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Why did Korean abandon Hanja? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| ParkeNYU Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4919 days ago 11 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 105 of 116 20 August 2011 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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And sign-language is not auditory, so there you go.
If you taught a deaf person Chinese characters instead of sign-language, he would probably think in Chinese characters just the same. The images of the characters would flash in a sequence in their minds, just as any other words would, to construct greater ideas and sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 5127 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes  Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 106 of 116 20 August 2011 at 7:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Erm, you missed my point. There's no way you can think in writing, it's either sign or speech. Anybody who hasn't been taught either during childhood ends up with severe mental disabilities.
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| ParkeNYU Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4919 days ago 11 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 107 of 116 21 August 2011 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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Is there any outstanding evidence to suggest that one cannot think in a visual language? When one thinks in "sign" there are no mentally conjured sounds, for such a person knows not the concept of "sound" at all. So if most people think with sounds, and deaf people think in signs, why on earth would it be impossible to think in logographs?
Chinese characters originated from the arbitrary cracks in so-called "oracle bones," caused by the process of punching holes in the bones' surface and then burning them. Their meanings came before their pronunciations, which varied by region; the sounds of the morphemes were mentally superimposed on glyphs that carried no intrinsic phonetic value at all. With this in mind, imagine: You are deaf. You are not taught sign-language, and have no idea what a "sound" is, but you are taught the meanings of characters. Your teacher points to a tree and then shows you a drawing: 木. Your teacher then points to a tall tree and writes 高木. Then your teacher points to a forest and writes 林 or 森. Then your teacher points to a mountain and writes 山. So later that day, when you mentally review what you've learned that day, you come across an astronomically tall mountain. The characters 高山 would probably appear in your mind. Apply this principle to the thousands of other characters needed to adequately express ideas and communicate, and voilà! You are thinking in Chinese characters! To talk to other people you simply write what you wish to say, and they write back. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| cntrational Triglot Groupie India Joined 5127 days ago 49 posts - 66 votes Speaks: Hindi, Telugu, English* Studies: French | Message 108 of 116 21 August 2011 at 9:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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The outstanding evidence against being able to do that is that there is no person in existence that has managed to do that. In contrast, consider when deaf people were forced to learn how to speak and write, to the exclusion of sign -- by your logic, they would have been easily been able to learn the language. But that didn't happen. You think they would've been able to write, but they were not. The fact is, speech and sign is independently learnable -- writing is not.
And in any case, even if Chinese characters were learnable without speech or sign, so what? The practically all people know a language. They won't be able to magically learn Chinese characters without putting their other languages in between. If you still remain convinced that Chinese characters could be learnt without speech and sign, consider that there's no need to use Chinese characters! Imagine if your teacher showed you a tree and then showed you the letters "tree"? Is there any reason this has to be done with Chinese characters? You could do it with any writing system in the world! But deaf people who've been taught like this have never succeeded in learning a language this way. I ask you: Do you still insist on believing that Chinese characters can be learnt on their own, without sound or sign? If so, why does it have to be Chinese characters? What makes them special? And is this of any use to people who already know other languages? Edited by cntrational on 21 August 2011 at 6:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DNB Bilingual Triglot Groupie Finland Joined 4886 days ago 47 posts - 80 votes Speaks: Finnish*, Estonian*, English | Message 109 of 116 21 August 2011 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am learning Hanja right now along with my Korean, and I've found them really helpful in
acquiring new vocabulary, plus they look cool. I read another older thread about Korean, and a person there told that Hanja is essential for mastering the more advanced grammar. I was left wondering, because so far I've only heard that Hanja is necessary in mastering the vocabulary aspect of the language. Could anyone elaborate as of why Hanja would be of any benefit when it comes to learning the grammar? Thanks 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ParkeNYU Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4919 days ago 11 posts - 19 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 110 of 116 21 August 2011 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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cntrational,
The reason it would have to be Chinese characters, or maybe even Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, is because many of them are pictographs; a tree really does look like 木, and so forth. I understand that this is only the case for the 214 KangXi radicals and the semantic compound characters (e.g. 林 and 森), but they provide the basis of construction for the vast remainder. As far as semantics are concerned, "tree" is an arbitrary assortment of phonetic letters; if you did not explain the role of the embedded phonemes (which would necessitate the recognition of sound), there would be no obvious tie to the universal concept of a tree. As for whether it is possible to learn language through writing alone, you know my opinion and I know yours, so unless we can have a professional linguist mediate this discussion, I am not sure how much deeper it can progress. DNB, Hanja would benefit learning advanced Korean grammar because much of that advanced grammar carries over from the days when scholars in Korea wrote solely in Classical Chinese. The switch from that foreign written language to a modern mixed-script (using Hanja only for Sino-Korean words and Hangeul for everything else) was not an immediate black-to-white transition; there were shades of grey in between. There was even a time when the Hanja system was more-or-less comparable to the Japanese Kanji system: Hanja were used both in Sino-Korean words (Eum reading) and native Korean words (Hun reading), with Hangeul appended to the latter for conjugation. As far as grammar goes, in modern Korean, many terms that were once drawn primarily from Sino-Korean vocabulary came to be replaced with their colloquial equivalents (e.g. 저것 for 其, 에서 for 在, 의 for 的, 나 for 我, etc). If you look at Korean texts written in mixed-script during the Japanese occupation, you will see many of these Chinese-derived grammar terms written with Hanja. As these forms are not entirely "obsolete," they have been relegated to the class of advanced & specialized grammar. As I mentioned earlier, because it was not an immediate transition from Classical Chinese to Hangeul, we instead see a gradual thinning-out of Hanja words over many centuries. So while learning Hanja will indeed help you with some advanced grammar constructions, in this day and age it is chiefly useful for learning Sino-Korean vocabulary, which itself includes many advanced and esoteric terms. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| egill Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5696 days ago 418 posts - 791 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 112 of 116 22 August 2011 at 12:28am | IP Logged | |||||
The vast majority of Chinese characters are not pictographs, but phono-semantic compounds (形聲字) with one symbol having some vague association with the meaning of the morpheme, and the other being a pretty much completely arbitrary sound component. Yes the basic components are often (more) transparent, but the ways they are put together and assigned meaning aren't. People often have this idea that Chinese characters are some radically (pun semi-intended) different and mystical picture <-> meaning code, when really most of it is encoding arbitrary phonetic information, with some semi-helpful semantic mnemonics.
Sure that may work for labeling things, but once you want to express anything more complicated than tree, dog, and bird, then you have to start making decisions. Is it to be tree tall or tall tree? What about actions, I want to be able to express interactions between objects, so I need characters for verbs. Now how do I put them together? What about when I have a lot of objects, do I mark them somehow to show how they relate to the verb or do I rely on a fixed word order for that? What about adjectives, adverbs, tense, moods? By the time you have a thinking system of any reasonable complexity, you would have just reinvented sign language. I think it's pretty clear the hierarchy goes language->writing. I guess I'm arguing that you can't really go the other way, at least not without constructing a new language and shoehorning your written symbols in it. Edited by egill on 22 August 2011 at 12:43am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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