5 ms·

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
  It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).
  - coredog64 10y ago
    Although that is fairly mild, I've seen authors that butcher the language to indicate accents, making their work unreadable. Introduce the character, mention their accent, and move on with your life.
  - spacehunt 10y ago
    We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead of the correct "墨丸", "腩肉", "三小辣" ("cuttlefish balls", "pork belly", "3rd little spicy").
    - jonathankoren 10y ago
      In otherwords, Chinese is "misspelled" for dialect... Just like any other writing system.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    I don't know if anyone does it, but one idea might be to use different fonts to indicate accents.
  - schoen 10y ago
    Maybe you and the original commenter mean to refer to "dialect" rather than "dialog"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect
mchaver 10y ago
Generally representing dialog is not a problem. In the case that they want to represent a word/sound that does not have a character assigned to it there are a number of strategies to deal with it: romanization (pinyin), zhuyin fuhao (phonetic notation), non-standard character or pick a character with similar meaning or sound. Generally context is sufficient for native speakers to figure out what they are trying to convey.
imron 10y ago
> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice. You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.
taejo 10y ago
Other responses have shown why characters do the job just fine, and they're not wrong, but there's something to be said for phonetic literature, which is why there is Pinyin Literature contest [0]. See [1] for some more explanation. [0]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 [1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546

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
It's fairly common in English for authors to give phonetic spellings in dialog, to make things seem more "real" or to indicate accents. To pick a random line from my favorite book, "What for? You caint do nothin for it." I'm not sure if that's what OP is asking, but I'm actually curious how you would indicate the same effect (essentially, encoding nonstandard pronunciation in a comprehensible way).
- coredog64 10y ago
  Although that is fairly mild, I've seen authors that butcher the language to indicate accents, making their work unreadable. Introduce the character, mention their accent, and move on with your life.
- spacehunt 10y ago
  We usually substitute with a different sounding character which results in a non-sensible string of characters, yet still understandable (to native speakers at least) given sufficient context. As an example, we often joke about how the staff of a certain local noodle soup chain often speak in heavily accented Cantonese by writing their speech as "勿演", "懶肉", "生小辣" ("don't act", "lazy meat", "raw little spicy") instead of the correct "墨丸", "腩肉", "三小辣" ("cuttlefish balls", "pork belly", "3rd little spicy").
  - jonathankoren 10y ago
    In otherwords, Chinese is "misspelled" for dialect... Just like any other writing system.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  I don't know if anyone does it, but one idea might be to use different fonts to indicate accents.
- schoen 10y ago
  Maybe you and the original commenter mean to refer to "dialect" rather than "dialog"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eye_dialect

mchaver 10y ago

Generally representing dialog is not a problem. In the case that they want to represent a word/sound that does not have a character assigned to it there are a number of strategies to deal with it: romanization (pinyin), zhuyin fuhao (phonetic notation), non-standard character or pick a character with similar meaning or sound. Generally context is sufficient for native speakers to figure out what they are trying to convey.

imron 10y ago

> It seems like characters would give the meaning but not the voice. You'd be surprised. It's easy enough for a writer to distinguish dialog spoken by a country bumpkin vs a sophisticated urbanite or between a ruler and a peasant because they have a different set of vocab and there are Chinese characters for most of the vocab that the different speakers will use.

taejo 10y ago

Other responses have shown why characters do the job just fine, and they're not wrong, but there's something to be said for phonetic literature, which is why there is Pinyin Literature contest [0]. See [1] for some more explanation. [0]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26503 [1]: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=26546