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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'

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.
  - rahimnathwani 2y ago
    I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana. If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write: A) Churchill B) 丘吉尔 But they will never write: C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B) I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).
    - raincole 2y ago
      The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was not invented to spell foregin words.
      - PaulHoule 2y ago
        I understand it they incorporate foreign words by matching up with Chinese characters bearing the matching syllables with some preference for preserving semantics, repetition, and an implied semantic anyway that is in the consciousness of the reader for either the native or foreign word: it must matter that a person’s name is spelled “stream creek creek” but in the end it is best kept in 中文.
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).

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.
- rahimnathwani 2y ago
  I feel like bopomofo and pinyin don't serve the same purpose as katakana. If Chinese folks want to write Churchill, they might write: A) Churchill B) 丘吉尔 But they will never write: C) Qiūjí'ěr (the pinyin for B) I've never seen an adult Chinese use pinyin for anything other than typing (as an input method for Chinese characters).
  - raincole 2y ago
    The purpose of bopomofo was, historically, to standardize Mandarin across the whole China (ROC, not PROC). It was not invented to spell foregin words.
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      I understand it they incorporate foreign words by matching up with Chinese characters bearing the matching syllables with some preference for preserving semantics, repetition, and an implied semantic anyway that is in the consciousness of the reader for either the native or foreign word: it must matter that a person’s name is spelled “stream creek creek” but in the end it is best kept in 中文.

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).