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Chinese cannot be Latinised ! | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 73 of 77 17 July 2009 at 5:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Just ignore'em and PS later the replies to PS's. I justify myself that doing this way we clutter the thread less.
Both, I guess. 《通字方案》 / A Project for General Chinese Being a legitimate successor to the full-fledged Chinese script, it is a syllabary of 2085 characters, and a complex Latin-based orthography for the 2085 possible superdialectical syllables. edit: Wrong English name Edited by minus273 on 17 July 2009 at 5:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 74 of 77 17 July 2009 at 6:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My hometown is fairly rich, and every family has at least an educated child that can read and write in quasi-MSM.
True. And it's a good point.
Not that unrealistic, I insist.
The number of core words seperating MSM-based writing and dialectical writing don't exceed 150 - large, but attainable by sufficient exposure.
Valid point. The legal jargon is quite known, and people may be able to guess their way in the Beijing pronunciation... Actual scenario:
I meant the usual written language with an MSM structure, filled with local words, which are replaced with MSM/literary words upwards the prestige ladder.
Regions with a perfect alphabet (the Spanish world plus many states of India) are illiterate-laden. The problem lies just elsewhere. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| gaa1gaa1 Newbie China Joined 5614 days ago 30 posts - 39 votes Speaks: Mandarin* | Message 75 of 77 17 July 2009 at 6:32am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I'm afraid not so. In fact, protecting characters from Latinisation or anything else is absolutely not for self-injury (bound feet is a wrong metaphor), and only partly for cultural and aesthetically pleasing, instead, another crucial factor is to protect the written form system of Chinese language, as a real language, it can't just contain some colloquial words such as "hello, bye, thanks, good afternoon, how're things going with you", perhaps written form is of utmost importance while reading something necessary, I've already repeated the differences between Chinese and European languages over and over, and few people could quite catch on to the essential parts. But it's not strange enough, because as a non-English or non-Italian speaker, I can't hit the right nail on the head while commenting on their souls, either. 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 76 of 77 17 July 2009 at 7:07am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Mhm, I think you, or perhaps both of us are confusing two separate issues: The first is Mandarin vs. Fangyan and how characters play in there (good points on both sides) and the other one is literacy (esp. for poor people) in general, not necessarily related to MSM. And there some sort of alphabetic writing (at least in addition to characters. Nobody ever said they should be banned and forgotten) could help enormously. Your reference to illiteracy in other countries is a valid one, but I'm sure you will agree with me that characters are at least yet another major hurdle for those people. It's hard to keep all those issues apart, especially with such a broad starting question. Anyway, I found some of the things you wrote (in this thread, not just the last point) very illuminating, minus. Thanks. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5765 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 77 of 77 17 July 2009 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Put it otherwise, literacy in a written norm comprehensible to the larger Sinophone world.
"Vernacular literacy", maybe? In search of a good term. I understand that, with vernacular literacy, we can translate from the written norm (be it Hanzi or Luomazi) to the vernacular language - for "How to Rear Pigs"'s and maybe market news, and that barrierless written communication, though in a limited scale, facilitates life greatly.
I fully support introduction of alphabets for local communication, just as what the glorious missionaries had done. Discussion finished. Ouf. PS: I read yesterday that my daily word for "begin" (开始) wasn't present at Beijing speech 100 years ago, it's a borrowing from Classical Chinese/MSM. I was shocked. I certainly need to review my assumptions of the relation between dialectical forms and Classical roots. Edited by minus273 on 17 July 2009 at 2:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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