second language learners this is certainly not the case though. Outside of China and it's influence a person has little need to learn Cinese. If someone chooses to learn Chinese, they are in for a daunting task. On the other hand, a Chinese learner of say, English can master the alphabet in a few short days. Crazy spelling aside, the learner will quickly be able to put the alphabet to use in short order. Aside from that, I think a motivated Chinese speaker learning English could acheive basic literacy in English more quickly than a Chinese student could achieve the same level of literacy in their own language.
Not to derail the thread but there have been a few comments made about we Vietnamese abandoning Chinese Characters. It was actually the Portugese who introduced Latin script, not the French. This was in fact long before Colonialism. We had our own rulers and they also adopted it. I don't know of any great literary works that have been lost to time, especially since we have had over 400 years to translate everything. Our Latin script is unique and very much our own. I don't see how this change adversly affected our culture at all. If anything it allowed the common people to enjoy a level of literacy that the masses in Europe and the Americas, for cultural and political reasons, would have to wait a couple of hundred years to experience. Moreover; our literacy rate has historically been much higher than China's, likely to this day. I would say that the relative ease of an alphabet allowed that to happen. We also were and still are a largely agricultural society and until recently education in the countryside was rudimentary at best.Yeah alphabet! Edited by Nguyen on 03 September 2011 at 7:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 46 of 81 03 September 2011 at 8:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Writing system is not a part of a language. So Spanish tenses and genders cannot be compared to Chinese characters and English spelling. People are always very much opposed to any changing in their writing system. P.S. I envy the author of the thread because he got so many answers. I crated in Русский a thread about Russian spelling, and there is no real discussion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 47 of 81 03 September 2011 at 10:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
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Let me rephrase what I said earlier in a bit more of a detail:
I myself would hate to see the characters go, basically you would have a future generation that would not be able to read their history. Plus, their national and cultural value is so ingrained that it's preposterous to propose an only-phonetic alphabet method. It feels like we, 'educated westerners', are trying to come up in their face and try to 'set them free' by proposing a somehow 'better' way of writing only by our standards. Also, what is with this obsession with literal efficiency? I've not only seen people argue against Chinese characters, but also the English orthography. There is more cultural heritage tied to both of these that you'd probably think. If you abolished Chinese characters you've basically got an end to a rich heritage... To the people claiming that arguments like this are based on subjective and irrational claims, why should we look at languages from a purely objective perspective? Languages are developed, conveyed and progressed by us, humans, and we are just as irrational and subjective in our way of thinking, and this is manifested in our languages. What logical motive is there behind the numerous irregular verb endings in Indo-European languages? If we have to be so efficient, why don't we also dump all the irregular endings? Because, you know, "learning them all separately is so inefficient". It's quite disappointing to see that some people people are so willing to scrap something beautiful that has been developing for thousands of years, just because it doesn't necessarily fit their own standards. How would you feel about this? 
Plus, who are we to judge? I'm not Chinese. It's their language - Let them do whatever the heck they want with it. Edited by DNB on 03 September 2011 at 10:07am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5056 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 48 of 81 03 September 2011 at 10:49am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Don't mix languages and writing systems! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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