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Chinese cannot be Latinised ! | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 9 of 77 14 July 2009 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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for example: 电=electronic
1, computer: 电脑(electronic head) 2, elevator(lift): 电梯(electronic ladder) 3, television: 电视(electronic vision) 4, refrigerator(fridge): 电冰箱(electronic icebox) 5, hairdryer: 电吹风(electronic wind-blower ) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 10 of 77 14 July 2009 at 10:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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gaa1gaa1, i'm sorry, but what you wrote is, as we say in German, totally gaga. It's nice that you like characters, but what you wrote is simply wrong. Please read "Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" by John DeFrancis, that book does a wonderful job of discussing the Chinese language and script in detail.
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| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 11 of 77 14 July 2009 at 11:28am | IP Logged | |||||
gaa1gaa1 is just one kind of Cantonese romanization, my first name can be pronounced as this, if in Mandarin, it pronounces jia1jia1, and the remark 1 means the 1st tone in Chinese language.
From 1958 to 1976, some Chinese experts attempted to carry out Chinese romanization(learned blindly from Russian Cyrillic), but at last, none of the proposals (both Cyrillic and Latin) had succeeded (their experiments came to nothing in the end) before China's government announced that romanization wouldn't be taken into account any more. Edited by gaa1gaa1 on 14 July 2009 at 11:28am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 77 14 July 2009 at 11:34am | IP Logged | |||||
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You mean, like, except for pinyin, which is widely applied for all sorts of things, and could be perfectly well used to replace Chinese characters?
Characters are just a script, not the language. The language wouldn't suffer from being represented in any other script, roman or otherwise. In fact, in my humble opinion, Chinese would gain much if it would abolish characters, like they did in Vietnam and Korea.. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6894 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 77 14 July 2009 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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They would gain some things and lose others.
It can be very tempting, and apparently logical, to say "If you can understand each other when you speak, then writing the sounds should be enough", but in actual fact things are just not as simple as that. A number of factors have already been mentioned above, about the differences in a spoken situation vs. written language to explain why all efforts in that direction have been unsuccessful in practice so far. Apart from the very good points already made above, AFAIU in the spoken language you often use longer explanations, with many syllables. They sometimes even need to clarify with examples which jia1 or ma3 they mean, while in a written and literary style you can generally be more concise. Being forced to "write like you speak" would be like having your hands tied to a certain colloquial style of expression. Exaggerating a little: Imagine a newspaper article about international politics, written in the colloquial style of street gangs in a bad part of town. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 14 of 77 14 July 2009 at 12:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The abbreviation of European languages is a chief shortcoming which is overcome much better in Chinese language, such as IPO, what does it mean? International Projects Office? Initial Public Offering? or Intellectual Property Office? Israel Philharmonic Orchestra? Interprocedural optimization? There're a great deal of abbreviation that we usually need to watch TV, listen to radio, read newspaper, or look up in the dictionary, very often. In fact, Chinese has also some abbreviations which won't be misunderstood as long as they're written in characters, in general, the same article in Chinese is much shorter and clearer than any western texts, this is why the same books in Chinese edition are always thinner in thickness and more refined in meanings than western editions.
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| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6272 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 15 of 77 14 July 2009 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Chinese could be Latinised. If Vietnamese could be (a language with more tones than Mandarin), there is no reason why Chinese can't be. In fact, teaching aids for foreigners already use a Romanised system to write Chinese, with diacritical marks for tones.
The question is whether it will be, whether more would be lost than gained. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pyx Diglot Senior Member China Joined 5735 days ago 670 posts - 892 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Mandarin | Message 16 of 77 14 July 2009 at 12:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hencke, William, I find it moot to philosophize if there are in fact very fine volumes written about the "but what about.."s and "are the tradeoffs worth it?"s, such as the one I mentioned above. If you have any interest in Chinese or character based languages in general, please do read "Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy". It addresses all of your questions in a very comprehensive manner.
gaa1gaa1: Sorry, but are you making a point or are you just ranting? What's that about IPO and thickness and books and stuff? I'm sorry, I don't see the relation of these things to your other postings. Actually, I don't even see why you put those together in the same post, where's the connection? Edited by Pyx on 14 July 2009 at 12:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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