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The end of Hanzi/Kanji? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5532 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes  Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 17 of 66 01 November 2010 at 7:17am | IP Logged | ||
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IMHO the 2,000 years-old character system will never reach the end of its operating life simply because it was born to work for Chinese writing system, perhaps for Japanese and Korean too. Has anybody ever thought about a question, why are Chinese middle school students capable of reading classical books that were written more than 2,000 years ago with the help of a thin classical dictionary or simple notes, while Latin, classical Greek, and old English might be taught almost as a foreign language in Europe and the US. Why so? Mainly because the dominant feature of most western languages is that, they consist of a lot of groups of polysyllabic pronunciation, in other words people just record the colloquial pronunciation with their respective alphabet. And here comes an important question, the pronunciation system is generally quite flexible and variable as time goes by, maybe 100 years later, or maybe 200 years later, what the current people are talking could not be understood/fully understood any more, from then on the current language would retire from its position as the language standard. The same thing hardly happens to character system, even if Chinese pronunciation/tones system actually changed a lot ever since Yuan dynasty, for example, there was no such pronunciation as zhi/chi/shi/er in ancient Chinese. In fact the character writing system is not as complicated as you complained, and the mainstream of “common Chinese characters” (about 3,000-5,000 pcs) is not hard to learn by heart for the Chinese or those foreign intermediate/advanced learners.
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| 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 18 of 66 01 November 2010 at 7:41am | IP Logged | ||
Actually, several of the reasons why the Chinese characters never changed into phonetic symbols the way other writing systems did are fading away. One of the great reasons was the variety of languages that all used the same system. In the time of Classical Chinese, the same written language was used by everyone and it didn't correspond to any of the spoken dialects. Everyone pronounced the writing differently. As such, changing it into phonetic symbols would be an impossibility, because the phonetics varied so immensly. But Classical Chinese has been replaced by a single dialect (Mandarin) being written by everyone. Modern written Chinese is, in many places, identical to spoken Mandarin. The more formal you get, the more the heritage of Classical Chinese is evident and the further you end up from spoken Mandarin. I suspect the trend is for the written and spoken languages to get closer and closer together. Once they are sufficiently close, one of the major historical obstacles to phonetization will be gone. The other part of the obstacle (that of the variety of differing pronunciations) is also declining as the PRC is tirelessly promoting Mandarin as a national language. If everyone can speak Mandarin, phonetic representations become a possibility, especially if the other languages die out (that's the way they're heading at the moment). At this moment, these transitions are not complete. There is still a gap between written and spoken language and there are still people with bad Mandarin skills. But the trend is pointing in this direction, I believe. Will these conditions be enough to transform Mandarin into a phonetically written language? I'm not sure. They might be enough for another push by the government for romanization to be successful, but will the government make such a push? I doubt it, as the CCP is a lot more sensitive and vulnerable to public opinion than it was during the days of Mao. In an age where nobody believes in Communism anymore, the ideological underpinnings keeping the CCP in power is nationalism. This nationalism makes it very difficult for the government to try to do away with something as closely tied to the Chinese culture as the writing system. Interestingly, there are small signs of phonetization already visible. Loan words and loan names are already being written with a system of characters representing sounds. These characters usually have their own meanings, too (though there are some that, when you look them up in a dictionary, are listed as "used in transliterations"), but these meanings have nothing to do with how they're used in transliterations. Characters like 巴 and 斯 are used in many different words. When transliterating a foreign word or a foreign name, you will rarely see any other characters being used when the sound is "ba" or "s" or similar (though 士 is used instead of 斯 in Hong Kong, as it's based on the Cantonese rather than the Mandarin pronunciation). These loan words and transliterations are already written phonetically in Chinese. Are these the faint beginnings of phonetic writing? I don't know. By the way, many Cantonese words are written phonetically. Since there has been a very long time since anyone wrote Cantonese before the modern movement of writing it began, except for scholars, nobody knows how to write many Cantonese words. Thus, people use characters that sound right ("訓教" (practice-teach) for "to sleep", original characters "困覺") or simply use Latin letters. So I find the idea that the Chinese characters might get phoneticized plausible. But I doubt it will happen anytime soon. Such an evolution would probably take a long time, with people starting to use the same standard set of characters to represent sounds no matter what the original characters were, especially with new coinages and loan words. Slowly, the less used characters will fall out of use and the character inventory will shrink. Eventually, everyone will use a specific character to represent a specific sound. Since there is less pressure to differentiate the characters from many similar-lokking characters, they will slowly get simplified until we get a syllabary, maybe looking a bit like the Japanese hiragana and katakana of today. But such an evolution would take hundreds of years, and so much is different today from how the world has looked during the rest of human history that making predictions is a guessing game at best. Fortunately, making predictions about things that take hundreds of years means never having to face the fact that you were wrong. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ericspinelli Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 5784 days ago 249 posts - 493 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Italian | Message 19 of 66 01 November 2010 at 8:48am | IP Logged | ||
Insulting time travel! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| YoshiYoshi Senior Member China Joined 5532 days ago 143 posts - 205 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 20 of 66 01 November 2010 at 8:54am | IP Logged | ||
In fact many Cantonese words should be written with original/standard characters, and sometimes we Mandarin speakers are quite puzzled about why the Cantonese usually don't have the habit of using correct characters in writing style. 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 21 of 66 01 November 2010 at 10:13am | IP Logged | ||
This is, of course, because nobody learns to write Cantonese in school. Proper Cantonese writing isn't taught even in Hong Kong. People know how to pronounce the characters, but they don't know which characters go with which words. This is complicated by the fact that the sounds of many words have changed since the spoken and written languages parted. Thus, if you write the character "困", which is the original character for what is now written as "訓" or, much better, with the new-coined "瞓", people won't understand that it's supposed to mean "sleep", because the character "困" is nowadays pronounced as "kwan3" and not as "fan3", which is how it's pronounced in the meaning "to sleep". The Cantonese word for "now" was originally written as "而今" but is now written as "而家", because "今" is pronounced "gam1" and "家" is pronounced "gaa1". So if you write it with the original characters, people would pronounce it as "ji4 gam1", rather than the actual pronunciation of the word, which is "ji4 gaa1". So for many words, writing with original characters would mean that the pronunciation would be wrong and people wouldn't understand. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 66 01 November 2010 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||
That trend, at least in Japan, might very well be caused by the same electronic media that make it easier for people to forget how to write many kanji, as it allows them to easily recognize and therefor use more kanji that they cannot write. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 6051 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese | Message 23 of 66 01 November 2010 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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When will Americans use the metric system of measurement? Enact spelling reform for the nonsensical English spelling?
Cultures don't change on a dime and for reasons of practicality. And these above mentioned things aren't even bound to our culture like the Chinese with their characters. The characters are bound even with the language itself. It will never happen, period. Unless, that is, the Chinese culture dies. Edited by irrationale on 01 November 2010 at 4:06pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6473 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 24 of 66 03 November 2010 at 8:19am | IP Logged | ||
Something that can be the topic of debate is not basic information that a reporter should get right. That I'm debating it with you is itself evidence that it can be a topic of debate. ;) If I were writing the article, I might well have used the same phrasing, and I'm certainly not ignorant on the topic (being intermediate in Japanese myself). Ultimately it's a matter of terminology. Does "Chinese characters" mean "a broad set of characters used in China, Japan, and occasionally in Korea", or does it mean "characters used in writing Chinese"? You're using it for the former, but I'm using it for the latter. But what makes your definition more correct than mine? There's a reason the Unicode consortium threw their hands up and called them "CJK ideographs" instead. Incidentally, I have a Korean aunt who refers to learning Korean hanja as "learning Chinese", leading her to make silly statements such as that all Korean students must learn how to write Chinese. It baffles me... Edited by furrykef on 03 November 2010 at 8:20am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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