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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 comp

• thedz 9y 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 9y 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.
    • coldtea 9y ago
      >The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia Well the "academia" has been debunked for even longer -- especially when it comes to soft sciences, so that doesn't say much.
    • optimuspaul 9y ago
      That's a pretty arrogant statement. Can a science fiction writer not have knowledge of linguistics?
      • truthexposer 9y ago
        no, but I doubt that if I ask him what X-bar theory is, that he'll have any clue what I'm talking about, and that he would even think I'm talking about a theory of generative syntax.
        • optimuspaul 9y ago
          you make a lot of assumptions.
    • yourapostasy 9y ago
      > The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis...has been debunked for years in academia... If even the weak form Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in restricted contexts) is debunked, then I'd like to read up on it. Where can I look into that because a Google by this layperson doesn't turn up anything on it? Thanks in advance.
      • truthexposer 9y ago
        the weak form isn't debunked, but the hypothesis as a whole is debunked to a degree of being common sense, of course psychology, sociology, and anthropology may argue for stronger forms to advance their own theories, but most theories from any discipline that studies this sort of thing would agree that the influence cognition and language have on each other is not one-directional, nor are the influences very direct, and the influence that they do display on each other may be caused by some other phenomenon. tell the eskimo seeing X different kinds of snow to any linguist and they will roll their eyes, debating whether or not to explain why the example is probably not only incorrect, but fabricated for the umpteenth time.
• Analemma_ 9y ago
  Historically, there have been repeated attempts in both China and Japan to replace Chinese characters with a phonetic system (and Korea and Vietnam actually went through with it). These efforts haven't panned out, but it's demonstrably not the case that only ignorant émigrés think a phonetic system would be better.
  • lstyls 9y ago
    Pinyin Chinese is an international standard and keyboards would be basically unusable for writing Chinese characters without it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin.
    • kmicklas 9y ago
      There's lots of alternatives to Pinyin, some based on the Latin alphabet, others not like Bopomofo.
      • jwong_ 9y ago
        Not to mention any of the shape based methods like congkit
    • jwong_ 9y ago
      Besides Pinyin, there is Cangjie, Q9, Dayi, etc. Plenty of other input methods are well in use. Though Pinyin is most widespread due to it being the way most kids are taught Mandarine.
    • MagnumOpus 9y ago
      > Pinyin Chinese is an international standard A national standard, at best (in the PRC). In Taiwan, Zhuyin (Bopomofo) is universal, taught in schools and found on laptop keyboards, and romanisations are mostly following Wade-Giles rules. In Hongkong, Eitel romanisation is used even though their new commie overlords are forcing pinyin and yale canto down their kids' throats.
      • 9y ago
• yongjik 9y ago
  > ... something that is the result of being one of the oldest language families in the world. That makes no sense. If we had a time machine, we'll be able to trace every modern language back to some African tribe that became the ancestor of all modern humans. Perhaps you meant having a literary tradition that's among the oldest in the world, but even that doesn't necessarily explain why there would be so many homophones. Languages lose words all the time, even one with great literary traditions.
  • truthexposer 9y ago
    I meant the development of written languages happened independently across different regions of the world, and of course at some point, languages became mutually unintelligible, and language changes within the languages happened differently. And while of course every language descends from another, and ancient Chinese isn't understandable to a modern Chinese speaker, there is a long tradition within the Chinese language, and change within the language hasn't been shaped by things as drastic as displacement of the linguistic community, or forced political rule under a foreign power, etc.
• Banthum 9y ago
  It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component (indicating meaning). And the phonetic component often doesn't correspond to anything any modern person would know. The problem in both cases is the shift of language through China's long history, and its divergence from the original design of the written characters. The problem with the semantic components is that the meaning is re-used and stretched over and over. E.g. they used to use a 'foot' radical to represent a journey towards a destination. Later that shifted to mean "in a straight line, not veering left or right". Later that took on the meaning of "straight and narrow" or "straight shooter" or "not-deviant". Then it becomes, "not deviating from the right path". So now, the old foot radical typically means "justice" or "correct". And the image shifts over time. This is the old foot radical now: 正 Does it look like a foot to you? The problem is with the phonetics is language shifts. In many cases, in ancient Chinese, the characters do have a phonetic component that hints at pronunciation. but, the pronunciation changed over the last 2000-3000 years, so the pronunciation hint that made perfect sense in the Han dynasty is now meaningless because you're speaking a different language. The result is that in the end the characters end up being arbitrary phonetic symbols with some arbitrary meanings attached.
  • T-R 9y ago
    Practically speaking, things are more nuanced than the article would imply, though - they're not 3000 completely unique characters, and at least for a lot of nouns, the radicals do serve to broadly categorize things as, e.g. "related to water", which can serve as a reading aid similar to how root words do. The author further claims "With a phonetic writing system like an alphabet or a syllabary, you need only learn a few dozen symbols and you can read most everything printed in a newspaper.", but that's only accurate insofar as reading means "pronouncing"; it's a tradeoff with being able to infer meaning.
  • jwong_ 9y ago
    It's a myth insomuch that it doesn't apply 100% to all characters. It works well enough to guess the pronunciation of a character you've never seen. Or maybe a word you know how to say but don't know how to write.
  • blacksmith_tb 9y ago
• interfixus 9y ago
  ... a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments The world's languages, of course, developed nicely without intervention from linguistics, a latter-day mostly retrospective discipline.
• deleted 9y ago
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• bluGill 9y ago
  English needs to reform out written language as well. It isn't as bad as Chinese, but there is a reason "only two languages commonly have writing competitions: Chinese and English." (I'm not sure who to attribute this to, it isn't mine though I probably got it wrong) Spanish adults read at a 5th grade level, English adults read at a 6th grade level, Japanese adults read at a 9th grade level - this isn't a reflection of education it is a reflection on how difficult the written language is to learn. As a bad speller with a passing knowledge of Spanish I'm jealous: when I hear a Spanish word I can spell it, with English I have no clue.
  • rinze 9y ago
    Note that even in Spanish there is room for confusion (source: I'm Spanish), as in some cases it's very simple to write homophones (like vaca / baca, both valid, not related at all.) My father, who always told me he had very bad orthography, always asked me if that word started with h, or if that other was written with b / v, or g / j.
    • mbroncano 9y ago
      That's certainly the exception and not the rule
• T-R 9y ago
  > 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. Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate. [1]* [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf * Not trying to cherry-pick for Japan being at the top, but Japan's not listed in the 2015 UNESCO report that's referenced all over the place. This US DoE report from 2013 seems legitimate enough.
  • RandomOpinion 9y ago
    > Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate. While literacy might be high, there's been a stream of articles over the years in Japanese media noting that literacy in kanji (the component of Japanese based on Chinese characters) in particular has been steadily declining, even among the highly educated; e.g. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/03/national/kanji-writing-skills-go-through-changes-in-the-digital-era/ http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/03/national/kanji-w...
    • T-R 9y ago
      That's a fair point - seems related to the fact that people aren't writing as much anymore. Anecdotally, I feel like Japanese picks a better point in the tradeoff space than other languages - Chinese characters are used where they get some leverage, with phonetics for everything else, even with a bunch of half-kanji words. Still, I'd imagine some of the less-commonly used ones will get dropped over time. On the other hand, English+Emoji+Txt simplification seems to be approaching the same point from the other direction.
• DonaldFisk 9y ago
  > 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?) English is probably the worst case among alphabetic languages, but you can still usually guess the exact pronunciation of an unfamiliar word. > the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones. But still Chinese speakers make themselves understood without difficulty, even over the telephone. Most Chinese words are polysyllabic. Taking that into account, homophones are rarer than you might think. There's a language+, Dungan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which is to some extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin. It's written entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet without diacritics to indicate tone. Sample text: http://www.omniglot.com/babel/dungan.htm http://www.omniglot.com/babel/dungan.htm + You could call it a dialect, but it has its own script.
• malandrew 9y ago
  How does Chinese handle the propagation of neologisms? A rough 1:1 phonetic correspondence between oral and written languages intuitively (to me at least) would be more fit for the creation and propagation of news words, or am I missing some other natural form of conveyance and propagation that exists in the Chinese writing system?
  • contravert 9y ago
    It's actually extremely easy to create new words using Chinese characters. You simply put existing characters together. To use some computing related terms for example: mobile phone: 手机 （hand machine) programming: 编程 （compose orders) QR code: 二维码 （2d code) hacker: 黑客 （black guest, this also sounds phonetically like "hacker") For brands and other names, there is a system of transliterating sounds using characters, or simply a literal translation of the name, e.g. Android: 安卓 (an zhuo) Microsoft: 微软 （small soft) Apple: 苹果 （literally apple)
    • jarboot 9y ago
      Note that what the author said was "danger plus oppertunity" for the word for crisis -- 危机 -- shares the same last character as 手机。 While easy to compose and sometimes understand, it's not as simple as the author implied.
• contravert 9y ago
  I agree with you. The author even admits right off the bad that he failed to learn the language. I don't understand the mindset of someone who would write an article critiquing Chinese characters, knowing so little about them. If the author can be taken this seriously given his self-professed ignorance, I am probably much more qualified than him to speak about Chinese characters. There are two points worth disambiguating here. One is whether Chinese characters hinder the literacy of native speakers and the other is if it hinders that for learners. Neither I nor the author have any authority to speak about the former. As a heritage speaker, I actually only recently learned Chinese to a level where I consider myself literate. My experience was that the characters were not an obstacle, like the author suggests, but an indispensable tool for rapidly learning the language. To learn any language, it is unavoidable that you need to memorize thousands of new words. Memorizing a Chinese character is not much harder than memorizing a word. However, the magic of Chinese characters comes when you combine them to form actual words. The vast majority of Chinese words consists of 2 characters, but because each character also encodes meaning, you can more often than not guess the meaning of a word you have never seen before. Although you can take advantage of common roots for words in other languages, the scale is simply incomparable. For other languages, you pretty much have to memorize every new word you see. My experience has been that learning Chinese characters may be a higher upfront cost (although I disagree), once you learn enough, you rapidly understand way more vocabulary because characters themselves encode semantic information. Perhaps it's simply the lack of any cognates between English and Chinese, and a tinge of cultural supremacy, that make people, like the author, think it's Chinese characters that's the root of everything that makes the language difficult to learn.
  • rspeer 9y ago
    The fact that Chinese characters hinder literacy is frequently discussed by linguist and Sinologist Victor Mair on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=18 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=18 Your reaction would be reasonable if someone had claimed that a particular spoken language was hard to learn. Spoken languages are all equally easy, because they are all learned by children in a few years. But written languages can be arbitrarily difficult, and in Chinese, people with post-graduate educations will often forget how to write common words. This is not cultural supremacy. This is linguistics.