[HN Gopher] If English was written like Chinese (1999)
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
Author : watercooler_guy
Score : 110 points
Date : 2024-06-03 17:34 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (zompist.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (zompist.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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 Zhong Wen .
|
| 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".
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal
| with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What
| did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing
| sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
| kibwen wrote:
| This is basically how we got to alphabetic systems in the
| first place.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
|
| _" Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic
| script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language
| of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in
| the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian
| language, which required a large number of pictograms, they
| selected a small number of those commonly seen in their
| surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the
| semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."_
| chuckadams wrote:
| Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out
| phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
|
| "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word
| to say out loud.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words,
| Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words.
|
| For instance there is the popular anime titled "Sailor
| Moon" which is written in Katakana like seramun and
| stranger still the second season is called "Sailor Moon R"
| (I think for "return") and is written seramun R.
|
| My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on
| particularly well
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
|
| it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the
| mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to
| spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
| vunderba wrote:
| Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I
| lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka
| Zhu Yin as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops /
| etc.
|
| The few English ex-pats that I knew used the Sou Gou
| software which defaults to pinyin I think.
|
| I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my
| phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was
| mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my
| Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of
| the symbols are highly similar.
| eob wrote:
| This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo
| rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And
| occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice
| to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese
| amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence.
|
| This is just my personal experience, but I think the big
| change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but
| rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally
| prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street
| signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake
| of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more
| familiar with Pinyin than WG.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same
| purpose as katakana.
|
| If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might
| write:
|
| A) Churchill
|
| B) Qiu Ji Er
|
| But they will never write:
|
| C) Qiuji'er (the pinyin for B)
|
| I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything
| other than typing (as an input method for Chinese
| characters).
| raincole wrote:
| The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize
| Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was
| not invented to spell foregin words.
| saagarjha wrote:
| Or romance
| chuckadams wrote:
| Ah, my source was a co-worker from Hong Kong, which is
| apparently a stronghold of Bopomofo. A little ironic that
| the more westernized island would prefer non-romanized
| spelling... politics with the mainland I guess. He
| mentioned Pinyin when talking about input methods though.
| raincole wrote:
| Just use the closest Chinese characters to represent a
| syllable / sound, and slightly modify it if they have to
| distinguish them. Actually this is not just for foregin
| languages. It was how Chinese itself evolved.
|
| Search "borrowing" in this page:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati.
| ..
| PaulHoule wrote:
| In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First
| they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana
|
| then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system
| that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In
| Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end
| of the sentence and the "stem" of the verb is usually written
| in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they
| would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to
| specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think
| a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which
| basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds
| new characters which are important grammatically.
|
| The character no for instance can be used in spelling out
| bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word
| "no" which roughly means "of". (It's good to know because any
| substantial Japanese text will use it so it's an easy tell of
| what language you're looking at)
|
| Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar
| particle role though
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles
|
| the one that sticks out to me is Liao which is pronounced
| "le" and is used in sentences that are describing a change in
| a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
| brazzy wrote:
| > First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for
| Japanese
|
| No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters
| that matched the syllables of Japanese -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana
|
| It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from
| the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where
| Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they
| didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically
| with China.
|
| The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is
| that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages.
| Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly
| different between the standard writing form (which is just
| Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest
| Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and
| Middle Ages using Latin.
| g9yuayon wrote:
| Note that modern Chinese are heavily influenced by modern
| English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors
| like Lu Xun diligently explore how to write modern Chinese with
| "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern
| Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple
| authors wrote books or articles pledging people not to write
| "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounification of
| verbs, something that traditional Chinese never had. In
| contrast, younger generations love to say Chinese equivalent to
| something like "do improvement" instead of "improve" (Jin Xing
| Gai Jin ,instead of Gai Jin , even though it is still
| considered bad writing style.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement
| jmclnx wrote:
| There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere
|
| https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm
|
| As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by
| extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it
| was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters
| than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny
| computers of the 40s and 50s.
| svachalek wrote:
| Computers developed by English speakers for English speakers
| tended to use English, I am very skeptical that any more
| thought went into it than that.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Asia have a massive booming tech industry. They always have
| done.
|
| Surely you've heard of brands like Sony, Sega, Nintendo,
| Samsung, Huawei, Asus, and Acer... to name but a small few?
| llm_trw wrote:
| As opposed to Russian, German or French?
| Eric_WVGG wrote:
| > 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 Sabir"
| bad_username wrote:
| Reminds me of Antonio Stella Bottom Tile (
| https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 )
| dllthomas wrote:
| ... and the bard Elron Hu, from a PKD story.
| resolutebat wrote:
| A luminary icon much like Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yerbouti.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _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)
| beardyw wrote:
| > 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.
|
| They already are aren't they?
| bmacho wrote:
| If Japanese was written like Chinese
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281
| lunaru wrote:
| 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.
| bradrn wrote:
| You're missing the point of the article. The primary aim is to
| explain how Chinese characters work, using English as a
| reference point.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I'd prefer to switch to Korea's hangul.
| SunlitCat wrote:
| As someone, still planning to tackle learning Chinese (mandarin)
| one day, this is very interesting!
| brazzy wrote:
| > 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).
| akavi wrote:
| Chinese has fewer inflections than English, but does have Er
| as a nominalizer (and one which is quite productive in northern
| dialects)
| beryilma wrote:
| 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.
| einpoklum wrote:
| "A type of speaking that rhymes with purse-- curse, of course."
|
| I was actually thinking "verse" :-\
| throwanem wrote:
| 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_...
| noirdujour wrote:
| 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 Gong 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-...
| aikinai wrote:
| This is a great explanation of important points many people
| fail to recognize. Thank you!
| j7ake wrote:
| My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows
| anybody to understand writing.
|
| However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local
| language.
| rat87 wrote:
| > English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified
| language, when in actuality it is not.
|
| 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?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| newbie take: there is one Chinese language
|
| intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages
|
| expert take: there is one Chinese language
|
| There are also plenty of languages in China that are not
| Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and
| their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese
| written language is used as a phonetic script for some
| minority languages (although many are based on uighur script
| is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| > There are also plenty of languages in China that are not
| Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and
| their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese.
|
| That's because Tibet is not, and never has been, China.
| raincole wrote:
| The difference between a langauge and a dialet is a
| political, not a lingustic.
| dllthomas wrote:
| It seems pretty well known that Mandarin and Cantonese are
| different languages. It turns out there are a whole bunch.
| gpvos wrote:
| 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.
| syntaxing wrote:
| 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.
| cynicalpeace wrote:
| 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.
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