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Chinese characters - inefficient? | ||
Tags: Chinese Characters | Mandarin | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5612 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes  Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 33 of 132 20 October 2009 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, Pinyin is not phonetic, is it? If it is phonetic and does represent the tones too, homophones wouldn't be a problem, even if there are 10 to 20 to each word. I think a lot of reasons can be traced to this fact that pinyin is not really phonetic. Spoken Chinese does not cause confusion, does it, with all those homophones? So I guess, pinyin can truly replace hanzi but it has to be really phonetic. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Saraneth Newbie United States Joined 5313 days ago 4 posts - 5 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese | Message 34 of 132 20 October 2009 at 3:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think what Me has to learn was trying to say is that knowing how to read modern Chinese gives you a foothold in reading Classical Chinese, making it less of a leap for those who wish to read ancient texts in the original.
Pinyin is phonetic and does represent tones. That doesn't change the fact that a whole sentence in pinyin is a pain to read, as Z.J.J. said. Also, how would there not be a problem with, as you say, 10-20 homophones per word, if they all look exactly the same in pinyin? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sebngwa3 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5958 days ago 200 posts - 217 votes Speaks: Korean*, English | Message 35 of 132 21 October 2009 at 1:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How does Vietnamese and Thai compare with Mandarin in terms of number of homophones?
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| OneEye Diglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6644 days ago 518 posts - 784 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, Taiwanese, German, French | Message 36 of 132 21 October 2009 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As has been explained many times in this forum (and I believe in this very thread), spoken Chinese and written Chinese are not the same. In higher registers of written Chinese (formal writing, academic writing, etc.), having a phonetic script would be a huge problem because the written language in those registers resembles classical Chinese more and more, making homophones a real problem and necessitating the use of characters. The Chinese characters are the foundation of the language, and have been so for thousands of years. You can't just remove something that has so entwined itself into the language without making drastic, sweeping changes to the language itself. And the fact of the matter is, people (natives) don't really have much trouble with learning the characters. And a nation of 1.3 billion (not even counting people in Taiwan, Singapore, overseas Chinese, etc.) is not just going to make such a huge change to the language when it isn't necessary and wouldn't help anything anyway, just to please a few foreigners who are uncomfortable reading something other than an alphabet. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5612 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 37 of 132 21 October 2009 at 1:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't quite agree. Firstly, we are confusing between whether Modern Chinese could and should be written phonetically. I do not advocate that Modern Chinese should be written phonetically, as I don't mind if it's mostly logographic. My point is whether it can be written phonetically and still makes sense when read. Secondly, I am not referring either to colloquial, spoken Chinese vis-a-vis Literary Chinese as I know they are different languages. My point is that if written Chinese (formal or academic) can be understood by reading, then, it must also be capable of being understood by another person who listens to someone read aloud that same written Chinese. Because if he does understands it, then it can be written phonetically. And this is testable by asking the person who reads it aloud to read the same passage in a phonetic transcription, say pinyin. If he does not understand what was read aloud out of written Chinese in hanzi, then written Chinese is an entirely different language. As a matter fact, you said it is closer to Classical Chinese. This is my point. Pinyin is not phonetic because it does not represent the sounds of Classical or even Literary Chinese. Pinyin is phonetic if it represents the sounds of colloquial, Modern Chinese. This is called diglossa, and is also the case of Arabic. This is like writing English content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs stripped to their base forms) in modern forms yet the function words (case endings, conjugations, articles, etc) is that of Proto-Germanic. Will it make sense? only to those trained in it. This is what I meant when I said pinyin is not phonetic if applied to written Chinese (Classical or Literary) as there has been a lot of sound changes since then. Can Classical and Literary Chinese be written phonetically? I don't know the state of pronunciation reconstruction for Classical Chinese, but if that continually improves, then the answer is of course yes. It would most likely be different from the pinyin of modern daughter languages like Mandarin, Wu, Yue, Min, etc. So its not the homophones per se that will cause the problems if written phonetically, but (1) wrong phonetic representation, (2) grammar differences between spoken Chinese and Classical/Literary Chinese, and (3) its a mishmash of Modern Chinese and Classical Chinese, or mostly Classical Chinese. Am I advocating change? No, just diagnosing the situation. Going back to it, its not a question of appeasement of foreigners. It's a question of capability to be written phonetically. And no, hanzi is not the foundation of Chinese language. Think of it more like a glue. Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 21 October 2009 at 1:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5315 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 38 of 132 21 October 2009 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Why is this so difficult? 1. In written Chinese there are lots of homophones 2. This is not because of diglossa, it's because the written vocabulary is larger 4. Pinyin represents the SOUNDS of the language faithfully 5. If you HEAR "yánzhèng", this could either mean "inflammation" or "cancer" 6. The respective characters for yan are different, so if you SEE the words you'll know 7. Spoken Chinese has fewer homophones, but people still sometimes have to explain which character they meant when they just said shi. I think there should be a sticky post explaining this to everyone. I am new here, but I suspect the discussion keeps returning on a regular basis. Note that it might be possible to CHANGE the language so that the written language could be represented in pinyin, by resolving homophones. This would entail longer words, or new syllables that didn't exist before, and teaching this new language to a billion people would be quite a task. Still, it is largely a problem of the educated elites, perhaps you can have reasonable discussions about farming without too many homophones. In short: you have completely misunderstood the issue. Almost everything you write above is incorrect. Edited by Gusutafu on 21 October 2009 at 2:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5315 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 39 of 132 21 October 2009 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Are you mad? Do you actually think that it is because Classical Chinese is ancient that it has to be written with characters? Chinese has a completely different structure from Egyptian and Hebrew. Semitic languages are pretty similar to Indo-european ones. Also, using Ancient Egyptian as a proof is quite hilarious. Or did you think that hieroglyphic writing was alphabetic? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jee Senior Member Australia Joined 6103 days ago 105 posts - 105 votes Studies: English | Message 40 of 132 21 October 2009 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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lol ,thanks for you guys paying attention to discuss this issue.
I'm thinking "Will English speakers give up using alphabet, turn to use Chinese characters for their writing? Even using the characters to show all their English sound is possible, but I don't think they will, I wouldn't ask this, and I don't even imagine this. If I ask this, every one will think that I'm silly even myself. Then, Will Chinese speakers give up using characters, and turn to use roman alphabet ?Even using the alphabet to show all Chinese sound is possible, but don't think we will, don't ask this, and don't even imagine it. The point is that something may be good for you, but it doesn't mean that it must be nice for others.(just like you eat cheese, but you shouldn't think that every one on the earth likes eating cheese) The anwser is that we will never ever do that, except you wipe out all Chinese speakers! ohh kidding!! For native Chinese speakers, using characters for Chinese language is much more efficient than using alphabet. Some one might say, Korean and Vietnamese gave up using characters. But characters were just adopt to help them writting things down, it doesn't fit in their own languages much. If you want to use the alphabet idea to conquer th world, you should really try to convince Japanese first to whether you can do it or not. Since they have their own alphabet already, but semms they still dont want to give up their adopt characters, which indeed helped a lot and meant a lot. Edited by Jee on 22 October 2009 at 2:22am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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