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The end of Hanzi/Kanji? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6851 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 49 of 66 16 November 2010 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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How is that point irrelevant? It has everything to do with why you can't use pinyin to write Chinese. The point is that you'd have to reform the written language extensively (beyond simply the orthography) in order to be able to use pinyin and have it work.
So, once again, as the language is now, pinyin won't work. I find it interesting that you have yet to address any of my points. You've simply disregarded them and now called them "irrelevant" without backing that claim up whatsoever. I made no claims about the language being exotic. It's just a language. It has its own orthography, like any other language, and the language and orthography suit each other, just like any other language. Why do you feel the need to reform it? And why is alphabetic writing necessarily an improvement? Until you can actually back up your claims, I won't be taking anything you have to say on the matter seriously. I've offered plenty of support for my arguments, so let's see some for yours. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| michau Tetraglot Groupie Norway lang-8.com/member/49 Joined 6227 days ago 86 posts - 135 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, NorwegianC1, Mandarin Studies: Spanish, Sign Language Studies: Burmese, Toki Pona, Greenlandic | Message 50 of 66 16 November 2010 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I have to strongly disagree. There are very few cases where a language and its ortography suit each other (i.e. there is one to one relation between phonemes and graphemes, and prosodic features that distinguish meanings are marked). The only case I know of is Finnish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6851 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 51 of 66 16 November 2010 at 7:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I didn't say they suit each other perfectly. But functionally, yes.
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| Cthulhu Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7224 days ago 139 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English, Mandarin, Russian | Message 52 of 66 16 November 2010 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The fact that written Chinese is different from spoken Chinese, while being indisputably true, is irrelevant because there's no necessary correlation between that fact and the point you're trying to make about the need to extensively reform said written language in order for its pinyinization to be workable. You might not be able to comfortably read a straight beginning-to-end Pinyin text (Nor could I for that matter, or in all probability most fully literate native Chinese speakers), but that's only because you're not used to it. I speak English as well as anyone, but it would take a lot of practice before I could comfortably read an English-language newspaper written in Devanagari. There's no evidence that people can't read texts written in Pinyin just as well as they could read the same texts written in Chinese characters, if that's what they've learnt and practiced all along. On the contrary, there's plenty of evidence that Chinese written without characters (Pinyinized or cyrilicized or arabicized, or any other conceivable -ized; look up Dungan, or Xiao'erjing, or various other alphabets used to write Chinese over the centuries whose names I don't feel like taking the trouble to recall at this particular moment in time) can serve as a fully functional replacement; or, in short, experience shows that if it can be written and understood in Chinese characters, it can be written and understood in any other writing system. I wish I had a nickel for every time I've had to say this, but not as much as I'd wish to have no nickels at all. Furthermore, saying that a writing system is particularly 'suited' to one language or another is highly questionable, and saying that all orthographies are suited to their respective languages as you seem to have is puzzling to say the least. Most languages use the orthographies they use for some combination of historical and political reasons, with linguistic or practical issues playing a very distant second fiddle if any fiddle at all. I suppose you could be referring to the idea that languages are in turn shaped by their orthography over time, but if anything time leads to writing systems becoming ever less suited to the languages they're meant to represent as the two forms of language develop and change at such vastly different rates, and often in entirely different directions. I mean, come on now, let's face it, Chinese characters probably weren't particularly well suited to writing Chinese even when they were being developed in the first place however many thousands of years ago; their format, that of a mixture of sound and meaning, came about because that's how new writing systems created from scratch with no experience of writing always seem to come about. And since that time the two have had thousands of years to diverge; I'd be inclined to think that because of this very antiquity there is in fact no writing system in the world less suited to its language (Or any language for that matter) than Chinese characters. That said, who really cares? As far as I, and hundreds of millions of others, am concerned, what Chinese characters lack in practicality and indispensability they more than make up for in sheer Awesomeness. There was a time earlier in the century when the end of Chinese characters being used to write Chinese (Or any other language) was a real possibility; there were even a few brief moments when it was a near certainty. As exciting as it may have been to see what could have grown out of that, that time is gone now, and I'm personally glad to see it go. Now we just need to get them to end all this simplification nonsense and bring back traditional characters. 1 person has 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 53 of 66 17 November 2010 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
1.) The majority of languages is not written at all, meaning that there does not exist any relevant body of written material and/ or no significant amount of literate speakers that actually write in that language and not a different one. 2.) Any writing system is a system to record spoken languages through a set of symbols which can be deciphered by anyone sufficiently trained in said symbols later on. These symbols can correlate to sound, concept, both or either. You cannot say that a logographic or ideographic writing system doesn't correspond to the spoken language, because it does - it's just that the conventions are different from how a phonetic rendition of the same language would be. 3.) The languages you cited all are languages that got their writing system from Christian missionaries. This means they adopted a more-or-less phonetic rendition of the spoken language, because that is what came with the cultural package. The reason why Latin script is so dominant in many parts of the world is because it was brought there complete with Christianity and Eurocentric culture, not necessarily because it is best suited for the job. 4.) No phonetic script, not even IPA, is exact. Even a phonetic script that used to be a very close rendition of the prestige dialect of a language will have to be changed to fit the phonetic changes in said dialect or it'll become more distant over time. Even if your native language is English, you should be aware of how highly irregular English spelling is. If there's any language's orthography that is not suited as an argument for how phonetic writing is preferrable over logographic writing, it's the English one. Do you see why I thought you were joking? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 54 of 66 17 November 2010 at 1:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Good point. And I wonder when the Chinese government is going to make all those pesky non-Mandarin dialects use simplified. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| CheeseInsider Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5123 days ago 193 posts - 238 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin* Studies: French, German | Message 55 of 66 17 November 2010 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I was raised bilingual, English from my father, Mandarin from my mother. I can only read about 50% of what I see. And I can write even less... Many of my Chinese friends who were born in China but immigrated to Canada have now forgotten how to read and write! And the ones that can still read and write prefer to use Han Yu Pin Yin anyway... Also, to me, the written form is quite clumsy. It is nothing but pictographs, totally disregarding phonetics. Koreans did a much better job in creating their written language.
Also I would like to contest that there is no NEED for characters. My friend from the mainland and I communicate to each other using only Han Yu Pin Yin. And we don't even write the words with tones. Like this: "Ni hao ma?" And we expect each other to understand everything that is said based on the context. And so far, we've never had any trouble understanding each other. I would say that people who are quite familiar with Mandarin don't even need tones to understand a sentence. That's not to say I can't use them (in spoken Mandarin), oh I always do. But it's not necessary, context takes care of it all anyway. Edited by CheeseInsider on 17 November 2010 at 3:19am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 56 of 66 17 November 2010 at 3:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
The point that reading pinyin is only a headache because we aren't used to it yet is a valid one. Reading IPA and kana were huge headaches to me until I got used to them, and now I can read them smoothly. So 'it gives me a headache' or 'it looks like a mess' aren't good arguments in and of themselves, I think. But there are other good arguments against the romanization of Chinese. First of all, you dismissed my comment as irrelevant. What's irrelevant about politics and culture? Politics and culture are everything! It's the reason why the nations of the world don't drop their languages for Esperanto or English, and it's also the main reason why China realistically won't give up its writing system in order to be more 'phonetic' like English or French (lol). But it seems like you aren't interested in the real-life context (although it was the original topic of this thread), as stated in this post:
So, what is it you do want, then? It seems like you'll only be satisfied if everyone agrees that alphabets are just superior writing systems to hanzi, period. It's one thing to say 'I don't understand why everyone says that the hanzi are intrinsically well-suited to the Chinese language. Can someone please explain this for me?' I really think this is what you've been wanting clarified. But unfortunately, your posts in this thread have come off like, 'ADMIT IT!! There's nothing advantageous about the Chinese writing system! When will they join the rest of the civilized world (your representative sample of the world's languages consisted of English, Spanish, and Italian, if I recall) and use an alphabet?' (not to mention your offhand remark about how everyone in China should speak Mandarin to simplify the process!) I'm sure this was not your intention, but as someone who doesn't speak a Chinese language you shouldn't be so assertive in your claims about them. You already have plenty of answers, anyway, a few of which I'll elaborate on based on my very superficial knowledge: 1. Leosmith claims there are more homophones in Mandarin (even with the tones) than in any alphabet language he's seen. Other posters add that it's not as simple as 'if you can understand it in speech, you can understand it in writing' because the Chinese don't usually transcribe the spoken language; they use a different register in writing. 2. Writing as the language is spoken would restrict the intelligibility to those who understand that specific language/dialect. Since there is a huge wealth of linguistic variety in China (and not everyone speaks, or should have to speak Mandarin), that would be like everyone in Europe having to write in French or something. As it is now, the written language does not represent Mandarin or any single spoken variety of Chinese, and can be equally accessed by all. 3. Classical Chinese (and its famous 4-character idioms, etc.) is a huge part of Chinese culture. My understanding is that speakers of different Chinese languages all use these maxims and idioms in everyday life, but all pronounce them differently. How should these be transcribed? In the pronunciation of the era and region in which they were originally penned? Or in the pronunciation of modern Beijing Mandarin (whose status as a standard language is a historical coincidence, as is the case with all standard languages), so that the meaning is inaccessible to millions? Neither of these possibilities would make sense. But as they are now, written in characters, they can be understood by all Chinese at a glance, who are free to pronounce them in their mother tongue without having to learn spoken Beijing Mandarin. And finally, some statistics from Wikipedia which I find relevant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putonghua#Mandarin_and_other_di alects_and_languages Although Mandarin is now firmly established as the lingua franca in Mainland China, the national standard is different from the other dialects even in the vast Mandarin dialect group, to the point of being to some extent unintelligible. n December 2004, the first survey of language use in the People's Republic of China revealed that only 53% of its population, about 700 million people, could communicate in Mandarin. (China Daily) A survey by South China Morning Post released in September 2006 gave the same result. Hope this has cleared some things up. Those who actually speak Mandarin, feel free to correct or elaborate :) Edited by Lucky Charms on 17 November 2010 at 3:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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