5 ms·

Please forgive my extremely ignorant question, but could Chinese be written phonetically, maybe using the IPA or some existing/custom script? If so, that shoul

Please forgive my extremely ignorant question, but could Chinese be written phonetically, maybe using the IPA or some existing/custom script? If so, that should require much less memorization than memorizing thousands of Chinese characters, and a "morse code" could be made from the phonetic script.

akasakahakada 3y ago
Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. If you don't specify the pitch in the phonetic transcript, the level of uniqueness in pronunciation of vocabulary is so much lower than other languages. Same may say Japanese can express their language solely in pronunciation (Kana) but this is not true. There are easily 20+ meanings for the same pronunciation and are even hard to distinguish them with context provided. Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).
- crooked-v 3y ago
  For a simple example in practice, many Japanese names can be written multiple ways based on the kanji used, ending up with different meanings and different implications, while being pronounced exactly the same. For example, the common name Michiko can be written in many different ways with many different meanings, such as: 美智子 — "beautiful wise child" 美千子 — "child of a thousand beauties" 見知子 — "child of recognition" 道子 — "child of the way" 路子 — "child of the road" 倫子 — "child of morals" 皆子 — "child of all" 通子 — "child of passage"
  - akasakahakada 3y ago
    You should look at something like "sousou" or "koukou", the range of meaning spread from noun to verb to adjective to everything.
    - morelisp 3y ago
      This is not that unusual for languages. For example, > range Can mean a wide open area, a set of things, a stovetop, a measure, to measure, to vary between extremes, to line up, or to pick an opposite side.
      - akasakahakada 3y ago
        No, "range" do not share the same prounciation with other word. https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range I think what you misinterpreted is that you think "sousou" and "koukou" is a word in Japanese, no, they are sound, the prounciation.
        iainmerrick 3y ago
        I think they were just making the more general point that most language are very context-sensitive. “Dear” and “deer” if you want an explicit English homophone.
        akasakahakada 3y ago
        Please consider the amount. How many collision can happen in one prounciation in English? It is on average 2, maximum about 4. Chinese is like 6-10, Japanese is like 10-20. If you don't do comparison, of course there is no difference.
        iainmerrick 3y ago
        Are you saying Japanese speech isn't fully comprehensible without seeing the written characters? If not, what are you saying? I mean, I'll believe you that there are more homonyms in Japanese, sure, but it must still operate as a spoken language somehow.
        akasakahakada 3y ago
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- gwd 3y ago
  You could add tones as numbers; a la "yi1 wan3 shui3 jiao4, duo1 shao3 qian2?". But that's really clunky to read. It's not that much to add tones as accents; that would work OK for spoken language, since you already have to make sure it's unambiguous. But it wouldn't work as well for texts primarily designed to be written, as there remain a lot of homophones.
  - akasakahakada 3y ago
    And this create a practical/political problem that people speak a different dialect cannot recognize what this encoding is trying to express. Even though literally they share the same writing system.
    - pmoriarty 3y ago
      How do they recognize that their own language when they speak it?
      - Tyr42 3y ago
        Think of Chinese as one script but multiple languages. The spoken languages have about as much diversity as European languages, but they all share a mapping to characters which are meaning based, not pronunciation based. So you can use Mandarin pinyin, (though there are a lot of homophones) to serialize to a pronunciation, it wouldn't be understandable by a Cantonese speaker.
        greiskul 3y ago
        Hmm... so would written chinese be one language, and all the spoken language different languages? They just developed a script based lingua franca.
        gwd 3y ago
        "Language" vs "Dialect" is a matter of degree. If you have a tiny bit of exposure to, say, German or Icelandic, you can actually catch a fair amount of what's said in those languages given the context. The same is true for Mandarin and Cantonese. A lot of the words really are just different pronunciations of the same word; 我 (me) is wo3 in Mandarin, and ngo5 in Cantonese; 你 (you) is ni3 in Mandarin and nei2 in Cantonese. A lot of the grammar concepts are the same; you don't conjugate verbs, you instead have "markers" that indicate things like "completed action" or "experienced action"; measure words, and so on. But a lot of the grammar and words are just different -- at least in the spoken language; and typically subtitles are all in Mandarin. So my son watches Peppa Pig in Cantonese; I can read most of the subtitles in Mandarin. Peppa will say, "Da4 di, nei2 tai2 ha2!" (Look, Daddy!); but the subtitles will say 爸爸，你看一下！ (ba1 ba! ni3 kan4 yi2 xia4!) Note that only one of those four words is the same (你/ni3/nei2). "da di" (Cantonese) has been replaced with "baba" (Mandarin); "tai2" is replaced with "kan4" (a different character); and "ha2" has been replaced with "yi2 xia4" (an extra word). "It's all Chinese" is a sort of fiction; and from my outsider's perspective, a fiction which heavily favors Beijing and the Han majority at the expense of the various minority groups. Written Mandarin is pretty close to spoken Mandarin; "official" written Cantonese is very different than spoken Cantonese -- to the extent that the verb "to be" is a completely separate word.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  It would be a pretty rough deal for people relying on text-to-speech if that were the case.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  > everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation Then how can Chinese speakers understand each other when they speak?
  - numpad0 3y ago
    Usually from contexts. If datastream could be interpreted as "correct horse battery staple" or "add salt to taste" and the situational context is a cooking instruction, the latter interpretation has to be correct.
  - inkblotuniverse 3y ago
    Historically, people from different regions would be able to read each other's writing (send letters to each other) even if their spoken dialects/languages were mutually incomprehensible. You get this in European history, too, just not to the same degree.
- talideon 3y ago
  > Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based. [1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like. > Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different. > Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters). Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
  - akasakahakada 3y ago
    > No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. "bat" and "pat" ... "stoop" and "stop" the same word I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those. > Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case. In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation. Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.
    - greiskul 3y ago
- mcswell 3y ago
  Vietnamese is a tone language, and it is written in a Latin script (with a number of accent marks). If it can be done with Vietnamese, it can be done with Chinese. For that matter, lots of tone languages are written in Latin scripts. The problem with Chinese is not that it is a tone language (not absolute pitch, but relative pitch); the problem is that there are many regional dialects with different tone systems, and other pronunciation differences as well. Not that that's a real problem; English has lots of dialects with very different pronunciation systems, and it's written in a dialect-agnostic way.
crooked-v 3y ago
Just to start with, there are a significant number of characters that share the same pronunciation.
- pmoriarty 3y ago
  Enlglish also has plenty of homonyms and English speakers can still understand each other when they speak.
iainmerrick 3y ago
I’m just as ignorant if not more so! :) could Chinese be written phonetically? A bit of Wikipedia research suggests possibly yes, this is basically what pinyin is. Although others in this thread are saying you would potentially lose meaning that way. Surely that would only be the case for written text that’s ambiguous when spoken aloud? Which I can’t think of a situation where that would be a serious problem except for intentional puns.
numpad0 3y ago
Korean language dropped Kanji altogether postwar, and one of funny anecdote circulated on the bad parts of Internet in 2000s was that a cause of a minor train fire in South Korea was that a requirement of fireproof wood was misinterpreted as incendiary wood, because the language relied on Kanji for distinction between those. CJK languages could be used in phonetics only, sort of as in backup mode, but not really.
- jefftk 3y ago
  If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English. The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
    - jefftk 3y ago
      > "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it. On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
      - marcosdumay 3y ago
        And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English. Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
    - numpad0 3y ago
      I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.
talideon 3y ago
Sure it can. In fact, it regularly is if you're entering stuff in on a phone. One of the major ways people enter text on phones is by typing stuff in using pinyin and selecting the appropriate character.

akasakahakada 3y ago

Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. If you don't specify the pitch in the phonetic transcript, the level of uniqueness in pronunciation of vocabulary is so much lower than other languages. Same may say Japanese can express their language solely in pronunciation (Kana) but this is not true. There are easily 20+ meanings for the same pronunciation and are even hard to distinguish them with context provided. Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).

crooked-v 3y ago
For a simple example in practice, many Japanese names can be written multiple ways based on the kanji used, ending up with different meanings and different implications, while being pronounced exactly the same. For example, the common name Michiko can be written in many different ways with many different meanings, such as: 美智子 — "beautiful wise child" 美千子 — "child of a thousand beauties" 見知子 — "child of recognition" 道子 — "child of the way" 路子 — "child of the road" 倫子 — "child of morals" 皆子 — "child of all" 通子 — "child of passage"
- akasakahakada 3y ago
  You should look at something like "sousou" or "koukou", the range of meaning spread from noun to verb to adjective to everything.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    This is not that unusual for languages. For example, > range Can mean a wide open area, a set of things, a stovetop, a measure, to measure, to vary between extremes, to line up, or to pick an opposite side.
    - akasakahakada 3y ago
      No, "range" do not share the same prounciation with other word. https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range I think what you misinterpreted is that you think "sousou" and "koukou" is a word in Japanese, no, they are sound, the prounciation.
      - iainmerrick 3y ago
        I think they were just making the more general point that most language are very context-sensitive. “Dear” and “deer” if you want an explicit English homophone.
        akasakahakada 3y ago
        Please consider the amount. How many collision can happen in one prounciation in English? It is on average 2, maximum about 4. Chinese is like 6-10, Japanese is like 10-20. If you don't do comparison, of course there is no difference.
        iainmerrick 3y ago
        Are you saying Japanese speech isn't fully comprehensible without seeing the written characters? If not, what are you saying? I mean, I'll believe you that there are more homonyms in Japanese, sure, but it must still operate as a spoken language somehow.
        akasakahakada 3y ago
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
gwd 3y ago
You could add tones as numbers; a la "yi1 wan3 shui3 jiao4, duo1 shao3 qian2?". But that's really clunky to read. It's not that much to add tones as accents; that would work OK for spoken language, since you already have to make sure it's unambiguous. But it wouldn't work as well for texts primarily designed to be written, as there remain a lot of homophones.
- akasakahakada 3y ago
  And this create a practical/political problem that people speak a different dialect cannot recognize what this encoding is trying to express. Even though literally they share the same writing system.
  - pmoriarty 3y ago
    How do they recognize that their own language when they speak it?
    - Tyr42 3y ago
      Think of Chinese as one script but multiple languages. The spoken languages have about as much diversity as European languages, but they all share a mapping to characters which are meaning based, not pronunciation based. So you can use Mandarin pinyin, (though there are a lot of homophones) to serialize to a pronunciation, it wouldn't be understandable by a Cantonese speaker.
      - greiskul 3y ago
        Hmm... so would written chinese be one language, and all the spoken language different languages? They just developed a script based lingua franca.
        gwd 3y ago
        "Language" vs "Dialect" is a matter of degree. If you have a tiny bit of exposure to, say, German or Icelandic, you can actually catch a fair amount of what's said in those languages given the context. The same is true for Mandarin and Cantonese. A lot of the words really are just different pronunciations of the same word; 我 (me) is wo3 in Mandarin, and ngo5 in Cantonese; 你 (you) is ni3 in Mandarin and nei2 in Cantonese. A lot of the grammar concepts are the same; you don't conjugate verbs, you instead have "markers" that indicate things like "completed action" or "experienced action"; measure words, and so on. But a lot of the grammar and words are just different -- at least in the spoken language; and typically subtitles are all in Mandarin. So my son watches Peppa Pig in Cantonese; I can read most of the subtitles in Mandarin. Peppa will say, "Da4 di, nei2 tai2 ha2!" (Look, Daddy!); but the subtitles will say 爸爸，你看一下！ (ba1 ba! ni3 kan4 yi2 xia4!) Note that only one of those four words is the same (你/ni3/nei2). "da di" (Cantonese) has been replaced with "baba" (Mandarin); "tai2" is replaced with "kan4" (a different character); and "ha2" has been replaced with "yi2 xia4" (an extra word). "It's all Chinese" is a sort of fiction; and from my outsider's perspective, a fiction which heavily favors Beijing and the Han majority at the expense of the various minority groups. Written Mandarin is pretty close to spoken Mandarin; "official" written Cantonese is very different than spoken Cantonese -- to the extent that the verb "to be" is a completely separate word.
iainmerrick 3y ago
It would be a pretty rough deal for people relying on text-to-speech if that were the case.
pmoriarty 3y ago
> everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation Then how can Chinese speakers understand each other when they speak?
- numpad0 3y ago
  Usually from contexts. If datastream could be interpreted as "correct horse battery staple" or "add salt to taste" and the situational context is a cooking instruction, the latter interpretation has to be correct.
- inkblotuniverse 3y ago
  Historically, people from different regions would be able to read each other's writing (send letters to each other) even if their spoken dialects/languages were mutually incomprehensible. You get this in European history, too, just not to the same degree.
talideon 3y ago
> Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based. [1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like. > Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different. > Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters). Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.
- akasakahakada 3y ago
  > No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. "bat" and "pat" ... "stoop" and "stop" the same word I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those. > Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case. In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation. Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.
  - greiskul 3y ago
mcswell 3y ago
Vietnamese is a tone language, and it is written in a Latin script (with a number of accent marks). If it can be done with Vietnamese, it can be done with Chinese. For that matter, lots of tone languages are written in Latin scripts. The problem with Chinese is not that it is a tone language (not absolute pitch, but relative pitch); the problem is that there are many regional dialects with different tone systems, and other pronunciation differences as well. Not that that's a real problem; English has lots of dialects with very different pronunciation systems, and it's written in a dialect-agnostic way.

crooked-v 3y ago

Just to start with, there are a significant number of characters that share the same pronunciation.

pmoriarty 3y ago
Enlglish also has plenty of homonyms and English speakers can still understand each other when they speak.

iainmerrick 3y ago

I’m just as ignorant if not more so! :) could Chinese be written phonetically? A bit of Wikipedia research suggests possibly yes, this is basically what pinyin is. Although others in this thread are saying you would potentially lose meaning that way. Surely that would only be the case for written text that’s ambiguous when spoken aloud? Which I can’t think of a situation where that would be a serious problem except for intentional puns.

numpad0 3y ago

Korean language dropped Kanji altogether postwar, and one of funny anecdote circulated on the bad parts of Internet in 2000s was that a cause of a minor train fire in South Korea was that a requirement of fireproof wood was misinterpreted as incendiary wood, because the language relied on Kanji for distinction between those. CJK languages could be used in phonetics only, sort of as in backup mode, but not really.

jefftk 3y ago
If only they'd used english and required inflammable wood!
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Many Latin-derived languages have that one problematic word. It's not only English. The opposite of it would be "non-inflammable", so it's not really ambiguous. It's just anti-systemic and confusing. "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it.
  - jefftk 3y ago
    > "Flammable" isn't supposed to be a word, even though people keep using it. On the contrary! "Flammable" has been used in English for centuries (https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable https://www.etymonline.com/word/flammable) and at this point it's used intentionally to make it clear that we really do mean something can burn.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      And "inflammable" has been around for so long that it has spread to a big handful of languages. One of those being English. Flammable is the obvious construction you get from the Latin, but it's not exactly the word that spread into English. It seems to have been created there later.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    I think the ambiguity in inflammable lies in in- prefix rather than in the second part. If someone told me that incombustible and inflammable used to point at the same property at one point, I’d believe that.

talideon 3y ago

Sure it can. In fact, it regularly is if you're entering stuff in on a phone. One of the major ways people enter text on phones is by typing stuff in using pinyin and selecting the appropriate character.