14 ms·

China’s tyranny of characters

90 points by kafkaesq 10y ago

tokenadult 10y ago
Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.
- auganov 10y ago
  Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.
  - spacehunt 10y ago
    That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.
    - auganov 10y ago
      So the subtitles on HK videos, tv etc are usually sanitized to be standard?
      - spacehunt 10y ago
        Often yes. For video only the really local content (eg. 100Most) are subtitled in exactly the same characters as the ones actually spoken. (Edit: actually I just rewatched some 100Most content after I wrote the above and no, sadly even their videos are subtitled in Standard Modern Chinese.)
- Immortalin 10y ago
  The examples you gave are in Traditional Chinese.
  - footpath 10y ago
    Which doesn't really matter in this case. The character for "he" in vernacular Cantonese is "佢", which isn't used at all in Mandarin. The characters for "don't know how" in vernacular Cantonese are written as "唔識" in traditional Chinese or "唔识" in simplified Chinese, which are used in Mandarin, but never in this context (as the example given, the common way of saying "don't know how" in Mandarin is "不會" in traditional Chinese or "不会" in simplified Chinese"). In a sense, the relationship between various Chinese "dialects" and standard Mandarin Chinese is similar to the Scots language's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) relationship to English.
- est 10y ago
  Cantonese to Mandarin is like Ebonics to English. https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D.E7.95.99.E5.A4.A7.E9.87.8F.E5.8F.A4.E6.BC.A2.E8.AA.9E.E7.94.A8.E8.A9.9E https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D.... In your example: > 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram 時，就寫為「渠係荷蘭礮隊副隊長」。 TL:DR Cantonese is Middle Age "Mandarin" in disguise, plus some Ancient Vietnamese dialects.
  - mveety 10y ago
    IIRC Hakka is closer to an antiquated mandarin than Cantonese is. Also the Chinese "dialects" are different languages. Calling them dialects is like saying Icelandic and Swedish are different dialects of Norse. They're all closely related but not mutually intelligible.
- dak1 10y ago
  The Taiwanese equivalent would be: Does he know how to speak Taiwanese? 他會曉講台語無? No, he doesn't. 他毋會。 The above is actually somewhat close to the Mandarin version, although many other phrases can vary much more significantly.
  - komali2 10y ago
    This is because we speak Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, using Traditional, rather than Simplified characters, whereas people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese using Traditional characters. It's a different language entirely. Similar to how you can use Chinese characters (traditional or simplified, whatever) to write Vietnamese and Korean and Japanese, as used to happen many years ago.
    - dak1 10y ago
      Taiwanese is as different from Mandarin as Cantonese is. Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in Taiwan, partly because the Taiwanese language was more or less outlawed during Martial Law rule from 1949 to 1987. It's also the primary language for education. Taiwanese is still commonly spoken as well though, especially in southern Taiwan, and is actually becoming increasingly common (partly for political reasons, which are a different topic). For comparison: 他會曉講台語無？ (Taiwanese) 他會講台語嗎？ (Mandarin) I also intentionally used 講 instead of 說 for the Mandarin version, since both are valid and it makes it more similar. A bigger difference would be the standard greeting: 你好 (Mandarin) 你食飽未？ (Taiwanese)
gbog 10y ago
"the boxy prison of Chinese characters" What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over the pronounciation is a blessing in many respects. It allows more people from distant cultures to converge with the writen language, and share much more.
- ralfd 10y ago
  I guess it relates to this: "It is one of many slang or dialect words and phrases that you can say but not write using Chinese characters."
  - gbog 10y ago
    This is not true, Chinese people are very able to find Chinese characters to express slang or dialect words, they do it all the time, and the case of M. Chan's hair is a rare exception.
- yoo1I 10y ago
  Except that's not what "concave" and "convex" look like. It also means that you need to agree with everyone, what the meaning of every symbol is. For instance symbol of "convex" you give, might also be a street intersection, so you can't really just rely on the shape of a character, and you need to spend many years memorizing each one of them. If you look at reality, your assertion that > people from distant cultures [...] converge with the writen language is really not true. Chinese writing systems aren't universal in a way that makes them easy to pick up to express yourself in. Quite the contrary.
- Chathamization 10y ago
  Only a tiny minority of Chinese characters are pictographic, and most characters have a phonetic element. You'll have a better chance guessing the pronunciation of a random Chinese character than guessing the meaning of a random Chinese character.
mahranch 10y ago
> gaining so much regional identity and independence that they want to do a Brexit of their own. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've wanted their own Brexit from day 1. At least Hong Kong does, and even Taiwan probably too. Especially Taiwan. I feel sorry for Taiwan, watching stuff like this (http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for-international http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for...) from Hong Kong and knowing that's a real possibility for them. At least the pro-China people in Taiwan (yes, they exist) will have to reevaluate their opinions after seeing how China has handled the Hong Kong return...
pipio21 10y ago
It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book. The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries. "as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent." That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 10y ago
  They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
  - kafkaesq 10y ago
    They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects). As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.
    - Retric 10y ago
      You can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols. long A sound = vr in language 1. Z sound = vr in language 2. But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word. This means if you have 10 languages then ideograms are easier in 9/10 of them.
allemagne 10y ago
>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.
- Noseshine 10y ago
  "reinforced", not "caused".
  - dibujante 10y ago
    "Movable goalposts", not "fixed goalposts".
- echaozh 10y ago
  > They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character. As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.
wyuenho 10y ago
David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics. Case in point: Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic. In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are. As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census. All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate. So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it. Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.
- jbooth 10y ago
  I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin. That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.
  - 10y ago
panglott 10y ago
"the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world." This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?
ianbicking 10y ago
Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.
- restalis 10y ago
  "It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice." Isn't this true for any general writing system? The textual recording of one's speech is always lossy. That's why the writers, when they deem it to be important enough, add descriptions here and there about the speaker, to capture all kind of verbal or non verbal details.
- vilhelm_s 10y ago
  There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non-Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    That was a really fascinating read.
- zhoutong 10y ago
  At least in Mandarin, given enough context, each Chinese character has one correct pronunciation. It's frequently the "context" that trips up non-native speakers.
- jonathankoren 10y ago
  Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.
  - defen 10y ago
cheatdeath 10y ago
In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.
- andyjdavis 10y ago
  Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters. Links for those unfamiliar with those two things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
  - footpath 10y ago
    Although in the case of Hong Kong, neither Pinyin input nor Zhuyin input are likely to be used, as both are based on the phonetics of standard Mandarin Chinese. There are alternative input methods that are shape-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...) such as the Cangjie, and Cantonese-only input methods.
    - andyjdavis 10y ago
      I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)
  - cheatdeath 10y ago
    I guess I've just been assuming any Roman characters are English, some definitely might be Pinyin. I generally try not to stare at peoples screens for too long haha. I did an intro to Chinese (Mandarin) class a few years ago so I'm aware of Pinyin but have forgotten almost everything (except some of the bits I found particularly interesting like word order for times and places, how numbers are represented and a few other things).
kazinator 10y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana
- PeCaN 10y ago
  Hokkien Taiwanese is no longer particularly prominent in Taiwan, let alone the Taiwanese kana (according to that link they're not even all in Unicode). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin is more relevant, as it's still moderately widely used today in Taiwan.
kiwidrew 10y ago
At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_character_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...
peteretep 10y ago
Crikey, 'duang' is a much better word than 'boing'.
legulere 10y ago
> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Wikipedia calls them “varieties” because to call them “languages” would result in a giant political flamewar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese That doesn’t mean they aren’t distinct languages (and not mere “dialects”) by any definition a modern linguist would typically use. Calling them “dialects” would be similar to calling English, German, and Dutch “dialects” of “Germanic”.
  - talideon 10y ago
    A better, more neutral term would be 'topolect'. It's a better translation of the term 'fāngyán' (which is typically translated as 'dialect'), and blurs the line between the English terms 'dialect' and 'language'.
  - legulere 10y ago
    English is pretty far from continental western germanic (German, Dutch, ...). Continental western germanic is actually a good example of a group where the distinction between dialect and language is not clear. There's a dialect continuum in the area [1], so you often can't draw clear cut lines what belongs to one language and one to another. - With Low German the question is wether it is an own language or just a dialect of German. - With the three frisian varieties the question is wether they are different languages or just different dialects of Frisian. - Luxemburgish can be considered just a dialect, like the German dialects spoken just behind the border that are essentially the same, or an own language. - Dutch belongs to a dialect group that also spans over wide parts of Germany and Luxembourg [2] - And there are many more things to think about like Afrikaans or Yiddish [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_West_Germanic_continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconian_languages
Freak_NL 10y ago
Weird. On Firefox, with ad-blocker and PrivacyBadger disabled, I am stuck on a page with only navigation menus and a title that reads 'Explicit cookie consent'. In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form. Anyone else getting this?
- seszett 10y ago
  I've had this for a while on this domain, which Chrome and Ghostery. I haven't been able to read their articles for months at least.
jasonjei 10y ago
Language is powerful in China. Wars were fought in China to unify culture. For example, the Chinese language in modern vernacular is generally not referred as a language in itself but referred as zhongwen, or "Chinese culture." The first emperor to unify China realized how important for maintaining power it was to have the people using a single common language (just as it were with the Roman Empire, compared to after its fall). The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy. What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor. My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).
eonwe 10y ago
This is only partially related, but I remember watching the news in the nineties and being dumbstruck on how Académie française policed the usage of language in public life. It was probably about use of Anglicisms in television or by politicians. I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.
- bitwize 10y ago
  I learned about the Académie Française in French class (1990 or so). I thought they were guarding against anglicisms creeping in through teen slang -- "c'est too much" and that.
  - macavity23 10y ago
    Also through vocabulary. 'Le weekend' (vs 'la fin de semaine') is the classic example, both of what l'academie does and how utterly (though heroically) doomed its efforts are.

90 points by kafkaesq 10y ago

Here is a written example of differences between the Cantonese language and the Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin) language when written in Chinese characters. I've seen many examples of signs or other written language in public places in Hong Kong that are incomprehensible to literate speakers of Mandarin, and some examples of written Taiwanese in Taiwan that are incomprehensible to people from anywhere else. How you might write the conversation "Does he know how to speak Mandarin? "No, he doesn't." 他會說普通話嗎？他不會。 in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write "Does he know how to speak Cantonese? "No, he doesn't." 佢識唔識講廣東話？佢唔識。 in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. If you can see the Chinese characters at all as this is displayed on your screen, you should easily be able to see that many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

auganov 10y ago
Well that example is rather radical. As long as you know (or can guess) traditional characters you can read a HK newspaper just fine with a stutter here and there.
- spacehunt 10y ago
  That's because newspapers in HK are still written in Modern Standard Chinese most of the time. In less formal contexts such as social media, however, written Cantonese is rather more common.
  - auganov 10y ago
    So the subtitles on HK videos, tv etc are usually sanitized to be standard?
    - spacehunt 10y ago
      Often yes. For video only the really local content (eg. 100Most) are subtitled in exactly the same characters as the ones actually spoken. (Edit: actually I just rewatched some 100Most content after I wrote the above and no, sadly even their videos are subtitled in Standard Modern Chinese.)
Immortalin 10y ago
The examples you gave are in Traditional Chinese.
- footpath 10y ago
  Which doesn't really matter in this case. The character for "he" in vernacular Cantonese is "佢", which isn't used at all in Mandarin. The characters for "don't know how" in vernacular Cantonese are written as "唔識" in traditional Chinese or "唔识" in simplified Chinese, which are used in Mandarin, but never in this context (as the example given, the common way of saying "don't know how" in Mandarin is "不會" in traditional Chinese or "不会" in simplified Chinese"). In a sense, the relationship between various Chinese "dialects" and standard Mandarin Chinese is similar to the Scots language's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scots_language) relationship to English.
est 10y ago
Cantonese to Mandarin is like Ebonics to English. https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D.E7.95.99.E5.A4.A7.E9.87.8F.E5.8F.A4.E6.BC.A2.E8.AA.9E.E7.94.A8.E8.A9.9E https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hk/%E7%B2%A4%E8%AF%AD#.E4.BF.9D.... In your example: > 第一及第二人稱用「我」、「你」，與官話相同，但粵語音「我」（ngo5）更保留了中古漢語唐音（*ngɑ̌ ）之疑母（ng-）。第三人稱不用「他」，而是「渠」（俗寫「佢」；東漢《孔雀東南飛》：「雖與府吏要，渠會永無緣」），跟吳語一樣。複數人稱不用「們」，而是上溯至端系的同源形式 [taʔ] 或 [ti]（現代粵語寫作「哋」，本字為「等」，見聖公會的公禱書）。粵語用「係」而不用「是」來代表正面答覆，「係」是明清兩代常用字。這些字眼在中共接管政權初期，仍然有作書面語用，例如李儼《中算史論叢》第一冊 (1955年版本，第210頁) 提及18世紀數學家 Issac Wolfram 時，就寫為「渠係荷蘭礮隊副隊長」。 TL:DR Cantonese is Middle Age "Mandarin" in disguise, plus some Ancient Vietnamese dialects.
- mveety 10y ago
  IIRC Hakka is closer to an antiquated mandarin than Cantonese is. Also the Chinese "dialects" are different languages. Calling them dialects is like saying Icelandic and Swedish are different dialects of Norse. They're all closely related but not mutually intelligible.
dak1 10y ago
The Taiwanese equivalent would be: Does he know how to speak Taiwanese? 他會曉講台語無? No, he doesn't. 他毋會。 The above is actually somewhat close to the Mandarin version, although many other phrases can vary much more significantly.
- komali2 10y ago
  This is because we speak Mandarin Chinese in Taiwan, using Traditional, rather than Simplified characters, whereas people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese using Traditional characters. It's a different language entirely. Similar to how you can use Chinese characters (traditional or simplified, whatever) to write Vietnamese and Korean and Japanese, as used to happen many years ago.
  - dak1 10y ago
    Taiwanese is as different from Mandarin as Cantonese is. Mandarin is the most commonly spoken language in Taiwan, partly because the Taiwanese language was more or less outlawed during Martial Law rule from 1949 to 1987. It's also the primary language for education. Taiwanese is still commonly spoken as well though, especially in southern Taiwan, and is actually becoming increasingly common (partly for political reasons, which are a different topic). For comparison: 他會曉講台語無？ (Taiwanese) 他會講台語嗎？ (Mandarin) I also intentionally used 講 instead of 說 for the Mandarin version, since both are valid and it makes it more similar. A bigger difference would be the standard greeting: 你好 (Mandarin) 你食飽未？ (Taiwanese)

gbog 10y ago

"the boxy prison of Chinese characters" What does it even mean? We are all "prisoners" of our language, because we can't easily think and express anything that cannot be molded in this language. But Chinese characters may actually give more "freedom" to their users, in that they convey directly their meaning, without the necessity of a sound. See 凹 and 凸, they mean concave and convex. Avoiding the articulation over the pronounciation is a blessing in many respects. It allows more people from distant cultures to converge with the writen language, and share much more.

ralfd 10y ago
I guess it relates to this: "It is one of many slang or dialect words and phrases that you can say but not write using Chinese characters."
- gbog 10y ago
  This is not true, Chinese people are very able to find Chinese characters to express slang or dialect words, they do it all the time, and the case of M. Chan's hair is a rare exception.
yoo1I 10y ago
Except that's not what "concave" and "convex" look like. It also means that you need to agree with everyone, what the meaning of every symbol is. For instance symbol of "convex" you give, might also be a street intersection, so you can't really just rely on the shape of a character, and you need to spend many years memorizing each one of them. If you look at reality, your assertion that > people from distant cultures [...] converge with the writen language is really not true. Chinese writing systems aren't universal in a way that makes them easy to pick up to express yourself in. Quite the contrary.
Chathamization 10y ago
Only a tiny minority of Chinese characters are pictographic, and most characters have a phonetic element. You'll have a better chance guessing the pronunciation of a random Chinese character than guessing the meaning of a random Chinese character.

mahranch 10y ago

> gaining so much regional identity and independence that they want to do a Brexit of their own. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they've wanted their own Brexit from day 1. At least Hong Kong does, and even Taiwan probably too. Especially Taiwan. I feel sorry for Taiwan, watching stuff like this (http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for-international http://reason.com/blog/2014/09/30/hong-kong-student-begs-for...) from Hong Kong and knowing that's a real possibility for them. At least the pro-China people in Taiwan (yes, they exist) will have to reevaluate their opinions after seeing how China has handled the Hong Kong return...

pipio21 10y ago

It is important to note that China had alphabetic systems, like Mongolian, since a long time ago. It was a conscious decision not to use them. Learning to write and read is much easier in alphabetic so the elite opposed it from the start as they viewed it as a menace to their status. They were right, when people in Europe could read Calvino's printed Bible and own one themselves it changed the status quo radically, creating lots of problems to the people on top. Before printing it took three years of a worker salary to copy a book. The same process happened in Korea and Japan, with equivalent systems to alphabetic, the difference is that in China elites won, because it was central planned. It was not easy though, specially at first it faced very strong opposition in these small countries. "as though Europe had thrown away Latin and decided to enforce French across the continent." That is exactly what happened with Napoleon. Then the fashion language to speak became German, then after WWII it was English, because of the Americans new world hegemony.

deleted 10y ago
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Retric 10y ago
They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. Signs use the same principle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hazard_symbol Though Arabic numerals have become fairly universal.
- kafkaesq 10y ago
  They use the same written language with multiple spoken languages. That does not work with an alphabet. It can work if you make it work (and ignore side effects). As attested by the many, many languages have been (forcibly) switched over to invented or completely foreign alphabets, over the millennia.
  - Retric 10y ago
    You can map a spoken language to a random set of symbols. long A sound = vr in language 1. Z sound = vr in language 2. But, unless each language also has a different spelling you can only have one language end up even vaguely phonetic, the other is just going to have random symbols mapping to words. As in "Krithnotrix" -> "Bob" because in L1 "Krithnotrix" translates to a short word. This means if you have 10 languages then ideograms are easier in 9/10 of them.

allemagne 10y ago

>The inflexibility of the Chinese script has always reinforced the inflexibility of the Chinese state. The democratization of Taiwan and Hong Kong must be pretty frustrating to writers who want people to take these kinds of baseless yet simplifying statements seriously.

Noseshine 10y ago
"reinforced", not "caused".
- dibujante 10y ago
  "Movable goalposts", not "fixed goalposts".
echaozh 10y ago
> They do not accept a canon of unchanging characters handed down from antiquity. They want to make up new ones and use Roman letters I've never heard such claims. Why do we need to make up new characters when there are more strange characters than necessary? Even the youngest can enjoy the so called Martian language[1] (the Chinese version of the leetspeak) with valid Chinese characters. And you can actually make up new characters by writing components as individual characters, and the outcome is just a larger and funnier character. As for wishing for a Roman alphabet... I think it's more of a fancy of those already using such an alphabet. If you grow up seeing Chinese characters everywhere but Roman letters not so often if ever, the characters will be a habit. Also, pinyin may not be very easy for many parts of the country, as the inhabitants will have difficulty in making the precise pronunciation. Their words can be easily understood, but it will be a hard time for them to pin down the correct pinyin. To input characters, the input method is very forgiving, allowing missing or redundant g's in ng or h's in sh, ch and zh. Some people even need to guess between r and l, h and f. Characters are a much better, semantic way of communication.

wyuenho 10y ago

David Moser, like many people, Chinese or otherwise, who's argued in the Communist party-line idea that a phonetic written language, or in fact any simplification of Han script helps eliminate illiterates, simply cannot comprehend statistics. Case in point: Japanese, a language that mixes 3 different scripts, one of which is Kanji (Han characters), is taught to everyone in Japanese since pre-school. An excellent Japanese reader can comprehend about 3000 Han characters, incidentally, is also the average number required for a Chinese speaker to read newspaper. Japan's literacy rate has been around 99% for so long that the government has basically stopped reporting that statistic. In the past 30-40 years, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau, all regions that continue to use the "complex" traditional Han script, has achieved 95+% literacy rate. We don't hear many people in those regions complaining about how hard traditional Han characters are. As a comparison, India, which teaches Hindi and English in school, both of which much simpler scripts than Han, has achieved an average of 74% literacy rate in the most recent census. All of the above tells us that the complexity of a language's written script has very little to do with literacy. The dominant factor in improving literacy is the introduction of free primary and secondary education across a region. No other factor even comes close to achieving a high literacy rate. So stop with this non-sense that the Han script is too complex to teach, learn and use now. 100s of millions of people have done it. Another point of this article is that the Han script is too rigid, which is not true. The 6 ways of constructing new Han characters has been recognized for millennia, it's just over the dynasties, the rulers have been reluctant to invent new ones to cater to new ideas. It's the people who forces down a way to use it that's rigid.

jbooth 10y ago
I know about 200 words of spoken chinese and can write maybe 4 (including yi er san ;)). Now, admittedly, I'm just picking it up here and there rather than attending classes and spending hours writing characters over and over, but I think learning the strokes for 3-5,000 characters is undisputably 'harder' than learning to write 26 or so letters and a really consistent pronunciation system like pinyin. That's not to say you're wrong that literacy is all about education. But harder is still harder.
- 10y ago

panglott 10y ago

"the use of a standard language is undeniably helpful in educating the poorest and helping them engage with broader development trends in the country and across the world." This is what the powerful say every time they're trying to forcibly strip a community of its language and culture. But is it even remotely true? The major varieties of Chinese have as many speakers as major European nations. Is it really to be believed that local varieties of Chinese or minority languages can have no recognition in school?

ianbicking 10y ago

Out of curiosity, how do writers deal with dialog with Chinese characters? It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice.

restalis 10y ago
"It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice." Isn't this true for any general writing system? The textual recording of one's speech is always lossy. That's why the writers, when they deem it to be important enough, add descriptions here and there about the speaker, to capture all kind of verbal or non verbal details.
vilhelm_s 10y ago
There are some complications when Chinese characters are used to write non-Chinese languages, but in general Chinese characters correspond to sounds (one character per syllable). You might like this article, "The Ideographic Myth". http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  That was a really fascinating read.
zhoutong 10y ago
At least in Mandarin, given enough context, each Chinese character has one correct pronunciation. It's frequently the "context" that trips up non-native speakers.
jonathankoren 10y ago
Can you elaborate, because I don't understand what you mean. Is it because you think they're ideographs that have no corresponding phonemes? They do. Every character is a syllable complete with a tone.
- defen 10y ago

cheatdeath 10y ago

In Hong Kong, I sometimes see peoples screens when I'm using public transport. WhatsApp audio recordings are very popular, sometimes I can see the entire conversation is just audio recordings back and forth. Other times it's Chinese (I can't differentiate which), sometimes English, often a mix. I've only seen someone drawing characters with his finger once.

andyjdavis 10y ago
Keep an eye out for either Pinyin or Zhuyin. I believe they are somewhat common for texting purposes. You input this stuff and your device starts displaying characters for you to pick from avoiding the slower process of actually drawing characters. Links for those unfamiliar with those two things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- footpath 10y ago
  Although in the case of Hong Kong, neither Pinyin input nor Zhuyin input are likely to be used, as both are based on the phonetics of standard Mandarin Chinese. There are alternative input methods that are shape-based (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_computers#Shape-based https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...) such as the Cangjie, and Cantonese-only input methods.
  - andyjdavis 10y ago
    I actually have not come across Cangjie before and it looks really interesting. Thank you for the link :)
- cheatdeath 10y ago
  I guess I've just been assuming any Roman characters are English, some definitely might be Pinyin. I generally try not to stare at peoples screens for too long haha. I did an intro to Chinese (Mandarin) class a few years ago so I'm aware of Pinyin but have forgotten almost everything (except some of the bits I found particularly interesting like word order for times and places, how numbers are represented and a few other things).

kazinator 10y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwanese_kana

PeCaN 10y ago
Hokkien Taiwanese is no longer particularly prominent in Taiwan, let alone the Taiwanese kana (according to that link they're not even all in Unicode). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuyin is more relevant, as it's still moderately widely used today in Taiwan.

kiwidrew 10y ago

At least in Hong Kong, "new" characters for spoken Cantonese are often derived from existing Chinese characters that sound similar, despite those characters having a completely different meaning. Wikipedia has a fascinating entry [1] with many examples of this. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_character_formation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Cantonese#Cantonese_ch...

peteretep 10y ago

Crikey, 'duang' is a much better word than 'boing'.

legulere 10y ago

> But central authorities are also now worried about any regional languages (which it insists on calling dialects) among the Han majority It's not as clear cut that variations of Chinese are languages and not dialects as the economist makes it out. This is very similar to arabic. Wikipedia for instance also calls them dialects. This is very different from Uighur and Tibetan which are pretty clear cut separate languages, but which are intermingled here in this article.

jacobolus 10y ago
Wikipedia calls them “varieties” because to call them “languages” would result in a giant political flamewar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Chinese, also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Varieties_of_Chinese That doesn’t mean they aren’t distinct languages (and not mere “dialects”) by any definition a modern linguist would typically use. Calling them “dialects” would be similar to calling English, German, and Dutch “dialects” of “Germanic”.
- talideon 10y ago
  A better, more neutral term would be 'topolect'. It's a better translation of the term 'fāngyán' (which is typically translated as 'dialect'), and blurs the line between the English terms 'dialect' and 'language'.
- legulere 10y ago
  English is pretty far from continental western germanic (German, Dutch, ...). Continental western germanic is actually a good example of a group where the distinction between dialect and language is not clear. There's a dialect continuum in the area [1], so you often can't draw clear cut lines what belongs to one language and one to another. - With Low German the question is wether it is an own language or just a dialect of German. - With the three frisian varieties the question is wether they are different languages or just different dialects of Frisian. - Luxemburgish can be considered just a dialect, like the German dialects spoken just behind the border that are essentially the same, or an own language. - Dutch belongs to a dialect group that also spans over wide parts of Germany and Luxembourg [2] - And there are many more things to think about like Afrikaans or Yiddish [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_West_Germanic_continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_continuum#Continental_... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconian_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franconian_languages

Freak_NL 10y ago

Weird. On Firefox, with ad-blocker and PrivacyBadger disabled, I am stuck on a page with only navigation menus and a title that reads 'Explicit cookie consent'. In Chrome I get the expected I-agree-to-your-cookies consent form. Anyone else getting this?

seszett 10y ago
I've had this for a while on this domain, which Chrome and Ghostery. I haven't been able to read their articles for months at least.

jasonjei 10y ago

Language is powerful in China. Wars were fought in China to unify culture. For example, the Chinese language in modern vernacular is generally not referred as a language in itself but referred as zhongwen, or "Chinese culture." The first emperor to unify China realized how important for maintaining power it was to have the people using a single common language (just as it were with the Roman Empire, compared to after its fall). The Qin dynasty despite its short reign laid the cultural foundations for generations of China (including and up to now). Before that, China was a collection of several warring states with their own written languages that the Qin dynasty immediately abolished. It allowed them to centralize administration of standards and take power from local lords to the central bureaucracy. What is happening in Hong Kong is a power play by the mainland authorities, just as it was in many instances in mainland history starting from the first emperor. My mother's family was from southern China, and relocated to Taiwan when the Communists won, my maternal grandparents' family having worked in the Kuomintang government. While my grandparents' native tongue was Cantonese, the only language my mother knows from her years in Taiwan is Mandarin (the Taiwan authorities had a strict prohibition on non-mandarin Chinese dialects).

eonwe 10y ago

This is only partially related, but I remember watching the news in the nineties and being dumbstruck on how Académie française policed the usage of language in public life. It was probably about use of Anglicisms in television or by politicians. I forgot about it for years until I learned from Wikipedia that that wasn't just a reaaction against Internet, but a policy that has been going on for centuries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vergonha So the mandarinisation doesn't seem that odd against such a background. The similar effort bore fruit in France as I think now virtually all people in France speak Parisian French compared to 12% or so at the advent of French Revolution and the following policies.

bitwize 10y ago
I learned about the Académie Française in French class (1990 or so). I thought they were guarding against anglicisms creeping in through teen slang -- "c'est too much" and that.
- macavity23 10y ago
  Also through vocabulary. 'Le weekend' (vs 'la fin de semaine') is the classic example, both of what l'academie does and how utterly (though heroically) doomed its efforts are.