7 ms·

It is fascinating that there are such major languages (or language groups) without standard written representations. I understand the concept of formal literar

It is fascinating that there are such major languages (or language groups) without standard written representations. I understand the concept of formal literary languages but in this case, having literary Chinese as your "written language" feels like an anachronism. Like treating Latin as literary language in medieval Europe: ultimately disenfranchising to common people and something that needed to be set aside.

SECProto 4y ago
> Like treating Latin as literary language That comparison is a stretch, as Latin and English are both written alphabetically, while classic and the various modern chinese dialects/languages are written logographically. It's a delightfully complex topic! The headline is a bit misleading, as wikipedia has an entire article on written Hokkien - as you note, it isn't standardized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Hokkien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Hokkien
- davidjohnstone 4y ago
  The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).
  - SECProto 4y ago
    Fair enough, there are similarities. However, alphabetically written languages are the same as their spoken - learn how to pronounce a hundred letter combinations and exceptions, and as long as you know the spoken language you're good. However with latin, pronouncing it wouldn't help with comprehension. With logographically represented languages, the characters have more to do with meaning than with pronunciation. It's part of why Chinese characters were used for completely different spoken languages (Korean, Japanese)
tokinonagare 4y ago
The AI community would be taken more seriously if they didn't over-exaggerate or even straight up lie about their achievements like it is done in that article title. Hokkien, specifically the version mentioned in the article (Taiwanese Southern Min) has two main writing systems: Chinese characters and Latin letters based romanization. Heck, that's actually more than most languages in the world! The Tâi-lô[1] system, a slight modification of Pe̍h-ōe-jī was recently standardized by the government. On the other hand, Chinese characters can be used to write Taiwanese, not just Classical Chinese or Standard Chinese (Mandarin), save for a few words that are often written using Latin or bopomofo letters. It's true that a large number of speakers have not been taught either of those writing systems, but it does not mean they don't exist. I've already met someone which taught me few words in Hokkien (the infamous chia̍h-pá--bōe 食飽未) and write it in Chinese characters for me. I'm working with various Sinitic languages, and Taiwanese is far from being the worst when it comes to available resources in written form (for my use cases dictionnaries). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3%A1-j%C4%AB_Phing-im_Hong-%C3%A0n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3...
- vore 4y ago
  If most people aren't able to use those systems, I think it's about as good as unwritten, especially if the target audience is your everyday speaker who wouldn't be familiar.
  - tokinonagare 4y ago
    I disagree. It makes a big difference: creating a writing system is not a simple as it seems and it's a task that require quite a lot of work, especially when there is huge dialectal variations in-between dialects. When a system already exist it means there is already a bunch of tools available such as dictionaries, input method[1], a corpus of texts even if small or medium, including text books. That can be used both for AI and teaching. This make the task way less daunting than doing everything from scratch. In case of Taiwanese, there is a small but existing corpus of literature, as a 5 seconds Google/Wikipedia search shows[2][3]. [1] https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%E6%96%87#%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8%E4%BD%9C%E5%93%81 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8... [3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8...
contingencies 4y ago
One of the amusing 20th century historical anecdotes which I am constantly pointing out to mainland Chinese is that the lauded literary figure Lu Xun of Shaoxing actually advocated for the replacement of written Chinese with an alphabetic/romanized writing system based on phonetic transposition. China then invented pinyin, which is a relatively well conceived and elegant system, but refused to support the replacement of characters and instead advocated for "simplified" characters (which are approximately as hard as the originals, but provide a convenient cultural gap). While Lu Xun is now taught in all mainland Chinese schools, they conveniently leave out the part where he advocated for leaving characters in the past. His primary argument was the years wasted on rote learning that Chinese students require as a precondition to literacy.
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Japanese tried the same thing - dropping kanji[0] and kana[1] entirely in favor of romaji[2]. It failed primarily for the same reason that English spelling reform fails, which is that we the horrifically mangled and confusing orthography to distinguish words spelled the same way. [0] Characters derived from Chinese. Each character has both an embedded meaning and one or more readings. They look like this: 漢字 [1] Characters that spell out whole syllables. The glyphs are typographically derived from kanji, but very simplified and without meanings. Due to medieval Japanese gender politics, there are two of them. They look like this: ひらがな and カタカナ. [2] The characters you are using right now.
  - contingencies 4y ago
    Japan is the only culture I know of with three or four concurrent systems in use. China could be said to have two. Taiwan could be said to have three, if you could bopomofo.
    - samus 4y ago
      Japanese could get rid of either Hiragana or Katakana if they really wanted, since both of them are fully functional syllabaries. But in Taiwan, the choice between Bopomofo, Pinyin, and their local variant of Pinyin has political significance because it is taken to be reflective of their stance to the Mainland.
ekianjo 4y ago
> Like treating Latin as literary language in medieval Europe: ultimately disenfranchising to common people not in latin countries which had languages and dialects not too far from Latin in the first place

SECProto 4y ago

> Like treating Latin as literary language That comparison is a stretch, as Latin and English are both written alphabetically, while classic and the various modern chinese dialects/languages are written logographically. It's a delightfully complex topic! The headline is a bit misleading, as wikipedia has an entire article on written Hokkien - as you note, it isn't standardized. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Hokkien https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Hokkien

davidjohnstone 4y ago
The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).
- SECProto 4y ago
  Fair enough, there are similarities. However, alphabetically written languages are the same as their spoken - learn how to pronounce a hundred letter combinations and exceptions, and as long as you know the spoken language you're good. However with latin, pronouncing it wouldn't help with comprehension. With logographically represented languages, the characters have more to do with meaning than with pronunciation. It's part of why Chinese characters were used for completely different spoken languages (Korean, Japanese)

tokinonagare 4y ago

The AI community would be taken more seriously if they didn't over-exaggerate or even straight up lie about their achievements like it is done in that article title. Hokkien, specifically the version mentioned in the article (Taiwanese Southern Min) has two main writing systems: Chinese characters and Latin letters based romanization. Heck, that's actually more than most languages in the world! The Tâi-lô[1] system, a slight modification of Pe̍h-ōe-jī was recently standardized by the government. On the other hand, Chinese characters can be used to write Taiwanese, not just Classical Chinese or Standard Chinese (Mandarin), save for a few words that are often written using Latin or bopomofo letters. It's true that a large number of speakers have not been taught either of those writing systems, but it does not mean they don't exist. I've already met someone which taught me few words in Hokkien (the infamous chia̍h-pá--bōe 食飽未) and write it in Chinese characters for me. I'm working with various Sinitic languages, and Taiwanese is far from being the worst when it comes to available resources in written form (for my use cases dictionnaries). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3%A1-j%C4%AB_Phing-im_Hong-%C3%A0n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A2i-u%C3%A2n_L%C3%B4-m%C3...

vore 4y ago
If most people aren't able to use those systems, I think it's about as good as unwritten, especially if the target audience is your everyday speaker who wouldn't be familiar.
- tokinonagare 4y ago
  I disagree. It makes a big difference: creating a writing system is not a simple as it seems and it's a task that require quite a lot of work, especially when there is huge dialectal variations in-between dialects. When a system already exist it means there is already a bunch of tools available such as dictionaries, input method[1], a corpus of texts even if small or medium, including text books. That can be used both for AI and teaching. This make the task way less daunting than doing everything from scratch. In case of Taiwanese, there is a small but existing corpus of literature, as a 5 seconds Google/Wikipedia search shows[2][3]. [1] https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf https://aclanthology.org/O16-1026.pdf [2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8%A9%B1%E6%96%87#%E4%BB%A3%E8%A1%A8%E4%BD%9C%E5%93%81 https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%87%BA%E8%AA%9E%E7%99%BD%E8... [3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8%AA%AA https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8F%B0%E6%96%87%E5%B0%8F%E8...

contingencies 4y ago

One of the amusing 20th century historical anecdotes which I am constantly pointing out to mainland Chinese is that the lauded literary figure Lu Xun of Shaoxing actually advocated for the replacement of written Chinese with an alphabetic/romanized writing system based on phonetic transposition. China then invented pinyin, which is a relatively well conceived and elegant system, but refused to support the replacement of characters and instead advocated for "simplified" characters (which are approximately as hard as the originals, but provide a convenient cultural gap). While Lu Xun is now taught in all mainland Chinese schools, they conveniently leave out the part where he advocated for leaving characters in the past. His primary argument was the years wasted on rote learning that Chinese students require as a precondition to literacy.

kmeisthax 4y ago
Japanese tried the same thing - dropping kanji[0] and kana[1] entirely in favor of romaji[2]. It failed primarily for the same reason that English spelling reform fails, which is that we the horrifically mangled and confusing orthography to distinguish words spelled the same way. [0] Characters derived from Chinese. Each character has both an embedded meaning and one or more readings. They look like this: 漢字 [1] Characters that spell out whole syllables. The glyphs are typographically derived from kanji, but very simplified and without meanings. Due to medieval Japanese gender politics, there are two of them. They look like this: ひらがな and カタカナ. [2] The characters you are using right now.
- contingencies 4y ago
  Japan is the only culture I know of with three or four concurrent systems in use. China could be said to have two. Taiwan could be said to have three, if you could bopomofo.
  - samus 4y ago
    Japanese could get rid of either Hiragana or Katakana if they really wanted, since both of them are fully functional syllabaries. But in Taiwan, the choice between Bopomofo, Pinyin, and their local variant of Pinyin has political significance because it is taken to be reflective of their stance to the Mainland.

ekianjo 4y ago

> Like treating Latin as literary language in medieval Europe: ultimately disenfranchising to common people not in latin countries which had languages and dialects not too far from Latin in the first place