11 ms·

Bad Character: If Chinese Were Phonetic

81 points by bemmu 10y ago

sparky_z 10y ago
Is it just me, or does this essay seem to be missing an introduction, like someone accidentally deleted the first few paragraphs? I initially assumed I had been linked to "page 2" and went looking for a link back to the beginning. Edit: Apparently, this is part of a series where guest authors are invited to choose something to "uninvent" and explains why they think it has had a negative impact on the world. The essay's abrupt beginning makes much more sense in that context.
- Jtsummers 10y ago
  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-this http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-this For more of the series.
  - tlb 10y ago
    This one is great: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-dancing http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-dancing
    - Jtsummers 10y ago
      I enjoyed it, but disagreed with it, but I actually enjoy dancing (ballroom primarily). The one I actually agreed with was the high heels one. Both my current and previous girlfriends insist on wearing heels most of the time, to the detriment of their health. My previous girlfriend could essentially not run anymore because of it, and the current girlfriend has chronic foot pain. I've banned (which is weird, I don't like saying that versus "asked", but I gave up on asking) her from wearing them on occasion because she needed to rest her feet/legs. Lasts about a week and then she's back in them. She's even had to go in for PT for a few weeks out of each year because of it. My ex had grown so used to them that she pretty much always walked on tiptoes (like a kid toe-walking). She found flats and similar shoes very uncomfortable to wear anymore.
      - keithpeter 10y ago
        Most of the ladies in my life wear what we in England call sensible shoes, however most will wear heels on special social occasions. A podiatry lecturer that I briefly worked with used to give a superb short illustrated lecture on the importance of your heel and its role in walking and in maintaining blood circulation in the leg. He had side swipes at high-heels in the process. Perhaps there is stuff online?
    - pavel_lishin 10y ago
      A great read, with awesome quotes, but I wish it had been "ban social pressure to do things you don't enjoy doing." "Come on, just dance for a little bit, you'll like it!" "Rollercoasters are fun, trust me, this one is great!" "Why won't you come eat Ramen with us, we know a great Ramen place! Don't be such a killjoy."
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        Do people really pressure other people into eating? In my group(s), it's always "I'll come for the company, but I'm not hungry", and that's fine. People don't have to be putting stuff in their face to keep you company.
      - CrystalLangUser 10y ago
        You don't have to go to a place and eat... It's possible to go somewhere and just enjoy the company.
failrate 10y ago
It is the intense educational requirements of the Chinese character system that led to the development of Hangul-am, the Korean character system. You still end up with a similar block structure, but it is phonetic and has about the same number of components as there are letters in the English alphabet.
- pqhwan 10y ago
  It may be misleading to call it a "similar block structure". The structure may have been inspired by the way chinese characters are composited to form new ones, but it's really just a way of chunking phonetic letters into syllabic units.
- smilekzs 10y ago
  That might be true, but an (perhaps more) important reason is literally the first 8 (chinese) characters in Hunminjeongeum [1], translated as follows: > Because the speech of this country is different from that of China, it [the spoken language] does not match the [Chinese] letters. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum
  - failrate 10y ago
    Yes, nationalism is an important consideration. I did not consider that in my opinion. I will now freely admit that there are probably other good reasons I have not considered. Thank you for the reference.
gumby 10y ago
>Imagine a world in which written English had changed so little that works of “Beowulf”’s era remained continuously readable for the past twelve hundred years. This works with an alphabetic system: in Iceland kids read the sagas in school.
- waqf 10y ago
  And in fact, written English has changed very little in the past five hundred years or so: it's easy to read Shakespeare and not too hard to read Chaucer, although their pronunciation would have been considerably different. Before that period there was a much greater rate of change in the written language.
  - douche 10y ago
    Aside from the spelling, Chaucer really is not too bad. I must have had to read a really, really abysmal treatment in school, because I did not remember the Canterbury Tales rhyming at all... http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm
- mbroncano 10y ago
  Spanish speakers usually read them too [1] around 6th grade and onwards. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantar_de_Mio_Cid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantar_de_Mio_Cid
phillryu 10y ago
One of my favorite Ted Chiang short stories also explores how much is shaped by our language: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...
mdturnerphys 10y ago
For those unaware, Ted Chiang wrote the short story that the 2016 film Arrival was based on.
lstyls 10y ago
Color me shocked that somehow the author found the alphabet of his native language to be superior. This article takes as a given some assumptions that I don't understand at all. China being resistant to change? There are few cohesive societies that I can think of that have experienced more change than China since the end of WWII. And it would be an understatement to say that the rise of literacy rates are more strongly correlated with industrialization than adoption of phonetic alphabets. I think it's telling that the author grew up in a Chinese-American community. Expat communities tend to lag their mother cultures in terms of social progress. An experience growing up in a community could explain this "steeped in tradition" characteristic that is attributed to Chinese culture here. Disclaimer: I'm a white American. My wife is Chinese and emigrated herself from China as a young adult; I get a lot of my perspective from her. Would be interested to hear what Chinese members of HN think of the article.
- phaed 10y ago
  Shocked that a man with a Chinese wife is shocked.
  - lstyls 10y ago
    Care to add anything to the conversation, or are you just here to stereotype?
- jbooth 10y ago
  As far as "change" and "cohesive society", it's possible that the only reason that the Chinese have a 2500-year-old cohesive society is because of initial resistance to change. How else can you have one "society" across a dozen dynasties, from the ancient world through the medieval world to the modern one? It's a lot harder to claim that some old druids or even the anglo-saxons are the same society as modern british-descended english speakers.
  - allemagne 10y ago
    Is the reason there hasn't been a comparable continuous European society for 2500 years really because druids/anglo-saxons had a society that was more open to change? I'd argue not. I would also argue that China's "5000 years of uninterrupted continuous society" is less continuous and uninterrupted than might be implied here. The concept of "China" is more or less a modern, retroactive, political invention, somewhat comparable to identifying the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Empire as a continuous entity. There is a shared heritage, writing system, and some overlapping territory -- just like Chinese dynasties. If the Habsbugs did a better job of consolidating and expanding their control of the continent in the sixteenth century then maybe we would talk about the continuous, unbroken Roman society. The metaphor is far from perfect, but I hope my point is clear. The difference between a continuous civilization and whatever the alternative would be called is, in my opinion, just a matter of our perception and a few historical happenstances.
truthexposer 10y ago
I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments. First, literacy isn't completely related to the writing system. Look at Spanish speaking countries, where the alphabet is more phonetic than the English alphabet. Second, Chinese characters that are more complex, i.e. consists of more than one radical, are usually composed with a semantic component, giving indication to the character's meaning, and a phonetic component, which gives an indication to the sound of the character. Although this isn't a rule, it helps a lot, and it's not like English doesn't have crazy non-phonetic spellings as well (how tf is "through" supposed to be pronounced for a English learner?) Last, the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and not one out of design, but something that is the result of being one of the oldest language families in the world. It allows for the concise expression of many things using only single syllables. You might say, but what about the crazy amount of ambiguity if the language has a lot of homophones? Well, ambiguity is a huge problem in all languages and our brains seem to manage. Now, even though homophones aren't a big problem in spoken language, because of intonation and prosody giving a clue to how to analyze sentences, written language is a different story, and it would be very hard to make an easier system to handle it. For all you engineers, the fact that Chinese has characters is essentially a performance trade off. More information density for more ambiguity.
- thedz 10y ago
  > I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments. FWIW, I think Ted Chiang (author of Story of Your Life that Arrival was based on) knows a decent amount on linguistics. At this point, Chinese characters aren't going to go anyhere. But I think it's an interesting thought experiment to puzzle through.
  - truthexposer 10y ago
    No, he has opinions on language, not knowledge of linguistics. He is a science fiction writer. It's an actual academic discipline, you know, not just people harumphing in armchairs. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia, and the movie, if detached from that hypothesis, is more of a thought experiment on the effect of the linearity of time on human thought than a thought experiment on anything related to language itself.
thedz 10y ago
For context, to forestall some knee jerk reactions I'm seeing: 1. This essay is part of a series, where guest authors are explicitly asked to "uninvent" something. So there's a level of built-in hot take to this. 2. The author is Ted Chiang, writer of Story of Your Life (and the work that the movie Arrival was based on). He's explored how language affects how we think before (Story of Your Life/Arrival is explicitly about this). So this kind of falls in line with that. Anyway, I think this is a fascinating thought experiment to work through. What would China be like with a phonetic system? What would change? How much of the culture is derived from the method of language and how much from other factors?
yongjik 10y ago
FWIW, I like Jared Diamond's thesis better, which is that the geography of China (a big habitable landmass with no sizable peninsulas or isolated areas) made a single political entity inevitable. It probably explains why the Chinese culture has more emphasis on tradition (if that is true, I mean): you can more easily identify yourself with your ancestors from 500 BC, because they are all Chinese. A Spaniard would have a harder time identifying with Celts, Romans, or Moors.
- mbroncano 10y ago
  I mostly agree: 500 BC might be a tad too remote in time, but while risking being pedantic, Spaniards do identify themselves with Moors [1] or Romans [2] often, in most traditions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos [2] http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/agenda/fiestas/murcia/fiestas_de_carthagineses_y_romanos.html http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/agenda/fiestas/murci...
kmicklas 10y ago
Some linguists (mostly Western) have advocated transitioning to a mixed system of characters and pinyin. I don't think that will ever happen because an uglier and less harmonious writing system could not possibly be devised. Chinese would be much better off with something syllabic and square, like Hangul. With some amount of fiddling I think it could be made to work for most of the different Chinese languages and potentially even elucidate cognates between them, retaining one of the main benefits of characters.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
wsxcde 10y ago
As someone who knows a bunch of different scripts (Perso-Arabic/Urdu, Brahmi-based scripts like Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and obviously the Roman script), scripts do make a difference. Yes, a lousy script isn't a fatal impediment. You can produce beautiful literature even with a poorly-designed script. And I suspect script complexity is only weakly correlated to literacy. Learning to read involves a lot more than recognizing characters and words. But a bad script definitely adds a layer of confusion that is completely unnecessary and ends up creating an elitist and cumbersome language. The standard counterpoint to complaints about scripts is some form of whataboutism involving English. Yes, English is not remotely phonetic, but the modern form of the Roman script for English is actually pretty decent. It has a lot of visual differentiation between different letters. Compare this to Persian and Arabic where the placement of a dot or three makes all the difference between wildly different sounds. The Roman script also has relatively few letters. This comes at the cost of ambiguity, and we need to make up sequences for certain sounds (th, sh, ch), but also means the learning curve is a lot less steep. Persian and Arabic have the huge mess involving initial, medial, final and standalone forms of a letter -- it serves no purpose really. Brahmi-based scripts are all abugidas which means vowels are folded into adjoining consonants and so you need to learn about 4X as many symbols as English. You do have to guess what a letter sounds like in English (g,j,k,c). But this is also pretty common. Tamil doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants. This is an unnecessary annoyance. A much worse example is of Persian, Arabic and Urdu where the script allows one to drop a lot of vowels. This is especially bad for Urdu. For example, the Hindustani words for here (idhar) and there (udhar) are written identically in Urdu, so you need to "backtrack" to fill-in vowels appropriately based on the rest of the sentence. Yes, English isn't phonetic, and is unstructured and unsystematic. But it is still a pretty decent script compared to some of the others out there. From an Indian perspective, I wish we could move to one script -- perhaps some variant of Devanagari for all our languages. There's really little purpose in differentiating between Gurmukhi and Devanagari. And we should just forget about Urdu all together. It made sense when the goal was to teach people one script that gave them access to both Hindustani and the official court languages of Persian/Arabic. But for today, Devanagari is vastly superior for writing any dialect of Hindustani. Similarly, Kannada has an almost bijective mapping to Devanagari, but each symbol in Kannada is just so much more elaborate and a pain to write. Life would be much better with one script. Bring up changing scripts though and people -- and this appears to be a global phenomenon -- just go nuts! People need to realize that changing scripts isn't a terrible thing and has occurred many times for many languages. We're not going to forget our languages/culture just because we choose to change the symbols we use in writing.
warlox 10y ago
> smartphones are impossible to use if you’re restricted to Chinese characters This isn't actually true. Handwriting recognition is much more popular than any other means of text input in Hong Kong.
Nadya 10y ago
>I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese characters—that they’re like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger” plus “opportunity.” That, at least, would be a relief. But... they are? They're ideograms and there is at least some reasoning to many of them. Things written with a part of "fire" tend to have a relation to..well...fire and heat. 火, 烧炊. You might see the relation 秋 shares with fire. But don't fall into the trap that it is 100% consistent because you'd be wrong about 約. And the last statement isn't even (technically) wrong. I'm not sure if the Chinese word is the same [0] but for Japanese it is 危機. With individual readings of "danger" and "opportunity" although a more reasonable 1-to-1 equation would be "danger" and "occasion". A crisis is a dangerous occasion. 機 happens to have several meanings and one of those is "opportunity". It is probably intentionally misleading but not incorrect to say it is danger + occasion. You can't have your cake and eat it too. For most compound words the individual meanings of the hanzi/kanji are very relevant - maybe not always relevant but more often than not. [0] Google Translate tells me it is, so my confidence is >0% but not by much.
- gizmo686 10y ago
  Most of the time (In Japanese, at least), the Kanji do not map to meaning per-se, but to roots. For example, in English, we have words like "lap-top", "uni-cycle", "roof-top", "blue-berry", that clearly have multiple semantic components within them. In these cases, in Japanese, the words would be written with the kanji for their roots. In more linguistic terms, the kanjis often refer to morphemes, not ideas. There are some exceptions. For example, in Japanese, today (kyou) is written as "今日”, even though it is a single morpheme. In cases such as this the kanji are used for their meanings. In cases such as this, is is not clear how much the kanji actually help, because the sementic information provided is precisly the information that you would get from knowing the roots, and you (or rather a native speaker) does not have to be taught roots (or at least those roots that still have semantic meaning).
  - Nadya 10y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by separating "meaning" from "roots". To myself they are one in the same (the root word or a meaning of the root "word", there is no difference in my opinion). Could you provide some examples of what you mean? Maybe I'm thinking too literally or you meant "root" (as in radicals) different from "root" (as in root word). 「自転車」, 「図書館」, 「作家」, 「日光」,「棋士」. You even have witty ones like 「親子丼」. Just have to be careful about ones like 「多少」. The reason I would say not to rely on such literal meanings to define words is because some require some stretch of the imagination like「子宮」 and my rule of thumb is if it it requires a stretch of the imagination it's because it doesn't actually mean that. But literal translations can still be useful as mnemonics to learn new words/kanji. Like a pair of training wheels that eventually get removed.
divbit 10y ago
I think in a software startup mindset it could be easy to think that more efficient => better, but a point not mentioned in the essay is that written Chinese is simply beautiful compared to e.g., the simple 26 character alphabet, which is quicker to learn. This also applies to some of the other alphabets such as Hindi, Arabic, etc. But Chinese has so many characters, it really shines.

81 points by bemmu 10y ago

Is it just me, or does this essay seem to be missing an introduction, like someone accidentally deleted the first few paragraphs? I initially assumed I had been linked to "page 2" and went looking for a link back to the beginning. Edit: Apparently, this is part of a series where guest authors are invited to choose something to "uninvent" and explains why they think it has had a negative impact on the world. The essay's abrupt beginning makes much more sense in that context.

Jtsummers 10y ago
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-this http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-this For more of the series.
- tlb 10y ago
  This one is great: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-dancing http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-dancing
  - Jtsummers 10y ago
    I enjoyed it, but disagreed with it, but I actually enjoy dancing (ballroom primarily). The one I actually agreed with was the high heels one. Both my current and previous girlfriends insist on wearing heels most of the time, to the detriment of their health. My previous girlfriend could essentially not run anymore because of it, and the current girlfriend has chronic foot pain. I've banned (which is weird, I don't like saying that versus "asked", but I gave up on asking) her from wearing them on occasion because she needed to rest her feet/legs. Lasts about a week and then she's back in them. She's even had to go in for PT for a few weeks out of each year because of it. My ex had grown so used to them that she pretty much always walked on tiptoes (like a kid toe-walking). She found flats and similar shoes very uncomfortable to wear anymore.
    - keithpeter 10y ago
      Most of the ladies in my life wear what we in England call sensible shoes, however most will wear heels on special social occasions. A podiatry lecturer that I briefly worked with used to give a superb short illustrated lecture on the importance of your heel and its role in walking and in maintaining blood circulation in the leg. He had side swipes at high-heels in the process. Perhaps there is stuff online?
  - pavel_lishin 10y ago
    A great read, with awesome quotes, but I wish it had been "ban social pressure to do things you don't enjoy doing." "Come on, just dance for a little bit, you'll like it!" "Rollercoasters are fun, trust me, this one is great!" "Why won't you come eat Ramen with us, we know a great Ramen place! Don't be such a killjoy."
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Do people really pressure other people into eating? In my group(s), it's always "I'll come for the company, but I'm not hungry", and that's fine. People don't have to be putting stuff in their face to keep you company.
    - CrystalLangUser 10y ago
      You don't have to go to a place and eat... It's possible to go somewhere and just enjoy the company.

failrate 10y ago

It is the intense educational requirements of the Chinese character system that led to the development of Hangul-am, the Korean character system. You still end up with a similar block structure, but it is phonetic and has about the same number of components as there are letters in the English alphabet.

pqhwan 10y ago
It may be misleading to call it a "similar block structure". The structure may have been inspired by the way chinese characters are composited to form new ones, but it's really just a way of chunking phonetic letters into syllabic units.
smilekzs 10y ago
That might be true, but an (perhaps more) important reason is literally the first 8 (chinese) characters in Hunminjeongeum [1], translated as follows: > Because the speech of this country is different from that of China, it [the spoken language] does not match the [Chinese] letters. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum
- failrate 10y ago
  Yes, nationalism is an important consideration. I did not consider that in my opinion. I will now freely admit that there are probably other good reasons I have not considered. Thank you for the reference.

gumby 10y ago

>Imagine a world in which written English had changed so little that works of “Beowulf”’s era remained continuously readable for the past twelve hundred years. This works with an alphabetic system: in Iceland kids read the sagas in school.

waqf 10y ago
And in fact, written English has changed very little in the past five hundred years or so: it's easy to read Shakespeare and not too hard to read Chaucer, although their pronunciation would have been considerably different. Before that period there was a much greater rate of change in the written language.
- douche 10y ago
  Aside from the spelling, Chaucer really is not too bad. I must have had to read a really, really abysmal treatment in school, because I did not remember the Canterbury Tales rhyming at all... http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm
mbroncano 10y ago
Spanish speakers usually read them too [1] around 6th grade and onwards. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantar_de_Mio_Cid https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantar_de_Mio_Cid

phillryu 10y ago

One of my favorite Ted Chiang short stories also explores how much is shaped by our language: http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...

mdturnerphys 10y ago

For those unaware, Ted Chiang wrote the short story that the 2016 film Arrival was based on.

lstyls 10y ago

Color me shocked that somehow the author found the alphabet of his native language to be superior. This article takes as a given some assumptions that I don't understand at all. China being resistant to change? There are few cohesive societies that I can think of that have experienced more change than China since the end of WWII. And it would be an understatement to say that the rise of literacy rates are more strongly correlated with industrialization than adoption of phonetic alphabets. I think it's telling that the author grew up in a Chinese-American community. Expat communities tend to lag their mother cultures in terms of social progress. An experience growing up in a community could explain this "steeped in tradition" characteristic that is attributed to Chinese culture here. Disclaimer: I'm a white American. My wife is Chinese and emigrated herself from China as a young adult; I get a lot of my perspective from her. Would be interested to hear what Chinese members of HN think of the article.

phaed 10y ago
Shocked that a man with a Chinese wife is shocked.
- lstyls 10y ago
  Care to add anything to the conversation, or are you just here to stereotype?
jbooth 10y ago
As far as "change" and "cohesive society", it's possible that the only reason that the Chinese have a 2500-year-old cohesive society is because of initial resistance to change. How else can you have one "society" across a dozen dynasties, from the ancient world through the medieval world to the modern one? It's a lot harder to claim that some old druids or even the anglo-saxons are the same society as modern british-descended english speakers.
- allemagne 10y ago
  Is the reason there hasn't been a comparable continuous European society for 2500 years really because druids/anglo-saxons had a society that was more open to change? I'd argue not. I would also argue that China's "5000 years of uninterrupted continuous society" is less continuous and uninterrupted than might be implied here. The concept of "China" is more or less a modern, retroactive, political invention, somewhat comparable to identifying the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Empire as a continuous entity. There is a shared heritage, writing system, and some overlapping territory -- just like Chinese dynasties. If the Habsbugs did a better job of consolidating and expanding their control of the continent in the sixteenth century then maybe we would talk about the continuous, unbroken Roman society. The metaphor is far from perfect, but I hope my point is clear. The difference between a continuous civilization and whatever the alternative would be called is, in my opinion, just a matter of our perception and a few historical happenstances.

truthexposer 10y ago

I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments. First, literacy isn't completely related to the writing system. Look at Spanish speaking countries, where the alphabet is more phonetic than the English alphabet. Second, Chinese characters that are more complex, i.e. consists of more than one radical, are usually composed with a semantic component, giving indication to the character's meaning, and a phonetic component, which gives an indication to the sound of the character. Although this isn't a rule, it helps a lot, and it's not like English doesn't have crazy non-phonetic spellings as well (how tf is "through" supposed to be pronounced for a English learner?) Last, the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and not one out of design, but something that is the result of being one of the oldest language families in the world. It allows for the concise expression of many things using only single syllables. You might say, but what about the crazy amount of ambiguity if the language has a lot of homophones? Well, ambiguity is a huge problem in all languages and our brains seem to manage. Now, even though homophones aren't a big problem in spoken language, because of intonation and prosody giving a clue to how to analyze sentences, written language is a different story, and it would be very hard to make an easier system to handle it. For all you engineers, the fact that Chinese has characters is essentially a performance trade off. More information density for more ambiguity.

thedz 10y ago
> I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments. FWIW, I think Ted Chiang (author of Story of Your Life that Arrival was based on) knows a decent amount on linguistics. At this point, Chinese characters aren't going to go anyhere. But I think it's an interesting thought experiment to puzzle through.
- truthexposer 10y ago
  No, he has opinions on language, not knowledge of linguistics. He is a science fiction writer. It's an actual academic discipline, you know, not just people harumphing in armchairs. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia, and the movie, if detached from that hypothesis, is more of a thought experiment on the effect of the linearity of time on human thought than a thought experiment on anything related to language itself.

thedz 10y ago

For context, to forestall some knee jerk reactions I'm seeing: 1. This essay is part of a series, where guest authors are explicitly asked to "uninvent" something. So there's a level of built-in hot take to this. 2. The author is Ted Chiang, writer of Story of Your Life (and the work that the movie Arrival was based on). He's explored how language affects how we think before (Story of Your Life/Arrival is explicitly about this). So this kind of falls in line with that. Anyway, I think this is a fascinating thought experiment to work through. What would China be like with a phonetic system? What would change? How much of the culture is derived from the method of language and how much from other factors?

yongjik 10y ago

FWIW, I like Jared Diamond's thesis better, which is that the geography of China (a big habitable landmass with no sizable peninsulas or isolated areas) made a single political entity inevitable. It probably explains why the Chinese culture has more emphasis on tradition (if that is true, I mean): you can more easily identify yourself with your ancestors from 500 BC, because they are all Chinese. A Spaniard would have a harder time identifying with Celts, Romans, or Moors.

mbroncano 10y ago
I mostly agree: 500 BC might be a tad too remote in time, but while risking being pedantic, Spaniards do identify themselves with Moors [1] or Romans [2] often, in most traditions. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos [2] http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/agenda/fiestas/murcia/fiestas_de_carthagineses_y_romanos.html http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-quieres/agenda/fiestas/murci...

kmicklas 10y ago

Some linguists (mostly Western) have advocated transitioning to a mixed system of characters and pinyin. I don't think that will ever happen because an uglier and less harmonious writing system could not possibly be devised. Chinese would be much better off with something syllabic and square, like Hangul. With some amount of fiddling I think it could be made to work for most of the different Chinese languages and potentially even elucidate cognates between them, retaining one of the main benefits of characters.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

wsxcde 10y ago

As someone who knows a bunch of different scripts (Perso-Arabic/Urdu, Brahmi-based scripts like Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and obviously the Roman script), scripts do make a difference. Yes, a lousy script isn't a fatal impediment. You can produce beautiful literature even with a poorly-designed script. And I suspect script complexity is only weakly correlated to literacy. Learning to read involves a lot more than recognizing characters and words. But a bad script definitely adds a layer of confusion that is completely unnecessary and ends up creating an elitist and cumbersome language. The standard counterpoint to complaints about scripts is some form of whataboutism involving English. Yes, English is not remotely phonetic, but the modern form of the Roman script for English is actually pretty decent. It has a lot of visual differentiation between different letters. Compare this to Persian and Arabic where the placement of a dot or three makes all the difference between wildly different sounds. The Roman script also has relatively few letters. This comes at the cost of ambiguity, and we need to make up sequences for certain sounds (th, sh, ch), but also means the learning curve is a lot less steep. Persian and Arabic have the huge mess involving initial, medial, final and standalone forms of a letter -- it serves no purpose really. Brahmi-based scripts are all abugidas which means vowels are folded into adjoining consonants and so you need to learn about 4X as many symbols as English. You do have to guess what a letter sounds like in English (g,j,k,c). But this is also pretty common. Tamil doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced consonants. This is an unnecessary annoyance. A much worse example is of Persian, Arabic and Urdu where the script allows one to drop a lot of vowels. This is especially bad for Urdu. For example, the Hindustani words for here (idhar) and there (udhar) are written identically in Urdu, so you need to "backtrack" to fill-in vowels appropriately based on the rest of the sentence. Yes, English isn't phonetic, and is unstructured and unsystematic. But it is still a pretty decent script compared to some of the others out there. From an Indian perspective, I wish we could move to one script -- perhaps some variant of Devanagari for all our languages. There's really little purpose in differentiating between Gurmukhi and Devanagari. And we should just forget about Urdu all together. It made sense when the goal was to teach people one script that gave them access to both Hindustani and the official court languages of Persian/Arabic. But for today, Devanagari is vastly superior for writing any dialect of Hindustani. Similarly, Kannada has an almost bijective mapping to Devanagari, but each symbol in Kannada is just so much more elaborate and a pain to write. Life would be much better with one script. Bring up changing scripts though and people -- and this appears to be a global phenomenon -- just go nuts! People need to realize that changing scripts isn't a terrible thing and has occurred many times for many languages. We're not going to forget our languages/culture just because we choose to change the symbols we use in writing.

warlox 10y ago

> smartphones are impossible to use if you’re restricted to Chinese characters This isn't actually true. Handwriting recognition is much more popular than any other means of text input in Hong Kong.

Nadya 10y ago

>I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about Chinese characters—that they’re like little pictures, that they represent ideas directly, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger” plus “opportunity.” That, at least, would be a relief. But... they are? They're ideograms and there is at least some reasoning to many of them. Things written with a part of "fire" tend to have a relation to..well...fire and heat. 火, 烧炊. You might see the relation 秋 shares with fire. But don't fall into the trap that it is 100% consistent because you'd be wrong about 約. And the last statement isn't even (technically) wrong. I'm not sure if the Chinese word is the same [0] but for Japanese it is 危機. With individual readings of "danger" and "opportunity" although a more reasonable 1-to-1 equation would be "danger" and "occasion". A crisis is a dangerous occasion. 機 happens to have several meanings and one of those is "opportunity". It is probably intentionally misleading but not incorrect to say it is danger + occasion. You can't have your cake and eat it too. For most compound words the individual meanings of the hanzi/kanji are very relevant - maybe not always relevant but more often than not. [0] Google Translate tells me it is, so my confidence is >0% but not by much.

gizmo686 10y ago
Most of the time (In Japanese, at least), the Kanji do not map to meaning per-se, but to roots. For example, in English, we have words like "lap-top", "uni-cycle", "roof-top", "blue-berry", that clearly have multiple semantic components within them. In these cases, in Japanese, the words would be written with the kanji for their roots. In more linguistic terms, the kanjis often refer to morphemes, not ideas. There are some exceptions. For example, in Japanese, today (kyou) is written as "今日”, even though it is a single morpheme. In cases such as this the kanji are used for their meanings. In cases such as this, is is not clear how much the kanji actually help, because the sementic information provided is precisly the information that you would get from knowing the roots, and you (or rather a native speaker) does not have to be taught roots (or at least those roots that still have semantic meaning).
- Nadya 10y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by separating "meaning" from "roots". To myself they are one in the same (the root word or a meaning of the root "word", there is no difference in my opinion). Could you provide some examples of what you mean? Maybe I'm thinking too literally or you meant "root" (as in radicals) different from "root" (as in root word). 「自転車」, 「図書館」, 「作家」, 「日光」,「棋士」. You even have witty ones like 「親子丼」. Just have to be careful about ones like 「多少」. The reason I would say not to rely on such literal meanings to define words is because some require some stretch of the imagination like「子宮」 and my rule of thumb is if it it requires a stretch of the imagination it's because it doesn't actually mean that. But literal translations can still be useful as mnemonics to learn new words/kanji. Like a pair of training wheels that eventually get removed.

divbit 10y ago

I think in a software startup mindset it could be easy to think that more efficient => better, but a point not mentioned in the essay is that written Chinese is simply beautiful compared to e.g., the simple 26 character alphabet, which is quicker to learn. This also applies to some of the other alphabets such as Hindi, Arabic, etc. But Chinese has so many characters, it really shines.