The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why.
The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.
I'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation.
For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese.
For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it.
The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
> It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
When I was studying Mandarin Chinese at a school in Shanghai, borrowed a book on Shanghainese. The reason why everyone in shanghai aren’t writing “everything different” is because they are not writing in Shanghainese. They are writing in Mandarin.
I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.
Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
As far as I understand this, this is quite an oversimplification. The differences between different dialects of Chinese is huge, especially in terms of vocabulary. The writing system isn't as purely logographic as it is often touted. There are only ~4000 characters in common use (university level literacy), but many more common words. So, lots of words are written with multiple characters. In Standard Chinese (corresponding mostly to the dialect of Beijing), each of the characters in a word represents a syllable in that word. This correspondence doesn't hold for other dialects.
Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".
>It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example.
I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.
If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.
It’s worth noting that the first emperor of China was the one that unified the language. The country was at war for about 250 years during the warring state period. One of the main pushes to maintain unification was standardized writing system throughout the country, increase of commerce, and unified monetary system.
Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
This explanation doesn't make any sense. Your example is two words which are barely different at all in their pronunciation, certainly not sufficiently to cause unintelligibility (i.e. [wirk] vs [wak]). Differences in pronunciation of this kind are everywhere in English.
I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019.
A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.
A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
English is also bad at this, ironically.
Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them.
this was a big reason why Korean alphabet was invented because the literacy was so poor for the reasons you mentioned.
Lot of terms/loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you'd have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.
Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.
Curiously, French is also good at being "pronounced how its written", but horrible the other way around, writing down what you hear.
With only a few exceptions, you can always read out loud a written word. There is quite a lot of rules, but they are rather strict. Once you know them, you are good to go and read everything out loud.
But if you want to learn French by "listening and looking up the words in a dictionary" - good luck with that. There are multiple ways to write down the same sounds. You hear [ku] and it can be "coup", "cou", "coût"...
> Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differently".
If I don't know a character, the phonetic radicals might let me guess close but not correctly or it might not have anything in common. The semantic radicals are a little better IMO, but not enough to guess more than the category something might be in sometimes. I'm not sure if the rules are just full of exceptions or if it's simply change over the past millennia, but it means rote learning has been the only way for me to learn hanzi.
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.
reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”
I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文.
Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.
The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language.
And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.
The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated.
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development.
This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.
If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.
But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
I'm not sure we all that much need a (1999) on an article inflecting "bodacious" without apparent irony. I suppose it helps in the "before" direction, but I certainly wasn't going to assume this was written much after...
I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english.
Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.
I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.
> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest
This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records.
Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's).
> The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning
The problem is that the English language does not have this structure, whereas Chinese does.
The individual syllables in Chinese words have their own independent meanings. If you break apart the English word "random," "ran" and "dom" don't independently mean anything. The reason why Chinese characters work well for Chinese is because the fundamental unit of Chinese is really the syllable, rather than the word. English isn't like that, so a Chinese-like writing system would be a very poor fit to the English language.
That being said, I sometimes wonder whether this property of Chinese comes from the writing system, or whether it preexisted writing. In other words, to what extent has Chinese been influenced by its writing system?
> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi.
English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.
> I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system. All of the concepts apply
Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu.
If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling.
The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘
Or writing in English can go the other way and become ortophonetic like Italian and Romanian, where each letter denotes a sound and "to", "too" and "two" will become "tu".
> So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi..... We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme.
[+] [-] noirdujour|1 year ago|reply
The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood.
As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds.
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...
[+] [-] gpvos|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] jcranmer|1 year ago|reply
For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese.
For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it.
The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
[+] [-] geokon|1 year ago|reply
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
[+] [-] wodenokoto|1 year ago|reply
I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial.
Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
[+] [-] j7ake|1 year ago|reply
However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.
[+] [-] latentsea|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] simiones|1 year ago|reply
Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".
[+] [-] Dalewyn|1 year ago|reply
I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.
[+] [-] rat87|1 year ago|reply
English? Do you mean the UK? US?
My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?
[+] [-] robomartin|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] lupire|1 year ago|reply
You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.
[+] [-] aikinai|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] russdill|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] syntaxing|1 year ago|reply
Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
[+] [-] twixfel|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] cynicalpeace|1 year ago|reply
A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it.
A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly.
English is also bad at this, ironically.
Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
[+] [-] gomox|1 year ago|reply
You owe us at least one fun story from mainland China in 2019.
[+] [-] dreamcompiler|1 year ago|reply
Kanji is a very different story of course.
[+] [-] localfirst|1 year ago|reply
Lot of terms/loanwords from Chinese language can be found in all neighbouring countries but you'd have to be part of the artistocracy to get the schooling.
Japan still uses it but North Korea banned it out of the gate. South Korea slowly phased out use of traditional chinese characters. It was common to see Chinese characters up until late 00s but definitely used a lot more sparingly.
[+] [-] basementcat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] alentred|1 year ago|reply
With only a few exceptions, you can always read out loud a written word. There is quite a lot of rules, but they are rather strict. Once you know them, you are good to go and read everything out loud.
But if you want to learn French by "listening and looking up the words in a dictionary" - good luck with that. There are multiple ways to write down the same sounds. You hear [ku] and it can be "coup", "cou", "coût"...
[+] [-] perilunar|1 year ago|reply
Yes. English desperately needs spelling reform.
[+] [-] gs17|1 year ago|reply
Yeah, it's unfortunately not enough to sightread purely from radicals. My girlfriend has been trying to teach me and it's the biggest frustration. The discussion keeps going "this radical is how you know it's pronounced ___, oh, but not in this one, that's pronounced entirely differently".
If I don't know a character, the phonetic radicals might let me guess close but not correctly or it might not have anything in common. The semantic radicals are a little better IMO, but not enough to guess more than the category something might be in sometimes. I'm not sure if the rules are just full of exceptions or if it's simply change over the past millennia, but it means rote learning has been the only way for me to learn hanzi.
[+] [-] mcmoor|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] Eric_WVGG|1 year ago|reply
reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”
[+] [-] bad_username|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] resolutebat|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] PaulHoule|1 year ago|reply
Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters.
The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
[+] [-] dang|1 year ago|reply
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 - March 2022 (7 comments)
If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments)
If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)
[+] [-] CalRobert|1 year ago|reply
Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
[+] [-] beryilma|1 year ago|reply
And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'.
The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
[+] [-] lunaru|1 year ago|reply
Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
[+] [-] mbivert|1 year ago|reply
This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research.
If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English.
But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
[+] [-] bradrn|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] throwanem|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] timbit42|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] MrDresden|1 year ago|reply
Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.
[+] [-] luyu_wu|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] ggm|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] mbivert|1 year ago|reply
This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records.
Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's).
[0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf
[+] [-] DiogenesKynikos|1 year ago|reply
The problem is that the English language does not have this structure, whereas Chinese does.
The individual syllables in Chinese words have their own independent meanings. If you break apart the English word "random," "ran" and "dom" don't independently mean anything. The reason why Chinese characters work well for Chinese is because the fundamental unit of Chinese is really the syllable, rather than the word. English isn't like that, so a Chinese-like writing system would be a very poor fit to the English language.
That being said, I sometimes wonder whether this property of Chinese comes from the writing system, or whether it preexisted writing. In other words, to what extent has Chinese been influenced by its writing system?
[+] [-] grishka|1 year ago|reply
English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.
[+] [-] brigandish|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] umanwizard|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] brazzy|1 year ago|reply
Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).
[+] [-] bmacho|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] zumu|1 year ago|reply
If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling.
The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘
[+] [-] DeathArrow|1 year ago|reply
[+] [-] beardyw|1 year ago|reply
They already are aren't they?