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Do alphabets need to be so complicated? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 57 of 115 17 October 2010 at 4:10am | IP Logged | ||
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Some comments on the spread of Mandarin:
First of all, the English word "Mandarin" is a bit imprecise. There's a difference between the Mandarin dialects of Chinese (官話 or 北方話) and the Standard Mandarin (普通話) which is the official language of the PRC. The Mandarin dialects are by far the largest dialect group in China. They are pretty much mutually comprehensible and Wikipedia estimates the number of native speakers to 885 million. It's true that there are many other languages in China, but they're all tiny in comparison to Mandarin (Yue chinese (Cantonese) is the second largest with around 50 million native speakers). Standard Mandarin is a standardized version of this and is studied by all the schoolchildren in China. It is the only allowed language in schools and the general knowledge of it is pretty high even amongst the Chinese whose mother tongue is not a Mandarin dialect. Second, interestingly, the written Mandarin language is in some ways more widespread than the spoken language. People in Hong Kong who cannot speak a word of Mandarin still write it quite fluently. They pronounce the characters in Cantonese, but the vocabulary and grammar of their writing is distinctly Mandarin, not Cantonese. Third, it is extremely difficult to extract the writing system reasons from the political reasons of China's low literacy. So I'm not even going to try. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Siberiano Tetraglot Senior Member Russian Federation one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6494 days ago 465 posts - 696 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, ItalianC1, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Serbian | Message 59 of 115 17 October 2010 at 12:31pm | IP Logged | ||
Edited by Siberiano on 17 October 2010 at 12:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 60 of 115 17 October 2010 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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The number of languages in China depends on where you draw the lines between languages and dialects. Do you consider Cantonese and Taishanese to be two different languages or two dialects of the same language (Yue)? Similarly, the degree of mutual intelligibility depends a lot on which languages you compare. Taishanese and Cantonese are a lot more mutually intelligible (but not completely transparent) than Yue and Mandarin.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 61 of 115 17 October 2010 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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The thing that has struck me in this thread is that it has turned into a discussion about the merits of the Chinese writing system, which isn't alphabetical.
The original question was "Do alphabets need to be so complicated?", and the answer is NO. Alphabets are as simple as can be, but the relationship between the alphabet used for a certain language and its pronunciation becomes complicated when it has been used for a certain time. Then all sorts of irrelevant and misleading historical information is retained in the official orthography, and the one-to-one correspondence with actual sounds is lost. And it normally takes a complete change of alphabet to get the spelling back on track. I suppose writing (by humans) will die out before the English spelling is reformed. Some alphabets also seem more difficult than necessary because of a lot of diacritics, but as long as these convey relevant and consistent information they have a mission - even though it can be a problem to write them on 'international' (ie. English) keyboards. I personally like those small differences between the alphabets, and therefore I always try to use for instance the special letters of Esperanto and Romanian and Danish. It would be a sad loss if all languages had to be written with just the letters of the English alphabet. Edited by Iversen on 17 October 2010 at 10:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 62 of 115 18 October 2010 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I think it evolved as it did because the question in the first post was so easy to answer. The next obvious question was: Should difficult scripts/alphabets be simplified? That question was harder to answer.
The Chinese government simplified the traditional script so it's obviously an important and valid question that China has had to deal with in the recent past. I believe that it should be up to the country speaking the language to decide. It's one thing for China to reform their system and another for someone who does not speak the language to insist that it should be reformed to make it easier to learn. I don't think China or Japan should use roman script because they would lose a bit of their culture. That being said, I believe their scripts are far harder than the one I am used to. Incidentally, I would not want American English spelling to be reformed so that it was easier to learn (I don't think there is any need for it to be reformed). The UK already thinks 'organization' instead of 'organisation' is linguistic corruption of the worst degree. Edited by fireflies on 18 October 2010 at 2:26am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 63 of 115 18 October 2010 at 7:30am | IP Logged | ||
Actually many use the -ize spelling in the UK (expecially the Oxford University Press). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fireflies Senior Member Joined 5182 days ago 172 posts - 234 votes Speaks: English* | Message 64 of 115 18 October 2010 at 7:45am | IP Logged | ||
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I have rarely seen a British person use that. :) Actually more like never.
There are a lot of spelling differences and the american spellings are not favoured by the brits in general. I am an American and I am not sure what oxford was thinking? cambridge is on the ise side as it turns out. So are many news outlets. The bbc uses ise I knew they would not let me down. I prefer the British spellings and wish we would adopt them. Edited by fireflies on 18 October 2010 at 8:25am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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