4 ms·

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the

Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwan, many choose the Japanese variant to be "hip").

kobeya 9y ago
Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.
- hangonhn 9y ago
  Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.
  - jwfxpr 9y ago
    This gets into slightly pedantic definitional arguments, but broadly speaking the assertion is true that all known earliest writing systems were logographic (where a character represents a word, not a sound), though it is also true that no 'pure' logographia has ever been known to exist (except for an artificially constructed language called Toki Pona[1] from c.2001 that's barely worth mentioning). In practice, all known writing systems have some level of phonemic association to characters along with the ideagraphic, be it using a special subset of characters for phonetic representation or by associating the actual utterances of the words with their ideagrams. Examples of writing systems that used characters primarily to represent sounds did come later, though similarly, it is difficult to argue that any known language is purely phonetic. As a simple example in English, take '&' — though it is not a recognised letter, neither is it punctuation, and it is unarguably a glyph in the English writing system about which one could debate whether it is ideagramatic or logographic. (But I digress.) There are many types and varieties of phonetically representative writing systems — most of the earliest, like Linear B, are Syllabaries[2]. The earliest known surviving examples date from the mid-15C BCE, written forms of Mycaenian Greek[3]. Fully segmental writing systems (please distinguish 'fully' from 'purely', as elaborated above) are definitely younger than the rest. The earliest examples of these are often abjads and abugidas, which either eschew vowel representations or form consonant-vowel digraphs respectively[4]. The Phoenician alphabet, or more correctly the Proto-Canaanite script that was used by the Phoenicians, is the earliest surviving example of a segmental writing system — it is an abjad of which the earliest surviving examples are from roughly 1000BCE[5]. The earliest preserved writings that aren't just numbers date to about 3100BCE in Sumer[6], so predate preserved phonetic (excluding syllabic) writings by about 2000 years, and are in the order of 5000 and 3000 years old, respectively. So it's a big stretch to call it a 'recent invention', but certainly not as ancient as logographic or mnemonic writing systems. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek [4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida [5]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet [6]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
    - danaliv 9y ago
      & is simply a ligature of et, is it not?
      - grzm 9y ago
        Yup: > The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand
- tanilama 9y ago
  Not really, the Phoenician alphabet, which considered as origin of the writing system of many western languages created somewhere around 1200 BC. Oldest Chinese oracle script is discovered around the same time.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing goes Back much further than that, and while the alphabet has it’s origin in he Phonician sea peoples, it didn’t become widespread through Europe and Central Asia until the Greek empire a thousand years later. Alphabet like writing systems have been prominent for less than half of written history, hence recent.
tanilama 9y ago
It is the consequence of past 2 centuries' political struggle in East Asia. Written Chinese has basically 3 different standards, in Sinosphere: 1. Mainland China: Simplified Chinese. Meanwhile, contrary to most people's understanding, PRC has standardized its own Traditional Chinese writing as well, which is permitted in logo/trademark and research purposes. 2.Hongkong: Hong Kong has its own system, and plus several hundred characters that created specifically for Cantonese. 3.Taiwan: Taiwan's system has some interesting distinction in characters like 骨(bone)，which is different from both Mainland China and Hong Kong's system. Japan ever since 20 century has simplified and revolutionized its Kanji standard on its own, but unlike China, a lot of Kanjis still follows form from the old Kanxi dictionary(康熙字典). While Korea is an interesting case, where they abandoned Hanja in everyday use, so they don't even bother to simplify it, thus Korean Hanja actually follows the most orthodoxical way of writing of all the systems mentioned above.
HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
- peterburkimsher 9y ago
  The alphabets are phonetic representations, and require reading in order to type. I've made Pingtype, which lets you decompose a character into the parts, and rebuild another similar character if your handwriting recognition isn't perfect. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io
- Manishearth 9y ago
  To get even more pedantic: I wouldn't say Cangjie or Dayi inputs are an "alphabet", and a sizeable number of users use those. They're certainly a way of inputting characters; and a method of looking at how glyphs can be broken down (one by stroke order, one by shape), but for it to be an alphabet there must be a rough phoneme mapping AFAICT; which there isn't. (but yes, the majority seems to use phonetic/alphabetic input methods, i.e. pinyin or zhuyin.)
  - HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
    As a fellow pedant I made sure to use words like "almost" (:
    - Manishearth 9y ago
      Right, it's not even "almost"; I'm saying a significant number of folks use Cangjie -- not a majority; but still a large number.
jack1243star 9y ago
What? How is choosing a character variant "hip"? I know in some case Taiwanese people are influenced by the default Microsoft font MingLiU, which has some Japanese variants.
- Dylan16807 9y ago
  Giving your text some flavor from a 'cool' language can absolutely be hip.

kobeya 9y ago

Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.

hangonhn 9y ago
Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.
- jwfxpr 9y ago
  This gets into slightly pedantic definitional arguments, but broadly speaking the assertion is true that all known earliest writing systems were logographic (where a character represents a word, not a sound), though it is also true that no 'pure' logographia has ever been known to exist (except for an artificially constructed language called Toki Pona[1] from c.2001 that's barely worth mentioning). In practice, all known writing systems have some level of phonemic association to characters along with the ideagraphic, be it using a special subset of characters for phonetic representation or by associating the actual utterances of the words with their ideagrams. Examples of writing systems that used characters primarily to represent sounds did come later, though similarly, it is difficult to argue that any known language is purely phonetic. As a simple example in English, take '&' — though it is not a recognised letter, neither is it punctuation, and it is unarguably a glyph in the English writing system about which one could debate whether it is ideagramatic or logographic. (But I digress.) There are many types and varieties of phonetically representative writing systems — most of the earliest, like Linear B, are Syllabaries[2]. The earliest known surviving examples date from the mid-15C BCE, written forms of Mycaenian Greek[3]. Fully segmental writing systems (please distinguish 'fully' from 'purely', as elaborated above) are definitely younger than the rest. The earliest examples of these are often abjads and abugidas, which either eschew vowel representations or form consonant-vowel digraphs respectively[4]. The Phoenician alphabet, or more correctly the Proto-Canaanite script that was used by the Phoenicians, is the earliest surviving example of a segmental writing system — it is an abjad of which the earliest surviving examples are from roughly 1000BCE[5]. The earliest preserved writings that aren't just numbers date to about 3100BCE in Sumer[6], so predate preserved phonetic (excluding syllabic) writings by about 2000 years, and are in the order of 5000 and 3000 years old, respectively. So it's a big stretch to call it a 'recent invention', but certainly not as ancient as logographic or mnemonic writing systems. [1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona [2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B [3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek [4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida [5]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet [6]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_writing
  - danaliv 9y ago
    & is simply a ligature of et, is it not?
    - grzm 9y ago
      Yup: > The ampersand is the logogram &, representing the conjunction "and". It originated as a ligature of the letters et, Latin for "and". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ampersand
tanilama 9y ago
Not really, the Phoenician alphabet, which considered as origin of the writing system of many western languages created somewhere around 1200 BC. Oldest Chinese oracle script is discovered around the same time.
- kobeya 9y ago
  Mesopotamian and Egyptian writing goes Back much further than that, and while the alphabet has it’s origin in he Phonician sea peoples, it didn’t become widespread through Europe and Central Asia until the Greek empire a thousand years later. Alphabet like writing systems have been prominent for less than half of written history, hence recent.

tanilama 9y ago

It is the consequence of past 2 centuries' political struggle in East Asia. Written Chinese has basically 3 different standards, in Sinosphere: 1. Mainland China: Simplified Chinese. Meanwhile, contrary to most people's understanding, PRC has standardized its own Traditional Chinese writing as well, which is permitted in logo/trademark and research purposes. 2.Hongkong: Hong Kong has its own system, and plus several hundred characters that created specifically for Cantonese. 3.Taiwan: Taiwan's system has some interesting distinction in characters like 骨(bone)，which is different from both Mainland China and Hong Kong's system. Japan ever since 20 century has simplified and revolutionized its Kanji standard on its own, but unlike China, a lot of Kanjis still follows form from the old Kanxi dictionary(康熙字典). While Korea is an interesting case, where they abandoned Hanja in everyday use, so they don't even bother to simplify it, thus Korean Hanja actually follows the most orthodoxical way of writing of all the systems mentioned above.

HumanDrivenDev 9y ago

> Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. If I could be very pedantic for a moment... Mandarin can be written in many alphabets. Almost every single native speaker one earth uses an alphabet to input chinese characters on computers and phones. And almost every native speaker learns their language using an alphabet - at least initially. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanyu_pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

peterburkimsher 9y ago
The alphabets are phonetic representations, and require reading in order to type. I've made Pingtype, which lets you decompose a character into the parts, and rebuild another similar character if your handwriting recognition isn't perfect. https://pingtype.github.io https://pingtype.github.io
Manishearth 9y ago
To get even more pedantic: I wouldn't say Cangjie or Dayi inputs are an "alphabet", and a sizeable number of users use those. They're certainly a way of inputting characters; and a method of looking at how glyphs can be broken down (one by stroke order, one by shape), but for it to be an alphabet there must be a rough phoneme mapping AFAICT; which there isn't. (but yes, the majority seems to use phonetic/alphabetic input methods, i.e. pinyin or zhuyin.)
- HumanDrivenDev 9y ago
  As a fellow pedant I made sure to use words like "almost" (:
  - Manishearth 9y ago
    Right, it's not even "almost"; I'm saying a significant number of folks use Cangjie -- not a majority; but still a large number.

jack1243star 9y ago

What? How is choosing a character variant "hip"? I know in some case Taiwanese people are influenced by the default Microsoft font MingLiU, which has some Japanese variants.

Dylan16807 9y ago
Giving your text some flavor from a 'cool' language can absolutely be hip.