|
 |
Mandarin to become a lot harder | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| flydream777 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6496 days ago 77 posts - 102 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French Studies: German, Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin, Greek, Hungarian, Armenian, Irish, Italian | Message 17 of 26 31 December 2010 at 7:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Darn it, pretty soon Chinese is gonna drop their genders, verb conjugations, and noun declensions just like English! Wait a minute......
1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6855 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 18 of 26 02 January 2011 at 8:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
You sure about that? Maybe we shouldn't write Tchaikovsky, but Чайковский? Or instead of Aristotle we should read works by Ἀριστοτέλης? I'm probably moving to 南京 soon, but my parents won't be able to find that on a map unless I tell them it's Nanjing. See the problem with that train of thought? The transliteration system works as well as can be expected I suppose, but there are going to be problems with that in any language. Now I'm going to go listen to some folk music from საქართველო. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sun_Wukong Newbie China Joined 5084 days ago 34 posts - 46 votes Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 19 of 26 02 January 2011 at 12:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
This doesn't make any difference *****whatsoever***** for 99.9% of foreigners, and not
all that much for the natives. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chucknorrisman Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5453 days ago 321 posts - 435 votes Speaks: Korean*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, Mandarin, Lithuanian, French | Message 20 of 26 02 January 2011 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Haha, no. What I meant was that they could develop a set of characters used exclusively for transcribing foreign words, and use only those for transcribing foreign words. Derive some characters from existing ones, and assign them each a phoneme or a syllable, without giving them meaning. Edited by chucknorrisman on 03 January 2011 at 2:28am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| FadedStardust Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5612 days ago 19 posts - 30 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German, Dutch | Message 21 of 26 11 January 2011 at 12:36am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The Japanese have a system that does this! It is called Katakana, it was originally invented to transcribe Buddhist texts in Sanskrit to something that Japanese monks could read and recite, it is now used mainly for foreign loan-words and omonopia-type phrases. Katakana does NOT make things easier for foreigners learning Japanese, because it is one more system (on top of Hiragana and Kanji that needs to be learned! I agree that Hanzi transcription could be done better than the current system, but developing a "new" system is not the way to do things either. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jee Senior Member Australia Joined 6314 days ago 105 posts - 105 votes Studies: English | Message 22 of 26 12 January 2011 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
The reason why there are not many foreign-loan words in Chinese is just simply because that the Chinese translation makes more sense to native speakers, but not the foreign words.I guess there is no such a language designed or developed to make it easier for foreign learners to study. Furthermore, the reading system makes it much harder to borrow English words than what a language which is using Roman alphabet can do.
I couldnt see there was much to do with language protection or government control issue etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6587 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 23 of 26 13 January 2011 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Okay, first of all, Mandarin has a massive number of loan words from Japanese. To say that there are not many foreign-loan words in Chinese is just not true. A classic and rather striking example is that the Chinese words for "socialism" "communism" and the People's "Republic" of China are all Japanese loan words. Second, I think we can look at HK Cantonese to see the future of English loan words in Mandarin. The reason there aren't that many isn't really because of the writing system (loan words will often first appear in spoken language, where that's not a barrier), but because mainland Chinese can't speak English. It's the same reason there are so few Chinese loan words in English. HKers can speak English to a much greater degree because of their colonial history, and as a result, their speech is riddled with anglicisms. We should expect the same to happen in the Mainland as English grows there. One of the things I adore about Cantonese is the lack of respect with which they treat English loan words. You'll see English speakers on this forum and elsewhere arguing about the plural form of latinate words as if the words are still not English even after centuries of integration. Not so in Cantonese. Once a word is taken from English, it's no longer English and the speakers feel free to do what they feel like with it. They break them apart, change their meaning, integrate them into the language so that it's flowing fluently, whereas a word like "larvae" sticks out like a sore thumb in English. The monosyllabic nature of Cantonese imposes itself on the English words. Short grammar lesson: Yes-no questions in Cantonese are formed, much like in Mandarin, by repeating the verb with a "no" (唔) in between. So a question like "Do you think it's good?" will be phrased like this: 你覺得好唔好呀? Nei5 gok3 dak1 hou2 m4 hou2 aa3 You think good not good [question particle] When the verb is polysyllabic, only the first syllable is repeated, they way it works sometimes but not always in Mandarin. So the verb "to like" is "鐘意" (zung1 ji3). The question "do you like it?" thus becomes "你鐘唔鐘意呀?". Only the first syllable is repeated. What does this have to do with foreign loan words? Well, let's look at a loan word like "busy". It's two-syllabic. If this was English, we'd have purists arguing that a question using this loan word should be phrased as "你busy唔busy呀?", because "busy" is an English word and cannot be broken apart into syllables the way Cantonese words can. Fortunately, this isn't English, it's Cantonese. So you get a question like "你b唔busy呀?", where the "b" is pronounced like "bee". This has then evolved further to the point where you can hear people say "我好b喎!" (ngo5 hou2 bi1 wo3), meaning "I'm very busy". The first syllable of the word has been stripped off and is used by itself, thus conforming to the monosyllabic nature of Cantonese. We have a new Cantonese word, "b", which is already distinct from its English origin and is perfectly integrated into Cantonese. Similar things has happened with other words, giving us questions like "你a唔agree呀?" and "你o唔ok呀?". In the same way as with "busy", the word "understand" has been shortened to "un" and the word "security" to "secu". Thus, you'll find people in HK movies screaming out "Secu!" when they want to get rid of a trouble maker, and you'll hear questions like "un唔un呀?", taking much the same role as the English "Capische?". Some other examples include words like "揸fit" where "揸" (zaa1) means "to grasp". The word means "to take charge", and I'm unclear as to the evolutionary turns it took to get there. The word has even evolved further to create "揸fit人" (zaa1 fit1 jan4), where "人" means "person", the compound meaning "leader". The "fit" part has even been assigned a character (弗), though it's not that commonly used. However, other words have ubiquitously used characters like "咭" (kaat1) for "card" and "呔" (taai1) for "necktie" (or sometimes "tyre"). This sort of linguistic creativity is one of the things that drew me to Cantonese. When large-scale English knowledge comes to China, is this what we'll see in Mandarin? I can only hope. It is also possible that they'll take the route of English and refuse to integrate the loan words into their own language. I suspect we'll see the schizophrenic attitude of the French, though, with an official attitude of no loan words and them not appearing in print, but being widely used in the spoken vernacular. Oh, and I'll have to add the obligatory remark that anyone that gets annoyed at English loan words in other languages should remember that English itself is a steaming pile of loan words held together by duct tape and chewing gum. Its own mother wouldn't recognize it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jee Senior Member Australia Joined 6314 days ago 105 posts - 105 votes Studies: English | Message 24 of 26 13 January 2011 at 10:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yet for sure, huge amount of modern Mandarin words were borrowed from Japanese, especially those "lism" terms! Japanese started big translation movement(European into Japanese) before Chinese, later on Chinese just lazily borrowed those words from Janpanese directly, since Japanese were and are using characters too, and the translation was pretty well done, from European words into characters. But Japanese nowadays tend to use more transliteration rather than really translating things into characters which show the meaning of it. They can use Japanese "alphabet" to spell a sound of English word or French word, it doesnt look so odd, cos Japanese do spell. But Chinese dont, character writing system is not a spelling system, if you use characters to represent the sound of English word, it's just so weird. For the spelling languages, the pronounciation will go with the word, when it was borrowed. But when Chinese borrow the words from Japanese, the pronounciation does go. Japanese read a characer in one way, Chinese read it in the other way, but most likely they meant same or similar. When I said "not that many foreign loan words", I really meant "transliteration", sorry for the misexpression. When it comes to translation, people can either use characters to show the sound or the meaning. For instance, "Email", the transliteration is "伊妹儿（yi mei er）"-the sound, the meaning translation is "电子邮件（dian zi you jian）", which really means "electronic mail". Most native speakers of Mandarin would prefer to use (dian zi you jian) rather than "yi mei er", because it just makes more sense to them! Edited by Jee on 13 January 2011 at 11:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
