|
 |
Chinese cannot be Latinised ! | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 1 of 77 14 July 2009 at 7:44am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Chinese characters play an important role in Chinese languages, it's not only the Classical Latin of China, but also Modern style of China, even a person don't want to learn anything about old China, he still needs to learn Characters to keep Chinese language effectively, without any errors while writing articles, yes, in daily informal conversation, of course, we can talk in colloquial style, don't need to read characters, but it only relates to some frequent words which are spoken almost everyday, but if you write Chinese in Latin alphbet, we have to guess what they actually mean based on context, on the contrary, we can understand them right now while reading Characters.
In China, many people are good at recognizing Traditional Characters (正體字), and some people, such as me, are proficient in Tradi. Characters, as much as Taiwaners and Hongkongers, sometimes, when I read Japanese or Korean articles, I don't have to master their pronunciation in Jap. or Kor., the more Characters are written, the more clearly I understand, Japanese has a few self-made Characters, but it doesn't matter at all, I can still recognize what it should be in Chinese. Conversation, of course, is very important for everyone to communicate with others, but in those formal articles, we shouldn't make readers have a guess at some ambiguous and critical places, they have little time and energy to make kinds of imagination according to context or the aim of the writers. In brief, "While seeing the characters, then instantly understanding the meanings, even no need to master its pronunciation", of course, one should know clearly the pronunciation, if he really wants to learn them well and practise colloquial languages in public. In fact, I don't like Simplified Characters, because it cuts some necessary relations with ancient China, Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and if Chinese only learn Simplified ones, they won't be able, at least very difficult, to comprehend the articles of Chinese Wenyan, Japanese, Korean, maybe as well as Vietnamese (sorry, I don't know Vietnamese at all). Chinese characters might be a little difficult for Western learners, but it does match the demand of Chinese language itself, it's absolutely not the real best writting system for all languages, but no doubt, it was, is, and will be the best style which always fits Chinese languages most, at least, much better than Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hangul, or Arabic alphabet. If a Westerner has studied Chinese very well, he'd be able to understand what I'm trying to explain. From the perspective of Koreans, in other words, if I were a native Korean, I would also attack hanja’s superiority so as to praise hangul subjectively. Sejong Daewang, the inventor of hangul, is an idol among most Koreans, maybe just anything like we Chinese usually regard Hànwǔdì, Tángtàizōng, or Kǒngzǐ, Lǎozǐ as our national idols. The grammatical structure of Korean and Japanese seems different from Chinese, but both Korea and Japan have borrowed too much Chinese vocabularies from ancient China, furthermore, the Sino-Xenic culture has made a far-reaching influences on Korean language, and it would be almost impossible for Koreans to reduce or remove those which have already been deeply rooted in everything of Korea during the past 2000 years. Have you ever heard about the story of Mr.Gija (기자／箕子)? From 1937 to 1945, China was invaded by Japanese militarists, about 30 millions of Chinese people were massacred, and Japanese was stipulated as the only national language in China. Some aged Chinese hate Japanese, and some Japanese don’t like Chinese, either. When it comes to the topic of Japan, actually I found it very close to China, especially ancient China, for example, traditional culture, Chinese kanji (hanja), verticle typeset layout, architecture, Kimono (similar to Chinese hànfú), and so on. Yes, some Japanese had ever wanted to abolish kanjis, but time and again, they failed to come up with any practical and effective solutions, without kanji’s system, neither hiragana nor katakana can replace kanji’s function, in fact, both hiragana and katakana were derived from parts of Chinese characters, that is to say, to a large extent, hiragana and katakana belong to kanji’s system, too. It was really gratifying that, Japanese government finally gave up stupid idea of Romanization, and then, they just created a few Japanese self-made kanjis which haven’t yet been simplified in Korea, Taiwan, Hongkong and Macau. Vietnam was ever reduced to a colony of France, and the current Latin system of Vietnamese was invented by a French priest “Alexandre de Rhodes” , what if it would happen in China, Korea, or anywhere else, I guess that they must have abolished the offspring of colonial culture in Vietnam. On the contrary, North Vietnam government, a Communist party, abolished Chữ Nôm completely, and turned to use ugly French-made Latin alphabet, while in South Vietnam, the status was very different and friendly. Now, some foolish Chinese are still agitating blindly for the Romanization of Chinese writing system, mainly because they haven’t known that monosyllabic single characters, instead of polysyllabic long words, are the real soul of Chinese language, not only ancient poetry and Wenyan, but also modern literature or scientific articles, cannot be simply written in Latin or other alphabet, it would be idle and stupid for those who’re not good at Chinese language (even if they’re native Chinese) to talk empty things, don’t forget “actions speak louder than words”. Each monosyllabic single character has 5 tones in mandarin (mā, má, mǎ, mà, ma), and even 7 in Cantonese, each character of same tone also has some homonymic words (such as tā above), most of all, each characters often need to combine another or more characters to be a vocabulary, only at that time, the combination of 2 (at least) or more characters can be called vocabulary, if everybody used Latin or other alphabet in China, such as "鼓励、骨力、古历、谷粒、股利", unfortunately, they all have the same pronunciation and same tone. Can you tell them apart immediately, without any hesitation based on contexts? even if you can do that, it takes more time and energy to do the same thing which can successfully be done well in shorter time and in less energy. Why do Chinese people have to choose a difficult way and abandon the easiest one? We don't think Characters very hard to learn, except for those stupid native Chinese who haven't wanted to learn anything, and just liked to be a lazybone all their lives. Arabic, the most difficult languages, hasn't changed its writing system for those foreign learners, it uses Arabic Script, and special writing direction (from right to left), but arabic is, and will be always arabic, foreign learners (beginners) have still had to learn original arabic texts. Chinese Character Classification (liùshū) : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificatio n 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 2 of 77 14 July 2009 at 7:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Please see the following characters, they have the very same pronunciation and tone. It's only one of thousands of examples in Chinese language. Don't forget any more, Chinese is neither English nor other Latin language.
他（tā）：he（for male human） 她（tā）：she（for female human） 它（tā）：it（for inorganic "no-life" things, or abstractive things） 牠（tā）：(only for all kinds of animals) 祂（tā）：(only for God, Jesus, Allah, or other Lord) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| pmiller Account terminated Groupie Canada Joined 5674 days ago 99 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 3 of 77 14 July 2009 at 8:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I heard that a person can actually read much faster, or comprehend much faster, when reading characters than an alphabet. Supposedly, the meaning goes straight to the brain without any need to "pronounce" the words in your head as you're reading them. I don't know if this is true or not.
But as far as the necessity of using characters to write East Asian languages... I guess my question is "if you can understand each other fine when speaking, then why is it so important to have characters in writing in order to distinguish homophones, homonyms, etc.?" Vietnamese and North Koreans have both totally eliminated Chinese characters - I haven't heard that they feel they are missing out on something. Of course, I love Chinese characters just for their exotic aesthetic beauty. I can't imagine visiting Japan or China and not seeing characters everywhere - that would be a very sad day. By the way, do you think Mainland China will go back to traditional characters? I suspect they will as the country gets richer, the education system gets better and people rediscover their traditional culture. I guess they'll be learning a lot of things from Taiwan, Hong Kong and other overseas Chinese, who have preserved many aspects of Chinese culture which were wiped out by the Communists on the Mainland. Edited by pmiller on 14 July 2009 at 8:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 4 of 77 14 July 2009 at 8:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's true!
Actually I just know a little Japanese and Korean, if you could master the pronunciation rules of Kanji(Hanja) in Japanese or Korean, pronoucing characters in Japanese style or Korean style would not be very difficult for Chinese learners. The soul of Chinese should mainly be monosyllabic single character(单音字), certainly not polysyllable copious vocabulary(多音节词) which could be told apart clearly by distinguishing different sounds.
I don't like them at all.
Thanks! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| pmiller Account terminated Groupie Canada Joined 5674 days ago 99 posts - 104 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 77 14 July 2009 at 8:45am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Oh, OK - but I was referring to the Chinese language - Chinese people don't have any great difficulty understanding each other when speaking Chinese, even though there are many homophones, right? Because the meaning is almost always clear from the context, right? So this means that you don't *really* need Chinese characters to make written communication clear either - just like in speech, the meaning should be clear from the context, right? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 77 14 July 2009 at 8:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
No. You might not have noticed, but the communication style in written and spoken language is inherently different, because in written language you have to provide a lot of details that in speech are either obvious from context or body language or can be easily double-checked with a simple question.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LittleKey Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5952 days ago 146 posts - 153 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Japanese | Message 7 of 77 14 July 2009 at 9:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Well don't forget, writing is used for many different things. In a sentence, sure, meaning is easily understood from context. But what about shorter things, such as store signs, company names, street signs, and things like that? A romanized Chinese writing system could get kind of hard to understand in those situations. Edited by LittleKey on 14 July 2009 at 9:04am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 8 of 77 14 July 2009 at 9:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
Dear Mr.Pmiller,
In fact, colloquial Chinese, to some extent, isn't all the same with standard written form, especially while writing Wenyan(literary language) or ancient poems(詩詞), for example, Mandarin, the modern Chinese language also depends on something related to Wenyan(文言), though we called it Baihua(白話), it's almost unable to cut off those factors which exist in Wenyan or between Wenyan and Baihua. So many single characters could combine itself with plenty of other characters to construct a new vocabulary, or become an extending meanings. If you could understand the example of 鼓励、骨力、古历、谷粒、股利, then it would be of great help for you to comprehend what I wrote completely. Sincerely, Gaagaa. 1 person has 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. |
