28 ms·

If English was written like Chinese (1999)

PaulHoule 2y ago
I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters. The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".
- pavel_lishin 2y ago
  I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    This is basically how we got to alphabetic systems in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet "Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."
  - chuckadams 2y ago
    Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
      - vunderba 2y ago
        Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc. The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think. I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.
        eob 2y ago
        This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence. This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.
  - raincole 2y ago
    Just use the closest Chinese characters to represent a syllable / sound, and slightly modify it if they have to distinguish them. Actually this is not just for foregin languages. It was how Chinese itself evolved. Search "borrowing" in this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically. The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at) Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
    - brazzy 2y ago
      > First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters that matched the syllables of Japanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        Thanks for the correction!
  - inkyoto 2y ago
    > Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages. Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language. The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning. For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as: Mandarin: Bǎoluó Cantonese: bou2 lo4 Hakka: Pó-lò Hokkien: Pó-lô Teochew: bao2 lo5 Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
  - sandbach 2y ago
    > What did they do in 950AD? An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China. The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms: 1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun'). 2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
    - valarauko 2y ago
      To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.
  - yongjik 2y ago
    I guess it depends on whether Chinese speakers collectively like you or not. E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation." But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).
- bobthepanda 2y ago
  usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically with China. The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.
- g9yuayon 2y ago
  Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounification of verbs, something that traditional Chinese never had. In contrast, younger generations love to say Chinese equivalent to something like "do improvement" instead of "improve" (进行改进，instead of 改进, even though it is still considered bad writing style. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement
  - hnfong 2y ago
    This is a common claim. But... I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation. Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do <noun>" much. I've read an attempt to connect the dots here: https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/20171215/s00022/1513328994116/%E6%80%8E%E6%A8%A3%E6%94%B9%E9%80%B2%E8%8B%B1%E5%BC%8F%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87-%E2%94%80%E2%94%80%E8%AB%96%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%9A%84%E5%B8%B8%E6%85%8B%E8%88%87%E8%AE%8A%E6%85%8B%EF%BC%88%E6%96%87-%E4%BD%99%E5%85%89%E4%B8%AD%EF%BC%89 https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/2017... Which was ridiculous if you read carefully, and I've gleefully written an article shredding it apart -- https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6%E7%AB%9F_%E4%BD%99%E5%85%89%E4%B8%AD_%E8%AD%98%E5%94%94%E8%AD%98%E8%8B%B1%E6%96%87_qm_.html https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6...
    - numpad0 2y ago
      I can feel a sort of a double translation shims hiding in that example. Chinese "改进" would work as a verb on its own but dictionary wise it will tend to mentally map to noun form "improvement" than the verb form "[to]improve", and that necessitates a "do" verb, which plausibly results in bloated forms such as "进行改进"(forward going [with] improving forward). Common claims are often common for reasons...
- latentsea 2y ago
  It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.
  - School-Cotton 2y ago
    Japanese still uses Chinese characters for native vocabulary that is not derived from Chinese at all.
    - latentsea 2y ago
      It does, but the loanwords from Chinese vastly outnumber those, so the influence of Chinese words on Japanese is pretty undeniable.
      - School-Cotton 2y ago
        Fair enough.
      - adrian_b 2y ago
        The amount of Chinese words is usually much greater in written Japanese or in legal/technical/scientific jargon than in casual spoken Japanese. The proportion of Chinese words also depends on the manner of accounting the compound words and the inflected words. I have seen the claim that the modern Japanese vocabulary consists roughly of 45% Chinese words, 45% native Japanese words, 8% English words and 2% words borrowed from other languages, mainly from Portuguese or other European languages. I do not know what assumptions have been used to compute these percentages, but they are similar to the frequencies of the words encountered in many modern Japanese texts. There are a lot of modern Japanese words that are composed from two or three or four or even more Chinese words. If all the compounds would be counted separately, the proportion of Chinese words in the Japanese vocabulary could increase a lot.
      - numpad0 2y ago
        btw this is true for historical arguments, but actual size of workable shared vocabulary in common use is tiny - famously "手紙(hand paper)" means postal letters in Japanese, and toilet paper in Chinese.
- filleduchaos 2y ago
  > I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner finding it hard to write "French" instead of "Le français" in an English sentence would come off as more than a little overzealous to me.
  - adelie 2y ago
    i'm bilingual and have absolutely not experienced this. that being said, i think being bilingual - rather than a learner - does make it a lot easier to code-switch instinctively between different languages.
ljsprague 2y ago
[flagged]
- ben_w 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  Pacific Ocean.
  - t-3 2y ago
    For a non-native speaker, sure, that's not obvious. For a native, especially if they're well read and have a decent vocabulary or have studied any Latin it's just fine. The many styles of englishizations of foreign words (romanization just doesn't quite fit here) and obsolete-in-terms-of-pronunciation spellings provide valuable context for pronunciation and meaning to people who have sufficient familiarity.
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  I think English spelling is a pain but overall I think 中文 is worse. There are an awful lot of characters to know for one thing. My understanding is that you have to work pretty hard to be literate in 中文. Also I understand that the horizon where 中文 gets hard to read is closer in time than it is English, that is even 150 year old texts are difficult to read and reading Confucius is harder than reading Chaucer. Contrast the problem of memorizing irregular spellings to the problem of remembering how to draw thousands of characters. I must admit that I really like Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua which is kind of a cleaned-up Latin. As a native English speaker who knows a lot of Latin roots from science and literature and who also has gotten good doses of Spanish and French, I can read the sample texts in that Wikipedia page right off that bat. It is a strange thing though that you can go through the first few chapters of a book on 中文 grammar and get the feeling there is something refreshingly regular about that language, almost as if it was an artificial language. When you get towards the end you find there are many things that will strain this sense of quick familiarity and I am told if you actually try to use the language it's harder than you think.
jmclnx 2y ago
There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.
- deleted 2y ago
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- svachalek 2y ago
  Computers developed by English speakers for English speakers tended to use English, I am very skeptical that any more thought went into it than that.
  - iainmerrick 2y ago
    I think there were a lot of historical contingencies involved. The nature of the language itself (small vs large alphabet, etc) is probably one of the least important. There was an interesting BBC article a while back about the decline of German usage in science: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29543708 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29543708 They put it down to anti-German sentiment during WWI (not WWII as I would have assumed!) It’s pretty easy to imagine an alternative world where German was the common international language of science and became the basis of most programming languages too.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The importance of German as a scientific language was even greater before WWI than claimed in that BBC article. While the BBC article estimates that of the scientific literature of the 19th century and of the pre-WWI 20th century a third was published in French, a third in English and a third in German, I believe that an estimate much closer to reality would be a quarter in French, a quarter in English and a half in German.
- 2y ago
dang 2y ago
Related: If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 - March 2022 (7 comments) If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments) If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)
Eric_WVGG 2y ago
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”
- bad_username 2y ago
  Reminds me of Antonio Stella Bottom Tile ( https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 )
  - dllthomas 2y ago
    ... and the bard Elron Hu, from a PKD story.
- resolutebat 2y ago
  A luminary icon much like Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yerbouti.
  - justsomehnguy 2y ago
    Just yesterday I found out why there was a fine German gentleman in Stunts/4D Sports Driving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s
beardyw 2y ago
> So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi..... We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme. They already are aren't they?
bmacho 2y ago
If Japanese was written like Chinese https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281
lunaru 2y ago
If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated. Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.
- bradrn 2y ago
  You’re missing the point of the article. The primary aim is to explain how Chinese characters work, using English as a reference point.
- mbivert 2y ago
  Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development. This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research. If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English. But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
  - CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
    >confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development. As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there. I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.
timbit42 2y ago
I'd prefer to switch to Korea's hangul.
- latentsea 2y ago
  The F word would all of a sudden lose it's punch. Puck the pucking puckers.
  - grishka 2y ago
    What about the existing word "puck", as in hockey puck?
    - latentsea 2y ago
      "copy" would also become ambiguous with coffee :)
      - localfirst 2y ago
        i was thinking about this for a long time but some sort of indicator, maybe an accent or symbol to indicate the F sound this would radically expand the number of pronouncable words in Korean. with the goal being able to describe phonetically as accurately as possible any spoke word in human history. Scandinavian languages need not apply. There should be no alphabet that describes the sound of spitting.
SunlitCat 2y ago
As someone, still planning to tackle learning Chinese (mandarin) one day, this is very interesting!
brazzy 2y ago
> I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system. All of the concepts apply Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).
- akavi 2y ago
  Chinese has fewer inflections than English, but does have 儿 as a nominalizer (and one which is quite productive in northern dialects)
  - canjobear 2y ago
    Also -们 as a pluralizer on pronouns and animate nouns.
    - akavi 2y ago
      I think I meant more fusional inflections. 们, 了, 着, 的, etc, don't affect the pronunciation of the root morpheme.
- canjobear 2y ago
  Interestingly Chinese did have things like this at the time the writing system formed, and they simply weren't written. You can see remnants of the old morphological system today in characters that alternate in tone. For example there used to be a suffix -s that turned a verb into a noun. During the Han Dynasty this turned into -h, and then later turned into the falling/departing/fourth tone. Hence 教 jiāo is the verb "to teach", from Old Chinese *kraw, and 教 jiào is the noun "teaching" from Old Chinese *kraws.
beryilma 2y ago
Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language. And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'. The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.
  - deleted 2y ago
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- pringk02 2y ago
  The issue is the opposite. Chinese has a comparitively small phonetic pallette (depending on how you view tones). Chinese written completely phoenetically can easily become incomprehensible. https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-the-meowsome-one-sound-poem-you-can-only-read/ https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-...
  - mmaniac 2y ago
    The functional load of tones (that is, the importance of a pronunciation difference for distinguishing words) in Chinese is comparable to that of vowels[1] "Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones. [1]https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.p...
  - emblaegh 2y ago
einpoklum 2y ago
"A type of speaking that rhymes with purse-- curse, of course." I was actually thinking "verse" :-\
throwanem 2y ago
I'm not sure we all that much need a (1999) on an article inflecting "bodacious" without apparent irony. I suppose it helps in the "before" direction, but I certainly wasn't going to assume this was written much after...
noirdujour 2y ago
The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood. As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-ever-consider-a-phonetic-writing-system#46659 https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...
- aikinai 2y ago
  This is a great explanation of important points many people fail to recognize. Thank you!
- j7ake 2y ago
  My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing. However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.
  - jameshart 2y ago
    The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)
cynicalpeace 2y ago
I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly. English is also bad at this, ironically. Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.
- mcmoor 2y ago
  > English is also bad at this, ironically https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce
- dreamcompiler 2y ago
  Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them. Kanji is a very different story of course.
  - brigandish 2y ago
    There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of people when spoken. Even the auto-kanji-conversion of my keyboard respects the variants.
    - Liquid_Fire 2y ago
      I can accept ふいんき as an exception, but for 原因 that's just a consequence of the rules for how to pronounce ん, which depends on the surrounding sounds (it's not quite い either). I wouldn't really call it an exception. Consider 一千円, 禁煙 etc all of which are pronounced like that.
grishka 2y ago
> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi. English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.
- brigandish 2y ago
  All us Brits agree with you, though I'm not sure the Scots can be called native speakers.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Why? Other than a comparatively small number of different spellings (“color” etc.) how is American English simpler?
  - kaashif 2y ago
    This isn't language, it's accent, but in America the vast majority of speakers merge lots of vowels - cot/caught are merged, Mary/marry/merry are merged. It certainly does simplify pronunciation.
    - kayodelycaon 2y ago
      This is dependent on regional accents. For my Midwestern accent cot and caught are most definitely not merged. However I did notice that in Seattle, no one can hear my name properly due to a merged consonant.
      - kaashif 2y ago
        Which consonant merger is that?
        kayodelycaon 2y ago
        Some D and T sounds.
fromMars 2y ago
No. Just no. Literacy is incredibly difficult in a language that requires knowing 10,000 characters to learn it.
mbivert 2y ago
> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records. Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's). [0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components, radicals are just an afterthought to make dictionairies work. I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters, they were not around when the characters were created, were not trained to do science and didn't know as much about the evolution of languages as us.
  - mbivert 2y ago
    > I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components The Shuowen indeed already mentions sounds. But the fact that there are sound components isn't contradictory with them being also semantic. > I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters Let's say that I enjoy the study of ancient thought processes, and that some of it seems to be recorded in etymology & the like. > were not trained to do science I believe their approaches were different, more "naive" perhaps, which might be the source of confusion. Let me give you and example where we currently fall short, and where they did not. Consider political organisation: from Plato (The Republic) we knew that they studied the way one political system changes to another, and studied the causes of this evolution. Yet, the overwhelming majority of contemporary people have been "in-doctrinated" to think that democracy is paramount. Not only are we disregarding history and previous data, but most businesses, where we all spend a considerable amount of time, for subsistence, are fundamentally non-democratic: we're also severely inconsistent. Perhaps ancient Greeks didn't had modern means (e.g. peer-reviewed papers, social "sciences"), but they nevertheless captured the jest of it, while we're essentially not.
ufoTofu 2y ago
so meaning+sound = well coded language system
ufoTofu 2y ago
meaning + sound = a well coded language system
DeathArrow 2y ago
Or writing in English can go the other way and become ortophonetic like Italian and Romanian, where each letter denotes a sound and "to", "too" and "two" will become "tu".
ggm 2y ago
I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.
- TheGlav 2y ago
  The author expanded on that later in the article, saying it was not quite right and doesn't always work, but it's a good analogy.
CalRobert 2y ago
In English, of course, the title of this might be "If English were written like Chinese" Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
- dadarecit 2y ago
  how do you spell waffling in chinese
MrDresden 2y ago
I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english. Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.
- luyu_wu 2y ago
  To some degree yes, but mostly because Cixin Liu is just an incredibly unique writer in style!
fguerraz 2y ago
I loved that I got tricked into learning something about Chinese!
DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
> The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning The problem is that the English language does not have this structure, whereas Chinese does. The individual syllables in Chinese words have their own independent meanings. If you break apart the English word "random," "ran" and "dom" don't independently mean anything. The reason why Chinese characters work well for Chinese is because the fundamental unit of Chinese is really the syllable, rather than the word. English isn't like that, so a Chinese-like writing system would be a very poor fit to the English language. That being said, I sometimes wonder whether this property of Chinese comes from the writing system, or whether it preexisted writing. In other words, to what extent has Chinese been influenced by its writing system?
bobafett-9902 2y ago
can someone explain the linguistic logic to me like I'm five? I've read it through twice and I don't understand how the connection is made between the characters and the english language?
- z500 2y ago
  It's an imagining of how the principles used to construct Chinese characters could be applied to English. The author names these hypothetical English characters yingzi, after hanzi.
zumu 2y ago
> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling. The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘
NeuroCase 2y ago
[dead]
Green-Man 2y ago
Could anyone find a live link to the "Belorussian translation" mentioned at the beginning? I wasn't able to find another version with search engines or Waybach machine.

I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. Certainly if Chinese people met English speakers when English speakers didn't have a writing system they'd find a way to write English in Chinese characters the same way they did for Japanese circa 950AD and that they've done for several languages unrelated to "Chinese" that are written with those characters. The effort in that article goes in the direction of making something regular that works a lot like "writing Chinese in Chinese characters" but it seems to me more likely to go in the more complex direction of preserving Chinese semantics at the expense of phonetics that happens when you "write Japanese with Chinese characters".

pavel_lishin 2y ago
I never considered how a Chinese speaker (writer?) would deal with a foreign language that doesn't have a written form. What did they do in 950AD? Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages.
- kibwen 2y ago
  This is basically how we got to alphabetic systems in the first place. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet "Its first origins can be traced back to a Proto-Sinaitic script developed in Ancient Egypt to represent the language of Semitic-speaking workers and slaves in Egypt. Unskilled in the complex hieroglyphic system used to write the Egyptian language, which required a large number of pictograms, they selected a small number of those commonly seen in their surroundings to describe the sounds, as opposed to the semantic values, of their own Canaanite language."
- chuckadams 2y ago
  Much like Japanese has Katakana for spelling things out phonetically, Chinese has Bopomofo, aka Zhuyin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo "Bopomofo" is also without a doubt my favorite Chinese word to say out loud.
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    Hiragana is used for phonetically spelling Japanese words, Katakana is used for phonetically spelling foreign words. For instance there is the popular anime titled “Sailor Moon” which is written in Katakana like セーラームーン and stranger still the second season is called “Sailor Moon R” (I think for “return”) and is written セーラームーン R. My understanding is that Bopomofo never caught on particularly well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo it is still used in education in Taiwan but in Taiwan, the mainland and the rest of the sinosphere people who want to spell out Chinese words are more likely to use Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Unless things have changed in the last 15 years, when I lived there most of my Taiwanese peers used bopomofo aka 注音 as their primary IME for smartphones / laptops / etc. The few English ex-pats that I knew used the 搜狗 software which defaults to pinyin I think. I mostly used pinyin on my laptop and bopomofo on my phone (old model that didn't support pinyin) which was mildly annoying. I constantly got it confused with my Japanese since I also read hiragana/katakana and some of the symbols are highly similar.
      - eob 2y ago
        This is still mostly true. Kids books also have bopomofo rubies, like the kana rubies in Japanese. And occasionally you'll see bopomofo as a typographic choice to represent a sound that feels more natural in Taiwanese amidst an otherwise Mandarin sentence. This is just my personal experience, but I think the big change in the past 15 years isn't Bopomofo -> Pinyin, but rather Wade Giles -> Pinyin. Bopomofo seems equally prevalent, but the Wade Giles romanizations on street signs have begin to get replaced with Pinyin for the sake of non-native speakers who are almost certainly more familiar with Pinyin than WG.
- raincole 2y ago
  Just use the closest Chinese characters to represent a syllable / sound, and slightly modify it if they have to distinguish them. Actually this is not just for foregin languages. It was how Chinese itself evolved. Search "borrowing" in this page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classificati...
- PaulHoule 2y ago
  In the case of Japanese they went through two phases. First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiragana then in the next 30-50 years or so they developed the system that we know today which use the kana in a secondary role. In Japanese, for instance, you tend to put the verb at the end of the sentence and the “stem” of the verb is usually written in Chinese characters which often mean the same thing they would in Chinese, but a few kana are added at the end to specify the tense of the verb and similar attributes. I think a Chinese speaker would recognize many characters which basically mean the same thing as in Chinese but Japanese adds new characters which are important grammatically. The character の for instance can be used in spelling out bigger words phonetically but it is usually used for the word “no” which roughly means “of”. (It’s good to know because any substantial Japanese text will use it so it’s an easy tell of what language you’re looking at) Chinese does have its own characters that play a similar particle role though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_particles the one that sticks out to me is 了 which is pronounced “le” and is used in sentences that are describing a change in a situation as opposed to describing an unchanged situation.
  - brazzy 2y ago
    > First they developed a phonetic alphabet specifically for Japanese No. First they used a set of existing Chinese characters that matched the syllables of Japanese - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27y%C5%8Dgana It took several hundred years until Hiragana developed from the cursive writing style of the Chinese characters.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      Thanks for the correction!
- inkyoto 2y ago
  > Surely there's some way of transcribing sounds in languages like Chinese for foreign languages. Same as in all other languages, with an extra step: first, sounds from the source language that are missing from the target language are mapped onto their closest phonetic counterparts in the target language according to the phonetic rules of the target language. The extra step: a Chinese character is assigned to each syllable to convey the «it sounds like this character» principle, multiple characters are pieced together and then there is a new borrowed word is born into existence. The assigned Chinese characters bear no relevance to their semantic or well established meaning. For example, 保羅 is the Chinese for the English name of «Paul» which is pronounced as: Mandarin: Bǎoluó Cantonese: bou2 lo4 Hakka: Pó-lò Hokkien: Pó-lô Teochew: bao2 lo5 Neither 保 (to defend; to protect; to keep; to guarantee; to ensure etc) nor 羅 (to collect; to gather; to catch etc) have anything to do with the actual pronunciation of the word, nor with the meaning of each character, nor the original Latin meaning of Paulus («small», «humble», «least» or «little»).
- sandbach 2y ago
  > What did they do in 950AD? An example from around then or a bit before, arising from the spread of Buddhism in China. The name of Vairocana Buddha, whose name in Sanskrit is वैरोचन and means 'solar', is given in Chinese in two forms: 1. 大日如来 Dàrì Rúlái This form is a loan translation, where the meaning of the Sanskrit is translated bit by bit into Chinese (日 means 'sun'). 2. 毘盧遮那佛 Pílúzhēnà Fó This form approximates the sound of the Sanskrit word using Chinese characters. It's typical of Chinese phonetic translations, which still today largely just use characters, and thus often don't sound much like the word in the original language.
  - valarauko 2y ago
    To add to this, Chinese (and Japanese) Buddhist scholars' emphasis on retaining the original pronunciation of chants led them to hang on to the phonetically written Siddham script in which their masters had learned the scriptural texts in universities in India.
- yongjik 2y ago
  I guess it depends on whether Chinese speakers collectively like you or not. E.g., Germany (Deutschland) => take the initial sound "De" => find a good character with that sound => Germany becomes "De Guo" ("De" nation), or 德国, which could also mean "virtuous nation." But the once great nomadic tribe of Xiongnu, who rivaled the Han Empire, will be forever known as "Barbarian (匈) Slaves (奴)" - it doesn't help the first character contains 凶 (unlucky, horrible, evil).
bobthepanda 2y ago
usually this effort happened in the opposite direction, where Japanese people adopted the writing system of China since they didn't have one yet and needed to communicate diplomatically with China. The hanzi approach is the most historical one. The problem is that it is generally not intuitive for vernacular languages. Even non-Mandarin Sinitic languages like Cantonese look wildly different between the standard writing form (which is just Mandarin) vs. writing the spoken vernacular form. The closest Western equivalent would be everybody in the European Dark and Middle Ages using Latin.
g9yuayon 2y ago
Note that modern Chinese is heavily influenced by modern English. During the May Fourth Movement[1], prominent authors like Lu Xun diligently explored how to write modern Chinese with "westernized" style. The experiment largely failed, but modern Chinese did get influenced a lot, to the point that multiple authors wrote books or articles pleading people not to write "westernized" Chinese. A typical example is nounification of verbs, something that traditional Chinese never had. In contrast, younger generations love to say Chinese equivalent to something like "do improvement" instead of "improve" (进行改进，instead of 改进, even though it is still considered bad writing style. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Fourth_Movement
- hnfong 2y ago
  This is a common claim. But... I haven't seen any credible claims of how Chinese was actually "westernized" aside of Chinese writers seemingly randomly pointing fingers and blaming European influence for a change of style initiated by the younger generation. Even your example shouldn't convince anyone, since in English we don't say "do improvement", and generally English doesn't overuse "do <noun>" much. I've read an attempt to connect the dots here: https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/20171215/s00022/1513328994116/%E6%80%8E%E6%A8%A3%E6%94%B9%E9%80%B2%E8%8B%B1%E5%BC%8F%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87-%E2%94%80%E2%94%80%E8%AB%96%E4%B8%AD%E6%96%87%E7%9A%84%E5%B8%B8%E6%85%8B%E8%88%87%E8%AE%8A%E6%85%8B%EF%BC%88%E6%96%87-%E4%BD%99%E5%85%89%E4%B8%AD%EF%BC%89 https://news.mingpao.com/ins/%E6%96%87%E6%91%98/article/2017... Which was ridiculous if you read carefully, and I've gleefully written an article shredding it apart -- https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6%E7%AB%9F_%E4%BD%99%E5%85%89%E4%B8%AD_%E8%AD%98%E5%94%94%E8%AD%98%E8%8B%B1%E6%96%87_qm_.html https://hnfong.github.io/public-crap/writings/2020/%E7%A9%B6...
  - numpad0 2y ago
    I can feel a sort of a double translation shims hiding in that example. Chinese "改进" would work as a verb on its own but dictionary wise it will tend to mentally map to noun form "improvement" than the verb form "[to]improve", and that necessitates a "do" verb, which plausibly results in bloated forms such as "进行改进"(forward going [with] improving forward). Common claims are often common for reasons...
latentsea 2y ago
It wouldn't sound like English if they did. Both Japanese and Korean share a huge amount of vocab with Chinese, and you can tell because all the words sound similar too. So, they didn't just take the characters, they also took and adapted version of how to pronounce those characters.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Japanese still uses Chinese characters for native vocabulary that is not derived from Chinese at all.
  - latentsea 2y ago
    It does, but the loanwords from Chinese vastly outnumber those, so the influence of Chinese words on Japanese is pretty undeniable.
    - School-Cotton 2y ago
      Fair enough.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      The amount of Chinese words is usually much greater in written Japanese or in legal/technical/scientific jargon than in casual spoken Japanese. The proportion of Chinese words also depends on the manner of accounting the compound words and the inflected words. I have seen the claim that the modern Japanese vocabulary consists roughly of 45% Chinese words, 45% native Japanese words, 8% English words and 2% words borrowed from other languages, mainly from Portuguese or other European languages. I do not know what assumptions have been used to compute these percentages, but they are similar to the frequencies of the words encountered in many modern Japanese texts. There are a lot of modern Japanese words that are composed from two or three or four or even more Chinese words. If all the compounds would be counted separately, the proportion of Chinese words in the Japanese vocabulary could increase a lot.
    - numpad0 2y ago
      btw this is true for historical arguments, but actual size of workable shared vocabulary in common use is tiny - famously "手紙(hand paper)" means postal letters in Japanese, and toilet paper in Chinese.
filleduchaos 2y ago
> I've spent just enough time studying that language in the last few months that I am calling it "Zhongwen" in my head and find it hard to write "Chinese" instead of 中文. I'm rather curious about this actually - do other bilinguals experience this? I first acquired French as a child and spent several years taking formal French lessons, and yet I simply call it French when I think, speak or write in English. A learner finding it hard to write "French" instead of "Le français" in an English sentence would come off as more than a little overzealous to me.
- adelie 2y ago
  i'm bilingual and have absolutely not experienced this. that being said, i think being bilingual - rather than a learner - does make it a lot easier to code-switch instinctively between different languages.

ljsprague 2y ago

[flagged]

ben_w 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
justsomehnguy 2y ago
Pacific Ocean.
- t-3 2y ago
  For a non-native speaker, sure, that's not obvious. For a native, especially if they're well read and have a decent vocabulary or have studied any Latin it's just fine. The many styles of englishizations of foreign words (romanization just doesn't quite fit here) and obsolete-in-terms-of-pronunciation spellings provide valuable context for pronunciation and meaning to people who have sufficient familiarity.
PaulHoule 2y ago
I think English spelling is a pain but overall I think 中文 is worse. There are an awful lot of characters to know for one thing. My understanding is that you have to work pretty hard to be literate in 中文. Also I understand that the horizon where 中文 gets hard to read is closer in time than it is English, that is even 150 year old texts are difficult to read and reading Confucius is harder than reading Chaucer. Contrast the problem of memorizing irregular spellings to the problem of remembering how to draw thousands of characters. I must admit that I really like Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua which is kind of a cleaned-up Latin. As a native English speaker who knows a lot of Latin roots from science and literature and who also has gotten good doses of Spanish and French, I can read the sample texts in that Wikipedia page right off that bat. It is a strange thing though that you can go through the first few chapters of a book on 中文 grammar and get the feeling there is something refreshingly regular about that language, almost as if it was an artificial language. When you get towards the end you find there are many things that will strain this sense of quick familiarity and I am told if you actually try to use the language it's harder than you think.

jmclnx 2y ago

There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.

deleted 2y ago
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svachalek 2y ago
Computers developed by English speakers for English speakers tended to use English, I am very skeptical that any more thought went into it than that.
- iainmerrick 2y ago
  I think there were a lot of historical contingencies involved. The nature of the language itself (small vs large alphabet, etc) is probably one of the least important. There was an interesting BBC article a while back about the decline of German usage in science: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29543708 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-29543708 They put it down to anti-German sentiment during WWI (not WWII as I would have assumed!) It’s pretty easy to imagine an alternative world where German was the common international language of science and became the basis of most programming languages too.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    The importance of German as a scientific language was even greater before WWI than claimed in that BBC article. While the BBC article estimates that of the scientific literature of the 19th century and of the pre-WWI 20th century a third was published in French, a third in English and a third in German, I believe that an estimate much closer to reality would be a quarter in French, a quarter in English and a half in German.
2y ago

dang 2y ago

Related: If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30577536 - March 2022 (7 comments) If English was Written Like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=462118 - Feb 2009 (32 comments) If English was written like Chinese - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70855 - Oct 2007 (14 comments)

Eric_WVGG 2y ago

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. reminds me of one of my favorite throw-away gags in George Alec Effinger’s A Fire in the Sun, a cyberpunk novel set in future Arabia, a character quotes “the great English shahrir, Wilyam al-Shaykh Sābir”

bad_username 2y ago
Reminds me of Antonio Stella Bottom Tile ( https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 https://youtu.be/adkWiJA9xR0 )
- dllthomas 2y ago
  ... and the bard Elron Hu, from a PKD story.
resolutebat 2y ago
A luminary icon much like Frank Zappa's Sheikh Yerbouti.
- justsomehnguy 2y ago
  Just yesterday I found out why there was a fine German gentleman in Stunts/4D Sports Driving https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmP0uAxz8Dc&t=59s

beardyw 2y ago

> So two, to, and too will each have their own yingzi..... We can simplify the task enormously with one more principle: syllables that rhyme can have yingzi that are variations on a theme. They already are aren't they?

bmacho 2y ago

If Japanese was written like Chinese https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40132281

lunaru 2y ago

If any language was written like Chinese has the same answer -- the written form of Chinese was not necessarily meant to be phonetic, although there are portions of it that have evolved to be phonetic. The characters have meanings and the grammar is very fluid to the point where a sequence of characters stringed together (such as in poetry) can be interpreted and debated. Cantonese and Mandarin are considered dialects, so I won't use that as an example, but this problem has already been solved in Korean. For a long time, Hangul did not exist and Korean scholars used Chinese as the written system despite speaking in a completely different language. This is obviously an old article (1999), but the fact that it doesn't consider how this is a solved problem from a real historical use case makes the musing incomplete.

bradrn 2y ago
You’re missing the point of the article. The primary aim is to explain how Chinese characters work, using English as a reference point.
mbivert 2y ago
Ah, I perhaps should have read all the comments before posting here, because it seems that you're answering my question, and confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development. This idea seems to be foreign to all native Chinese speakers I've encountered, and this seems to be in contradiction with what I can grasp from research. If I may, I've got another related question: Chinese speakers all parrot this idea that literary Chinese is to modern (let's set aside character simplification) Chinese what (ancient?) Greek is to English. But it's not my impression, at all; my intuition is that they don't properly understand neither Greek nor literary Chinese. For example, a modern Chinese speaker can be expected to read literary Chinese and at least make some sense out of it, but a modern English speaker won't even be able to read (ancient?) Greek, let alone interpreting it.
- CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
  >confirm this idea that phonetic interpretation of written Chinese is a "recent" development. As I understand it, this is a recent development as in the science of language is a recent development. We might not have known about it but it was always there. I think the comparaison with Greek or Latin is a good one. I can read modern French and Chinese, and my understanding of Latin and Classical Chinese is about the same: virtually nonexistent, at most a word here and there. The reason why Chinese understand it is because they learn it at school.

timbit42 2y ago

I'd prefer to switch to Korea's hangul.

latentsea 2y ago
The F word would all of a sudden lose it's punch. Puck the pucking puckers.
- grishka 2y ago
  What about the existing word "puck", as in hockey puck?
  - latentsea 2y ago
    "copy" would also become ambiguous with coffee :)
    - localfirst 2y ago
      i was thinking about this for a long time but some sort of indicator, maybe an accent or symbol to indicate the F sound this would radically expand the number of pronouncable words in Korean. with the goal being able to describe phonetically as accurately as possible any spoke word in human history. Scandinavian languages need not apply. There should be no alphabet that describes the sound of spitting.

SunlitCat 2y ago

As someone, still planning to tackle learning Chinese (mandarin) one day, this is very interesting!

brazzy 2y ago

> I've attempted in this sketch to lay out, by analogy, the nature and structure of the Chinese writing system. All of the concepts apply Do they? I think there is one section that has nothing whatsoever to do with how Chinese works, namely "Inflections". Chinese does not have them, at all. I guess the author felt compelled to at least give a token acknowledgement to the concept, even while it was irrelevant to what he was really going for (a parable about the Chinese writing system).

akavi 2y ago
Chinese has fewer inflections than English, but does have 儿 as a nominalizer (and one which is quite productive in northern dialects)
- canjobear 2y ago
  Also -们 as a pluralizer on pronouns and animate nouns.
  - akavi 2y ago
    I think I meant more fusional inflections. 们, 了, 着, 的, etc, don't affect the pronunciation of the root morpheme.
canjobear 2y ago
Interestingly Chinese did have things like this at the time the writing system formed, and they simply weren't written. You can see remnants of the old morphological system today in characters that alternate in tone. For example there used to be a suffix -s that turned a verb into a noun. During the Han Dynasty this turned into -h, and then later turned into the falling/departing/fourth tone. Hence 教 jiāo is the verb "to teach", from Old Chinese *kraw, and 教 jiào is the noun "teaching" from Old Chinese *kraws.

beryilma 2y ago

Turkish used to be written using Arabic characters before the Turkish Republic. Now, the Latin alphabet is used. So, it was fairly easy (probably not) to switch alphabets for the same underlying language. And 29 characters are sufficient to represent the sounds of the language with a couple of controversial accents like '^'. The sounds in Chinese are probably very different and nuanced, but for Turkish, I am always surprised that sounds were very similar to European languages so switching alphabets was possible.

CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
Then you might be even more surprised to hear the Latin alphabet is the official way to write Chinese phonetically (in mainland China), and is used to write on computers and phones. It's called pinyin.
- deleted 2y ago
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pringk02 2y ago
The issue is the opposite. Chinese has a comparitively small phonetic pallette (depending on how you view tones). Chinese written completely phoenetically can easily become incomprehensible. https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-the-meowsome-one-sound-poem-you-can-only-read/ https://ninchanese.com/blog/2022/05/09/the-lion-eating-poet-...
- mmaniac 2y ago
  The functional load of tones (that is, the importance of a pronunciation difference for distinguishing words) in Chinese is comparable to that of vowels[1] "Depending on how you view tones" dismisses the important phonemic value of tones. Writing Chinese completely phonetically includes writing the tones. [1]https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/levow/papers/fltonemandarin.p...
- emblaegh 2y ago

einpoklum 2y ago

"A type of speaking that rhymes with purse-- curse, of course." I was actually thinking "verse" :-\

throwanem 2y ago

I'm not sure we all that much need a (1999) on an article inflecting "bodacious" without apparent irony. I suppose it helps in the "before" direction, but I certainly wasn't going to assume this was written much after...

noirdujour 2y ago

The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another speaker. If all of China switched to using a phoenetic writing system, everyone would write everything differently. It'd be very difficult--impossible at some points--to read and write materials from other "dialects". However, with a logographic approach, everyone can understand that the character 工 means "work" even if I pronounce it like [wirk] and someone else pronounces it like [wak], for example. It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media. Obviously, this problem can be eliminated by eliminating individual "dialects", which is sort of promoted through the adoption of Mandarin Chinese. Many Chinese media is also dubbed in the standard dialect so that actors with regional dialects can be understood. As for Chinese characters in other languages, Japanese becomes a lot easier to read with the addition of Chinese characters. Kanji allows sentences to be shorter, less ambiguious, and easier to parse. Unlike Chinese, each character is not just a single syllable, and there are many homonyms in Japanese because there's a smaller set of sounds. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-ever-consider-a-phonetic-writing-system#46659 https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/46658/did-china-...

aikinai 2y ago
This is a great explanation of important points many people fail to recognize. Thank you!
j7ake 2y ago
My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing. However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.
- jameshart 2y ago
  The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)

cynicalpeace 2y ago

I studied Chinese for 2 years in University and hitchhiked mainland China in 2019. A common misconception is that Chinese "makes more sense" because many characters look like what they mean. So you can guess what a new character means just by looking at it. A downside is that for many Chinese characters it becomes impossible to know how to pronounce a new word. I've seen adult native speakers ask how to pronounce a new word many times. Oftentimes there are hints in the characters (the "phonetics" mentioned by the writer), but usually not enough to guess correctly. English is also bad at this, ironically. Spanish is really good at this, if not the best. When you come across a new word, it's 99.99% of the time pronounced how its written.

mcmoor 2y ago
> English is also bad at this, ironically https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/pronounce
dreamcompiler 2y ago
Japanese is great for this also, at least for signage written in Katakana or Hiragana. If you learn those alphabets you will always know how to pronounce words written in them. Kanji is a very different story of course.
- brigandish 2y ago
  There are exceptions, certainly in colloquial speech variants, 雰囲気 and 原因 come to mind. Both have an annoying ん ("n") in the middle that makes them a pain to pronounce even for natives, so the first gets changed from ふんいき to ふいんき and the latter from げんいん to げいいん. So, if written properly in hiragana you'd know how to pronounce them "properly" but not necessarily as they're actually used by a significant amount of people when spoken. Even the auto-kanji-conversion of my keyboard respects the variants.
  - Liquid_Fire 2y ago
    I can accept ふいんき as an exception, but for 原因 that's just a consequence of the rules for how to pronounce ん, which depends on the surrounding sounds (it's not quite い either). I wouldn't really call it an exception. Consider 一千円, 禁煙 etc all of which are pronounced like that.

grishka 2y ago

> It's as if the US had its own versions of a large fraction of English yingzi. English is a foreign language for me. I don't know how native speakers see it, but to me it does sometimes feel like US English is the "simplified" one compared to British.

brigandish 2y ago
All us Brits agree with you, though I'm not sure the Scots can be called native speakers.
School-Cotton 2y ago
Why? Other than a comparatively small number of different spellings (“color” etc.) how is American English simpler?
- kaashif 2y ago
  This isn't language, it's accent, but in America the vast majority of speakers merge lots of vowels - cot/caught are merged, Mary/marry/merry are merged. It certainly does simplify pronunciation.
  - kayodelycaon 2y ago
    This is dependent on regional accents. For my Midwestern accent cot and caught are most definitely not merged. However I did notice that in Seattle, no one can hear my name properly due to a merged consonant.
    - kaashif 2y ago
      Which consonant merger is that?
      - kayodelycaon 2y ago
        Some D and T sounds.

fromMars 2y ago

No. Just no. Literacy is incredibly difficult in a language that requires knowing 10,000 characters to learn it.

mbivert 2y ago

> Instead we'll use it only for king, which will be the phonetic for this set, and add little signs called radicals to distinguish the rest This is something I would dearly enjoy to have a genuine expert opinion on. I've looked at some research[0] (§1.3 in particular), and as far as I understand, the idea that radicals are essentially/purely phonetic doesn't match with historical records. Meaning, if I understand correctly, characters used to be systematically considered as semantic combinations, with authors "debating" about the proper way to interpret some characters (again, see §1.3 where Xu Shen proposes different interpretations than Confucius's). [0]: http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf http://crlao.ehess.fr/docannexe/file/1513/bottero.wen_zi.pdf

CorrectHorseBat 2y ago
I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components, radicals are just an afterthought to make dictionairies work. I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters, they were not around when the characters were created, were not trained to do science and didn't know as much about the evolution of languages as us.
- mbivert 2y ago
  > I've always learned that there are sound components and meaning components The Shuowen indeed already mentions sounds. But the fact that there are sound components isn't contradictory with them being also semantic. > I don't think we need to look too much about what ancient scholars thought about characters Let's say that I enjoy the study of ancient thought processes, and that some of it seems to be recorded in etymology & the like. > were not trained to do science I believe their approaches were different, more "naive" perhaps, which might be the source of confusion. Let me give you and example where we currently fall short, and where they did not. Consider political organisation: from Plato (The Republic) we knew that they studied the way one political system changes to another, and studied the causes of this evolution. Yet, the overwhelming majority of contemporary people have been "in-doctrinated" to think that democracy is paramount. Not only are we disregarding history and previous data, but most businesses, where we all spend a considerable amount of time, for subsistence, are fundamentally non-democratic: we're also severely inconsistent. Perhaps ancient Greeks didn't had modern means (e.g. peer-reviewed papers, social "sciences"), but they nevertheless captured the jest of it, while we're essentially not.

ufoTofu 2y ago

so meaning+sound = well coded language system

ufoTofu 2y ago

meaning + sound = a well coded language system

DeathArrow 2y ago

Or writing in English can go the other way and become ortophonetic like Italian and Romanian, where each letter denotes a sound and "to", "too" and "two" will become "tu".

ggm 2y ago

I can't entirely buy this line of reasoning because it depends on rhyming/sounds-like reasoning but Mandarin and Cantonese are not sound alike. And, I would not expect all sound-like root terms to work in both. I mean french and English sound alike mostly but in no way is sun/son translating to soleil/fils.

TheGlav 2y ago
The author expanded on that later in the article, saying it was not quite right and doesn't always work, but it's a good analogy.

CalRobert 2y ago

In English, of course, the title of this might be "If English were written like Chinese" Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.

dadarecit 2y ago
how do you spell waffling in chinese

MrDresden 2y ago

I've recently read the "Remembrance of the Earth's past" trilogy in english and the first thing that struck me was how different the dialogue (both internal and external) felt to novels which were written originally in english. Been wondering if it had anything to do with the way language structures differ between chinese and english.

luyu_wu 2y ago
To some degree yes, but mostly because Cixin Liu is just an incredibly unique writer in style!

fguerraz 2y ago

I loved that I got tricked into learning something about Chinese!

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago

> The basic principle will be, one yingzi for a syllable with a particular meaning The problem is that the English language does not have this structure, whereas Chinese does. The individual syllables in Chinese words have their own independent meanings. If you break apart the English word "random," "ran" and "dom" don't independently mean anything. The reason why Chinese characters work well for Chinese is because the fundamental unit of Chinese is really the syllable, rather than the word. English isn't like that, so a Chinese-like writing system would be a very poor fit to the English language. That being said, I sometimes wonder whether this property of Chinese comes from the writing system, or whether it preexisted writing. In other words, to what extent has Chinese been influenced by its writing system?

bobafett-9902 2y ago

can someone explain the linguistic logic to me like I'm five? I've read it through twice and I don't understand how the connection is made between the characters and the english language?

z500 2y ago
It's an imagining of how the principles used to construct Chinese characters could be applied to English. The author names these hypothetical English characters yingzi, after hanzi.

zumu 2y ago

> Winston Churchill would be represented by hanzi that would be transliterated Wensuteng Chuerqilu. If we actually used Chinese characters, we would write Churchill with meaningful hanzi and not strictly transliterate. Though there'd of course be variations as there are variations in spelling. The only Chinese I know is through Japanese, but I imagine Churchill would look something like 教丘

NeuroCase 2y ago

[dead]

Green-Man 2y ago

Could anyone find a live link to the "Belorussian translation" mentioned at the beginning? I wasn't able to find another version with search engines or Waybach machine.