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Turning character into pinyin introduces so much ambiguity and lose so much information at local level that we need to go back and forth multiple times to infer

Turning character into pinyin introduces so much ambiguity and lose so much information at local level that we need to go back and forth multiple times to infer what that word really is according to the partially parsed part of the sentence. While written sentence in character we don’t even need to do linear character by character scan, usually a glimpse of it will give you most of what you need to understand it.

mac01021 8y ago
If you include an indication of the tone along with the pinyin, doesn't it end up being just about as informative as spoken word?
- ssnistfajen 8y ago
  There are still way too many hompohones which can introduce a lot of amibiguity. Even Korean still includes Hanja to clarify technical terms in law/medicine. Modern Standard Mandarin has way fewer syllables than Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese languages which makes homophones a lore more common. Vietnamese didn't really have this problem because the phonology is a lot more complex and it shows through the written word. An example of homophones creating ambiguity: An Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated a former Japanese Prime Minister in 1909. He is often called 義士 in Korean textbooks which means "hero, man of honor". However, 義士(의사) is pronounced in the same way as 醫師(의사) which means "doctor". The Hangul spelling is identical thus it has led to many younger Koreans to think An Jung-geun was a doctor and question why would a doctor intentionally kill someone. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek joke but it shows the problem of completely detaching a writing system from a language that does not sufficiently distinguish words without context. In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. Being able to talk to each other without writing is not sufficient proof that a writing system can be abolished with minimal impact, because it ignores the fact that the writing system is what helped to dispel the ambiguity in the first place.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    > There are still way too many hompohones which can introduce a lot of amibiguity. Is this a problem when speaking? How many times a day do speakers of Chinese have to ask a collaborator which homophone they are using?
    - ssnistfajen 8y ago
      Enough times that replacing Chinese characters with a fully phonetic system will introduce more problems than it solves. Did you read the example I wrote? Homophones usually aren't a problem because most people learn things in writing first, and that provides context in speech.
      - mac01021 8y ago
        > In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. I read that, but I'm having trouble imagining how that works. Do you have an example?
        ssnistfajen 8y ago
        But I literally gave an example... "Queue" and "cue" which are homophones in English. Now imagine if there is a language reform where IPA replaces the current writing system, and both words are replaced with /kjuː/ as the only written form. "/kjuː/ the crowd" can be either "Queue the crowd" or "Cue the crowd". We are aware these two words are distinct from each other, since we learned these two words in their written form already, and in certain situations we won't have any ambiguity as to which action needs to be taken. If the reform lasts long enough that a new generation of people grows up only learning "/kjuː/" and not "queue/cue", they won't be so sure about which action is to be taken in "/kjuː/ the people" when it is presented as an isolated phrase without context. Think of a hash table that resolves hash collisions via separate chaining. The collision is when words sound the same (have the same index). Abolishing the current writing system is like dumpking the bucket contents and only returning the index. It's not an immediate problem because we still know that the bucket used to contain chained entries ("cached" in our brain memories"). Those who have never accessed the hash table (e.g. younger generations receiving education after the change) won't know what was in there before. They just know the index but not that there used to be two different data entries stored at the same index. The downside of losing information should be evident.
- FabHK 8y ago
  Sure, but written Chinese is very different from spoken Chinese. That is the case in any language, but even more so in Chinese. Much more concise. That's the problem, really - the written language would have to change (beyond switching from characters to alphabetic writing), to be closer to spoken language.
  - mac01021 8y ago
    That's interesting! Do you have a good example of a common sentence/thought/idea that is expressed with much greater concision in written chinese than spoken? Surely a basic sentence like "mingtian wo xuexi yihou qu ti zuqiu" can't really get much shorter? Hopefully that's a real sentence. I speak mandarin at something like the level of a 3-year-old kid.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      Great question. There might be better examples, but let's look at one of the most famous poems, "Thoughts in the Silent Night" [1] by Li Bai: 床前明月光，疑是地上霜。举头望明月，低头思故乡。 "Translated" word for word, it's something like Bed before bright moon shine Think be ground on frost Raise head hope bright moon Lower head think home Note that it doesn't even contain 我 ("I"). One can render it as: Beside my bed a pool of light— Is it hoarfrost on the ground? I lift my eyes and see the moon, I bend my head and think of home. Or: Before my bed, the moon shines bright; Be it frost aground? I suppose it might. I lift my head, the moon to behold, then Lower it, musing: I'm homesick tonight. Moser [2] offers these gems on Classical Chinese: "Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure." "Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway." Wikipedia says [3]: "Classical Chinese is distinguished from written vernacular Chinese in its style, which appears extremely concise and compact to modern Chinese speakers, and to some extent in the use of different lexical items (vocabulary). An essay in Classical Chinese, for example, might use half as many Chinese characters as in vernacular Chinese to relate the same content." "Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Northern Chinese varieties including Mandarin, in which two-syllable, three-syllable, and four-syllable words are extremely common." "However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, Classical Chinese can be difficult to understand by native speakers of modern Chinese, because of its heavy use of literary references and allusions as well as its extremely abbreviated style." However, I don't have a neat example at hand... Anyone? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought [2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_lexicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_...

mac01021 8y ago

If you include an indication of the tone along with the pinyin, doesn't it end up being just about as informative as spoken word?

ssnistfajen 8y ago
There are still way too many hompohones which can introduce a lot of amibiguity. Even Korean still includes Hanja to clarify technical terms in law/medicine. Modern Standard Mandarin has way fewer syllables than Middle Chinese and Southern Chinese languages which makes homophones a lore more common. Vietnamese didn't really have this problem because the phonology is a lot more complex and it shows through the written word. An example of homophones creating ambiguity: An Jung-geun was a Korean independence activist who assassinated a former Japanese Prime Minister in 1909. He is often called 義士 in Korean textbooks which means "hero, man of honor". However, 義士(의사) is pronounced in the same way as 醫師(의사) which means "doctor". The Hangul spelling is identical thus it has led to many younger Koreans to think An Jung-geun was a doctor and question why would a doctor intentionally kill someone. It's more of a tongue-in-cheek joke but it shows the problem of completely detaching a writing system from a language that does not sufficiently distinguish words without context. In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. Being able to talk to each other without writing is not sufficient proof that a writing system can be abolished with minimal impact, because it ignores the fact that the writing system is what helped to dispel the ambiguity in the first place.
- mac01021 8y ago
  > There are still way too many hompohones which can introduce a lot of amibiguity. Is this a problem when speaking? How many times a day do speakers of Chinese have to ask a collaborator which homophone they are using?
  - ssnistfajen 8y ago
    Enough times that replacing Chinese characters with a fully phonetic system will introduce more problems than it solves. Did you read the example I wrote? Homophones usually aren't a problem because most people learn things in writing first, and that provides context in speech.
    - mac01021 8y ago
      > In Chinese this is not a problem because by people usually learn this type of stuff on paper first. The additional context helps reduce the ambiguity in spoken conversation. I read that, but I'm having trouble imagining how that works. Do you have an example?
      - ssnistfajen 8y ago
        But I literally gave an example... "Queue" and "cue" which are homophones in English. Now imagine if there is a language reform where IPA replaces the current writing system, and both words are replaced with /kjuː/ as the only written form. "/kjuː/ the crowd" can be either "Queue the crowd" or "Cue the crowd". We are aware these two words are distinct from each other, since we learned these two words in their written form already, and in certain situations we won't have any ambiguity as to which action needs to be taken. If the reform lasts long enough that a new generation of people grows up only learning "/kjuː/" and not "queue/cue", they won't be so sure about which action is to be taken in "/kjuː/ the people" when it is presented as an isolated phrase without context. Think of a hash table that resolves hash collisions via separate chaining. The collision is when words sound the same (have the same index). Abolishing the current writing system is like dumpking the bucket contents and only returning the index. It's not an immediate problem because we still know that the bucket used to contain chained entries ("cached" in our brain memories"). Those who have never accessed the hash table (e.g. younger generations receiving education after the change) won't know what was in there before. They just know the index but not that there used to be two different data entries stored at the same index. The downside of losing information should be evident.
FabHK 8y ago
Sure, but written Chinese is very different from spoken Chinese. That is the case in any language, but even more so in Chinese. Much more concise. That's the problem, really - the written language would have to change (beyond switching from characters to alphabetic writing), to be closer to spoken language.
- mac01021 8y ago
  That's interesting! Do you have a good example of a common sentence/thought/idea that is expressed with much greater concision in written chinese than spoken? Surely a basic sentence like "mingtian wo xuexi yihou qu ti zuqiu" can't really get much shorter? Hopefully that's a real sentence. I speak mandarin at something like the level of a 3-year-old kid.
  - FabHK 8y ago
    Great question. There might be better examples, but let's look at one of the most famous poems, "Thoughts in the Silent Night" [1] by Li Bai: 床前明月光，疑是地上霜。举头望明月，低头思故乡。 "Translated" word for word, it's something like Bed before bright moon shine Think be ground on frost Raise head hope bright moon Lower head think home Note that it doesn't even contain 我 ("I"). One can render it as: Beside my bed a pool of light— Is it hoarfrost on the ground? I lift my eyes and see the moon, I bend my head and think of home. Or: Before my bed, the moon shines bright; Be it frost aground? I suppose it might. I lift my head, the moon to behold, then Lower it, musing: I'm homesick tonight. Moser [2] offers these gems on Classical Chinese: "Forget it. Way too difficult. If you think that after three or four years of study you'll be breezing through Confucius and Mencius in the way third-year French students at a comparable level are reading Diderot and Voltaire, you're sadly mistaken. There are some westerners who can comfortably read classical Chinese, but most of them have a lot of gray hair or at least tenure." "Whereas modern Mandarin is merely perversely hard, classical Chinese is deliberately impossible. Here's a secret that sinologists won't tell you: A passage in classical Chinese can be understood only if you already know what the passage says in the first place. This is because classical Chinese really consists of several centuries of esoteric anecdotes and in-jokes written in a kind of terse, miserly code for dissemination among a small, elite group of intellectually-inbred bookworms who already knew the whole literature backwards and forwards, anyway." Wikipedia says [3]: "Classical Chinese is distinguished from written vernacular Chinese in its style, which appears extremely concise and compact to modern Chinese speakers, and to some extent in the use of different lexical items (vocabulary). An essay in Classical Chinese, for example, might use half as many Chinese characters as in vernacular Chinese to relate the same content." "Classical Chinese rarely uses words composed of two Chinese characters; nearly all words are of one syllable only. This stands directly in contrast with modern Northern Chinese varieties including Mandarin, in which two-syllable, three-syllable, and four-syllable words are extremely common." "However, even with knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, Classical Chinese can be difficult to understand by native speakers of modern Chinese, because of its heavy use of literary references and allusions as well as its extremely abbreviated style." However, I don't have a neat example at hand... Anyone? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Night_Thought [2] http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_lexicon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese#Grammar_and_...