4 ms·

Article also repeats the canard, "Chinese is based on pictures, or logograms, with specific meanings." No, Chinese writing is not logograms. Chinese writing is

by ncmncm 4y ago

Article also repeats the canard, "Chinese is based on pictures, or logograms, with specific meanings." No, Chinese writing is not logograms. Chinese writing is a syllabary with redundancy (many ways to write the same syllable) and complicated spelling rules. Chinese developed from logograms, as did Phoenician and cuneiform, but that was left behind thousands of years ago. Oddly, Chinese students are often taught to call the glyphs logograms, which they happily parrot, despite that they do not use them in that way. Many earnestly believe that users of other Chinese languages, when writing Mandarin, are simply transcribing what they say ("with different pronunciation") and not, as they are in fact, translating to a language as different from their own as German differs from English.

nine_k 4y ago
But don't logographic elements remain a major mnemonic device in Chinese? These characters are very different from other syllabic systems, like Japanese kana or Korean hangul.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Ret-conned mnemonics, maybe. But that still doesn’t accurately describe how they are used.
- ncmncm 4y ago
  A fair number of glyphs do look like a picture of one of the words usually spelled with that glyph. And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs represent the same syllable, and one is preferred for writing this word, and another for that word. So there is an appealing "just so" story to be told for those. But they are exceptional, and often ad hoc, drifting in and out of fashion. Chinese languages use about 1200 different syllables (some, a fair few more, e.g. with an extra tone). There is very strong pressure for any new word to be shortened to one syllable so it can be written with one glyph, in a process a little like acronyms become words in English. (E.g. laser, sonar.) This makes for a phenomenally huge overload of homophones. Having different glyphs for the same syllable helps disambiguate when writing. And, people naturally like to try to make things more mnemonic. (You must sometimes pretend to write a glyph on your hand, when talking, to to make sure you are understood, in a technical or legal context.) But glyphs for syllables, pronunciations of words, and preferred synonyms drift as in all languages. Meanwhile syllables for glyphs change on a completely different schedule. So whatever correspondence maybe once existed, there is very little of it left. Many Chinese people like to think they can read things written two thousand years ago, because the glyphs are often hardly changed, but they must confabulate because so much else has changed. The huge number of homophones mean you can invent a plausible meaning for practically any sequence of glyphs. The numbers are instructive. Mandarin has tens of thousands of words, mostly of one syllable, but only ~1200 syllables. Most people can read several thousand glyphs, but write from memory rather fewer. So even if a glyph "should" be used for a word, you might not remember how to write it, and must write one that sounds the same, instead. Imagine this drifting over centuries as different glyphs come in and out of fashion. Despite all this, even small children have no difficulty understanding and expressing these languages. The fluid meanings make for glorious wordplay like we can never experience.

by ncmncm 4y ago

nine_k 4y ago

But don't logographic elements remain a major mnemonic device in Chinese? These characters are very different from other syllabic systems, like Japanese kana or Korean hangul.

adastra22 4y ago
Ret-conned mnemonics, maybe. But that still doesn’t accurately describe how they are used.
ncmncm 4y ago
A fair number of glyphs do look like a picture of one of the words usually spelled with that glyph. And in a fair number of those cases, multiple glyphs represent the same syllable, and one is preferred for writing this word, and another for that word. So there is an appealing "just so" story to be told for those. But they are exceptional, and often ad hoc, drifting in and out of fashion. Chinese languages use about 1200 different syllables (some, a fair few more, e.g. with an extra tone). There is very strong pressure for any new word to be shortened to one syllable so it can be written with one glyph, in a process a little like acronyms become words in English. (E.g. laser, sonar.) This makes for a phenomenally huge overload of homophones. Having different glyphs for the same syllable helps disambiguate when writing. And, people naturally like to try to make things more mnemonic. (You must sometimes pretend to write a glyph on your hand, when talking, to to make sure you are understood, in a technical or legal context.) But glyphs for syllables, pronunciations of words, and preferred synonyms drift as in all languages. Meanwhile syllables for glyphs change on a completely different schedule. So whatever correspondence maybe once existed, there is very little of it left. Many Chinese people like to think they can read things written two thousand years ago, because the glyphs are often hardly changed, but they must confabulate because so much else has changed. The huge number of homophones mean you can invent a plausible meaning for practically any sequence of glyphs. The numbers are instructive. Mandarin has tens of thousands of words, mostly of one syllable, but only ~1200 syllables. Most people can read several thousand glyphs, but write from memory rather fewer. So even if a glyph "should" be used for a word, you might not remember how to write it, and must write one that sounds the same, instead. Imagine this drifting over centuries as different glyphs come in and out of fashion. Despite all this, even small children have no difficulty understanding and expressing these languages. The fluid meanings make for glorious wordplay like we can never experience.