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> I meant was a phonetic system could be used in all ways contemporary spoken Mandarin is currently used without getting too tripped up by homophones. Except p

by knolax 8y ago

> I meant was a phonetic system could be used in all ways contemporary spoken Mandarin is currently used without getting too tripped up by homophones. Except phonetic writing systems are aren't even capable of representing Chinese names correctly. I think you're underestimating the extent to which homophones are prevalent in Chinese. It's not just classical texts, it's all written texts and most non-trivial spoken words, including names. The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are only a syllable long, and have up to hundreds of homophones. Unlike most European languages, Chinese names do not all come from a fixed list like "John. Mary, Jane, etc..." and are instead constructed directly from morphemes. The result is that whenever you encounter a Chinese name transliterated phonetically in any system, there is no deterministic way of converting it back into Chinese without ambiguity.

tivert 8y ago
> I think you're underestimating the extent to which homophones are prevalent in Chinese. It's not just classical texts, it's all written texts and most non-trivial spoken words, including names. The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are only a syllable long, and have up to hundreds of homophones. I guess my question is how much of a problem are these in spoken communication (say over a telephone where there's less shared situational context)? My intuition is that if the prevalence of homophones were so troublesome to make a phonetic writing system difficult/impractical to use, they'd also make spoken telephone conversations similarly difficult/impractical. Since Chinese people can obviously speak productively on the telephone, then there must be enough context in the phoneme-stream that it's sufficient to effectively communicate without the extra context provided by the characters. That's not to say the characters don't provide an extra layer of depth and subtlety to written text over phonetic writing.
- knolax 8y ago
  > an extra layer of depth I think that's the best way to put it. Like you intuited, a phonetic system is perfectly capable of writing down spoken conversations, but without as much context as a spoken conversation it's going to get more confusing. For example, he she and it in Chinese are all pronounced "tā", but are written as 他，她， and 它 respectively in Chinese. In fact it's common to write "ta" as an equivalent to xhe/xer/xem.

by knolax 8y ago

tivert 8y ago

> I think you're underestimating the extent to which homophones are prevalent in Chinese. It's not just classical texts, it's all written texts and most non-trivial spoken words, including names. The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are only a syllable long, and have up to hundreds of homophones. I guess my question is how much of a problem are these in spoken communication (say over a telephone where there's less shared situational context)? My intuition is that if the prevalence of homophones were so troublesome to make a phonetic writing system difficult/impractical to use, they'd also make spoken telephone conversations similarly difficult/impractical. Since Chinese people can obviously speak productively on the telephone, then there must be enough context in the phoneme-stream that it's sufficient to effectively communicate without the extra context provided by the characters. That's not to say the characters don't provide an extra layer of depth and subtlety to written text over phonetic writing.

knolax 8y ago
> an extra layer of depth I think that's the best way to put it. Like you intuited, a phonetic system is perfectly capable of writing down spoken conversations, but without as much context as a spoken conversation it's going to get more confusing. For example, he she and it in Chinese are all pronounced "tā", but are written as 他，她， and 它 respectively in Chinese. In fact it's common to write "ta" as an equivalent to xhe/xer/xem.