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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 log

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…)
  - simiones 2y ago
    The use of 2nd is a better example of the limitations of this system. The reality of written Standard Chinese is that you'd use "2nd" to write both "second", but also "deuxieme", instead of writing "2eme".
    - jameshart 2y ago
      Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta? Also helps you appreciate that Japan is not completely insane for having seemingly completely unrelated number words for different contexts, even though they write them with the same numeral. Turns out, so do many western languages (although generally only for ordinal/cardinal, not for the endless range of counters Japanese has) The fact that as a native English speaker this seems like not how you actually read or write numerals at all - no, of course 3 doesn’t ’read’ as ‘thi(r)’ - also suggests that there is a less mechanistic way to understand the relationships between hanzi and words than learners often try to apply (we want to find the ‘rules’ that must underpin these things), and that the way native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese think of the relationship between these symbols and the words they are writing is much more organic - and that’s okay.
      - mcmoor 2y ago
        > seemingly completely unrelated number words for different context I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.
- lupire 2y ago
  But it also shows that you don't need logograms. We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.
  - ObnoxiousProxy 2y ago
    Unlike with numbers, day to day language needs to convey a larger variety of concepts hence why logograms are still needed. Much like how more advanced math requires different symbols and operators that are akin to mathematical logograms to convey additional concepts beyond the fundamental quantities of 0 to 9. Alphabets are often linked to sound, and it would be a tremendous challenge to create an "alphabet" analogue that links to a set of fundamental concepts that you can somehow rearrange to form higher level concepts and can still be universally understood without it linking to sound.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
rat87 2y ago
> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. English? Do you mean the UK? US? My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  newbie take: there is one Chinese language intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages expert take: there is one Chinese language There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
  - ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - j16sdiz 2y ago
      How how Yi? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language
    - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
      Tibet is a part of China today. Whether Tibet should be a part of China is up for debate, but the fact that it has been completely integrated into the PRC for at least 70 years now isn't really. I'll be the first one to argue that the PRC's moral claim to the territory comes from it being conquered by the Mongolians during the Yuan dynasty is lame. But it still doesn't mean anything when China controls it today. And that's just the TAR, there are plenty of Tibetans living in areas of China that aren't very contested as not being part of China.
- raincole 2y ago
  The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.
gpvos 2y ago
As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Franco-Germanic, por favor.
  - samus 2y ago
    Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      That sounds like a carefully worded response and I will respect it as such. Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- lolinder 2y ago
  There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
syntaxing 2y ago
It’s worth noting that the first emperor of China was the one that unified the language. The country was at war for about 250 years during the warring state period. One of the main pushes to maintain unification was standardized writing system throughout the country, increase of commerce, and unified monetary system. Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "unified the language". I think you mean script, rather than language, given the plurality of those extant even today.
latentsea 2y ago
I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.
- krispyfi 2y ago
  Korean is easier to pronounce, but Japanese is easier to read. Try reading a Japanese children's book that doesn't use kanji. It's excruciating.
  - latentsea 2y ago
    That hasn't been my experience of both languages.
  - localfirst 2y ago
    Most HN users who are coders should be able to read and write Korean within a few hours... Good luck with any other language. Japanese is tougher since you have to memorize thousands of what are basically hieroglyphics and learn two separate alphabets (one for native Japanese, another for foreign). With Korean you can express many sounds phonetically (with some abstractions for non-korean sounds)
- lbotos 2y ago
  I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese. I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps: たまねぎ玉ねぎいつつ五つ In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying to convey imo)
  - latentsea 2y ago
    I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean. I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does. With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think you know how to read it correctly, can never quite be sure, look it up every time as a consequence and are surprised often enough at the reading that you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks. In contrast I was able to score 50% on the reading section of TOPIK II after only 4 months of study. So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.
robomartin 2y ago
If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.
- School-Cotton 2y ago
  Eh, it’s “hard” for the U.S. to switch from customary to metric units because nobody really cares enough to do so. The forces causing language standardization (in many countries, not just China) are much more powerful.
- bdowling 2y ago
  Americans use metric where it's required by law (e.g., food and drug packaging), it just takes government force. Government force can also change a population's language. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  > I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.
- numpad0 2y ago
  VTubers and ~15 years. Media, in generalized form. The velocity of weebs internalizing fringe Japanese concepts is astonishing.
  - devnullbrain 2y ago
    Not as fast as the reverse. It's surprising how much Japanese is just borrowed English written in katakana.
- 2y ago
jcranmer 2y ago
I'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation. For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese. For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it. The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).
- faitswulff 2y ago
  I don't see how your explanation and GP's explanations are mutually exclusive. To add some detail to this point: > my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.
lupire 2y ago
You don't need logograms for that. You don't need a phonetic alphabet if all you want is a visual alphabet. You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.
Dalewyn 2y ago
>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. I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.
russdill 2y ago
Pronouncing two identical sequences of characters differently depending on dialect doesn't appear to be a problem in English.
- simiones 2y ago
  The dialects of English (such as Scots) most certainly do not spell words the same as a general rule. The fact that there are slight pronunciation differences between different accents of standard English is not at all the same as writing entirely different words with the same sequence of characters. For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".
  - russdill 2y ago
    The influence of loan words on English give vastly different pronunciations of words even regionally. For extreme examples see "shibboleth", especially in the UK.
    - simiones 2y ago
      What I've found with some cursory googling is mostly place names, which I agree often have major differences between spelling and pronunciation. Even there, many of the examples on the Wikipedia page are still plausible spellings for the pronunciation, especially given how ambiguous English spelling is in the first place. Others seem more like nicknames that have essentially replaced the original full name of the place, while the full name is conserved in the spelling.
wodenokoto 2y ago
When I was studying Mandarin Chinese at a school in Shanghai, borrowed a book on Shanghainese. The reason why everyone in shanghai aren’t writing “everything different” is because they are not writing in Shanghainese. They are writing in Mandarin. I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial. Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.
twixfel 2y ago
This explanation doesn't make any sense. Your example is two words which are barely different at all in their pronunciation, certainly not sufficiently to cause unintelligibility (i.e. [wirk] vs [wak]). Differences in pronunciation of this kind are everywhere in English.
geokon 2y ago
> It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles. Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying" I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison
- faitswulff 2y ago
  I’m not 100% bilingual, but my take is that there’s a lot more to be gained from the subtitles due to homophones, wordplay, and literary allusions. It’s like getting genius.com rap annotations in real time for any metaphors or references.
- ozmodiar 2y ago
  This jives with my experience as well. Chinese has a ton of near homophones that are distinguished by tone. One interesting result of this is that Chinese speakers seem to hate hate hate accents, even just from other parts of China. I hear because it's just mentally taxing to listen to. Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.
- PinkSheep 2y ago
  Not Chinese, but I might call myself trilingual and this is exactly something that has wondered me. Language "pair": ru>de>en In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net. It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts. The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two. English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies. Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent. Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.
simiones 2y ago
As far as I understand this, this is quite an oversimplification. The differences between different dialects of Chinese is huge, especially in terms of vocabulary. The writing system isn't as purely logographic as it is often touted. There are only ~4000 characters in common use (university level literacy), but many more common words. So, lots of words are written with multiple characters. In Standard Chinese (corresponding mostly to the dialect of Beijing), each of the characters in a word represents a syllable in that word. This correspondence doesn't hold for other dialects. Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".

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…)
- simiones 2y ago
  The use of 2nd is a better example of the limitations of this system. The reality of written Standard Chinese is that you'd use "2nd" to write both "second", but also "deuxieme", instead of writing "2eme".
  - jameshart 2y ago
    Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta? Also helps you appreciate that Japan is not completely insane for having seemingly completely unrelated number words for different contexts, even though they write them with the same numeral. Turns out, so do many western languages (although generally only for ordinal/cardinal, not for the endless range of counters Japanese has) The fact that as a native English speaker this seems like not how you actually read or write numerals at all - no, of course 3 doesn’t ’read’ as ‘thi(r)’ - also suggests that there is a less mechanistic way to understand the relationships between hanzi and words than learners often try to apply (we want to find the ‘rules’ that must underpin these things), and that the way native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese think of the relationship between these symbols and the words they are writing is much more organic - and that’s okay.
    - mcmoor 2y ago
      > seemingly completely unrelated number words for different context I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.
lupire 2y ago
But it also shows that you don't need logograms. We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.
- ObnoxiousProxy 2y ago
  Unlike with numbers, day to day language needs to convey a larger variety of concepts hence why logograms are still needed. Much like how more advanced math requires different symbols and operators that are akin to mathematical logograms to convey additional concepts beyond the fundamental quantities of 0 to 9. Alphabets are often linked to sound, and it would be a tremendous challenge to create an "alphabet" analogue that links to a set of fundamental concepts that you can somehow rearrange to form higher level concepts and can still be universally understood without it linking to sound.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

rat87 2y ago

> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. English? Do you mean the UK? US? My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?

seanmcdirmid 2y ago
newbie take: there is one Chinese language intermediate take: there are many Chinese languages expert take: there is one Chinese language There are also plenty of languages in China that are not Chinese or a dialect of Chinese. Tibetan and Mongolian (and their many dialects) are obviously not Chinese. Chinese written language is used as a phonetic script for some minority languages (although many are based on uighur script is used a lot also, Uighur itself uses arabic).
- ThePowerOfFuet 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - j16sdiz 2y ago
    How how Yi? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuosu_language
  - seanmcdirmid 2y ago
    Tibet is a part of China today. Whether Tibet should be a part of China is up for debate, but the fact that it has been completely integrated into the PRC for at least 70 years now isn't really. I'll be the first one to argue that the PRC's moral claim to the territory comes from it being conquered by the Mongolians during the Yuan dynasty is lame. But it still doesn't mean anything when China controls it today. And that's just the TAR, there are plenty of Tibetans living in areas of China that aren't very contested as not being part of China.
raincole 2y ago
The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.

gpvos 2y ago

As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.

gerdesj 2y ago
On a recent holiday to to Hong Kong {sp}, I noted the Metro announcements were in Cantonese, Mandarin and then English. I also noted that apologies and other minor social skirmishes and interactions, eg after bumping into someone, were mostly delivered in English. When in Rome, speak English: its the French language.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Franco-Germanic, por favor.
- samus 2y ago
  Hong Kong is a special case where English still has higher prestige to begin with. Locals sometimes code-switch to English even if everyone present would understand Cantonese.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    That sounds like a carefully worded response and I will respect it as such. Language is important in so many ways - it often defines who you are, regardless of where you are.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
lolinder 2y ago
There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distinct language from Spanish even though the two are more mutually intelligible than Scots (a "dialect") and American English are. Portugal has the sovereign government to back up its claim to having its own language where Scotland does not. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_an_army_and_navy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...

syntaxing 2y ago

It’s worth noting that the first emperor of China was the one that unified the language. The country was at war for about 250 years during the warring state period. One of the main pushes to maintain unification was standardized writing system throughout the country, increase of commerce, and unified monetary system. Also somewhat disputed, but the first emperor of China killed all the scholars from every other nation they conquered to facilitate the language unification.

gerdesj 2y ago
"unified the language". I think you mean script, rather than language, given the plurality of those extant even today.

latentsea 2y ago

I don't think Kanji makes Japanese easier to read. Korean, ditched it, and it's comparatively easier to read.

krispyfi 2y ago
Korean is easier to pronounce, but Japanese is easier to read. Try reading a Japanese children's book that doesn't use kanji. It's excruciating.
- latentsea 2y ago
  That hasn't been my experience of both languages.
- localfirst 2y ago
  Most HN users who are coders should be able to read and write Korean within a few hours... Good luck with any other language. Japanese is tougher since you have to memorize thousands of what are basically hieroglyphics and learn two separate alphabets (one for native Japanese, another for foreign). With Korean you can express many sounds phonetically (with some abstractions for non-korean sounds)
lbotos 2y ago
I don’t speak or read Korean but I am studying Japanese. I think GP was trying to say that kanji helps: たまねぎ玉ねぎいつつ五つ In both of these examples the words are the same. I’m still early enough in my studies that I don’t know the rules of when someone might choose to write one way or the other, but I’ve seen examples of ads that “spell it out” with hiragana. (Which is harder for me to read, which is what GP was trying to convey imo)
- latentsea 2y ago
  I've been fluent in Japanese for over a decade and am about 6 months into studying Korean. I understand the issues of Kanji vs no Kanji well. Korean successful ditched it, isn't painful to read, is far more accessible to read for beginners, and doesn't suffer from an extreme long-tail of ambiguous difficult readings like Japanese does. With Japanese no matter how many vocab you learn, you hit new words like 仲人, think you know how to read it correctly, can never quite be sure, look it up every time as a consequence and are surprised often enough at the reading that you never really settle into a sense of confidently being able to read new words correctly. It sucks. In contrast I was able to score 50% on the reading section of TOPIK II after only 4 months of study. So, on balance I'd say reading Korean is way easier because they ditched Kanji.

robomartin 2y ago

If it is nearly impossible to switch the US from imperial to metric, I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect. I think the answer is measured in generations.

School-Cotton 2y ago
Eh, it’s “hard” for the U.S. to switch from customary to metric units because nobody really cares enough to do so. The forces causing language standardization (in many countries, not just China) are much more powerful.
bdowling 2y ago
Americans use metric where it's required by law (e.g., food and drug packaging), it just takes government force. Government force can also change a population's language. See, e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglicisation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinicization
Joker_vD 2y ago
> I cannot imagine what it would take to unify a massive population under a single dialect Ask French how they've managed to (almost) eradicate the Occitan and Breton and spread the Parisian dialect as the offical variant of French language throughout the country.
numpad0 2y ago
VTubers and ~15 years. Media, in generalized form. The velocity of weebs internalizing fringe Japanese concepts is astonishing.
- devnullbrain 2y ago
  Not as fast as the reverse. It's surprising how much Japanese is just borrowed English written in katakana.
2y ago

jcranmer 2y ago

I'm not entirely certain that's a good explanation. For most of history, literacy isn't exactly common. I'm not finding easily accessible any estimates of literacy rates for early (say, Qin dynasty) China, but numbers for medieval Europe suggest something like 10-30% for relatively broad definitions of literacy, which seem to be commensurate for estimates for Qing dynasty China. Especially if you look at the period at which Chinese characters essentially ossify into their modern form, it's not clear to me that there's a wide diversity of topolects that it has to approximate, almost certainly nothing to the degree of modern Chinese. For another thing, mediating among linguistic diversity is something that all of our other scripts have had to do. Cuneiform was used to write the administrative languages of different language families (Semitic languages like Akkadian, Indo-European like Persian, and who-knows-what-language-family-these-are like Elamite), and yet it was a syllabary. Even Chinese script itself starts devolving into a syllabary when Japanese adapts it. The reason I think Chinese resisted becoming a syllabary was because Chinese was poorly suited for such a transition: my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. Furthermore, reconstructions of Old Chinese also suggest a relatively complex phonotactic structure, which means a syllabary that largely covers a CV-syllable scheme is hard to adapt. In other words, Chinese may have been a rare language in that conversion from a logography to a syllabary would not have dramatically reduced the amount of characters one would have had to have learned. (Note also that the reduction of a syllabary to an alphabet, abjad, or abugida happened effectively twice, with Phoenician (or some ancestor) and Korean Hangul).

faitswulff 2y ago
I don't see how your explanation and GP's explanations are mutually exclusive. To add some detail to this point: > my understanding is that words in Chinese are largely monosyllabic and involve a decently high degree of homophones. A syllabary would have had to represent phonetics as well as tones, which would have multiplied the required syllabary by n number of tones. For instance, Mandarin has 4 (or arguably 5) tones. The "ah" sound has four pronunciations: ā, á, ǎ, and à. Hong Kong Cantonese has at least 6 tones, having purportedly lost a few. Different dialects of Chinese have different numbers of tones, and some have been lost or gained within the same dialect throughout history.

lupire 2y ago

You don't need logograms for that. You don't need a phonetic alphabet if all you want is a visual alphabet. You could write a word / morpheme as a string of standard strokes / radical characters, instead of as overlapping standard strokes.

Dalewyn 2y ago

>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. I'd like to point out this isn't unique to CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean). Languages descending from or based on Latin can be understood, at least very generally, by each other because the equivalent words in each language usually have similar spellings or appearances.

russdill 2y ago

Pronouncing two identical sequences of characters differently depending on dialect doesn't appear to be a problem in English.

simiones 2y ago
The dialects of English (such as Scots) most certainly do not spell words the same as a general rule. The fact that there are slight pronunciation differences between different accents of standard English is not at all the same as writing entirely different words with the same sequence of characters. For example, the word for "enemy" in Mandarin is "dírén", in Cantonese it is "dik6 jan4", in Shanghainese it is "dih nyin", and in Hakka it is "tit5 ngin11" (including different tone markers, I'm taking these translations from different sites). All of them would write it as "敵人". These words are far more different though than the difference in how an American and Englishman would pronounce "four".
- russdill 2y ago
  The influence of loan words on English give vastly different pronunciations of words even regionally. For extreme examples see "shibboleth", especially in the UK.
  - simiones 2y ago
    What I've found with some cursory googling is mostly place names, which I agree often have major differences between spelling and pronunciation. Even there, many of the examples on the Wikipedia page are still plausible spellings for the pronunciation, especially given how ambiguous English spelling is in the first place. Others seem more like nicknames that have essentially replaced the original full name of the place, while the full name is conserved in the spelling.

wodenokoto 2y ago

When I was studying Mandarin Chinese at a school in Shanghai, borrowed a book on Shanghainese. The reason why everyone in shanghai aren’t writing “everything different” is because they are not writing in Shanghainese. They are writing in Mandarin. I disagree on your assessment of Japanese. I would argue that Japanese is the most difficult written language in common usage / not artificial. Moreover, one of the greatest literary achievements of Japan, “The Pillow Book” is written entirely in hiragana. Today you have so much text that leans into the resolve of ambiguity that kanji lends that you’d lose a lot of writings were everyone to unlearn kanji, but I disagree that it’s an aid, and had Japan developed its own writing system, it would have felt a lot more like hiragana than kanji.

twixfel 2y ago

This explanation doesn't make any sense. Your example is two words which are barely different at all in their pronunciation, certainly not sufficiently to cause unintelligibility (i.e. [wirk] vs [wak]). Differences in pronunciation of this kind are everywhere in English.

geokon 2y ago

> It's one of the reasons why subtitles are so prevalent in Chinese media I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles. Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying" I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison

faitswulff 2y ago
I’m not 100% bilingual, but my take is that there’s a lot more to be gained from the subtitles due to homophones, wordplay, and literary allusions. It’s like getting genius.com rap annotations in real time for any metaphors or references.
ozmodiar 2y ago
This jives with my experience as well. Chinese has a ton of near homophones that are distinguished by tone. One interesting result of this is that Chinese speakers seem to hate hate hate accents, even just from other parts of China. I hear because it's just mentally taxing to listen to. Though I'm certainly not 100% bilingual. I like to think it isn't just that I'm annoying to listen to. I have heard other speakers get put down as sounding like 'birds chirping' which seems to be a popular way to describe accents.
PinkSheep 2y ago
Not Chinese, but I might call myself trilingual and this is exactly something that has wondered me. Language "pair": ru>de>en In very general terms, the longer you listen to a particular voice, the better you get at reconstructing the acoustically lost parts of the words. Imagine hearing low bitrate radio transmission for the first time. It's very hard to understand the words, but over time you'll get accustomed to the noise and the voice, it'll become intelligible to you. Quite literally training your neural net. It's easy for me to read/listen to RU (native). I have no problem whatsoever listening to DE, but mentally it must be more taxing to also follow the text/train of thought (beyond very short-term memory) because I notice to be swaying away more often unless remain concentrated. So it's a little harder to memorize stuff in DE or read long thoughtful texts. The walkie-talkie example from above is not arbitrary. I have experienced exactly that when learning DE and going to game servers with voice. Back then the microphones were all poor and noisy, it was much tougher to understand people. The adaptation took me about a week or two. English is very specific to me. Remember what a radar chart is? That's it, one aspect is skilled to 100% and others are closer to zero. As you can ~see~ read, my writing is doing well. Listening to cleanly recorded and spoken content such as Youtube presents no issues. As with DE, I might not follow the content very well, but I can hear and understand all of it. Movies? Oh dear, subtitles please! Not only because the voice isn't recorded in a studio (sometimes whispering, sometimes mumbling etc.) but the variety of language (vocabulary, slang) and pronunciations overload me to the point of not understanding the spoken language. Yet because my general comprehension of English is good, I'd be mostly reading subtitles to not miss anything. As it stands, I would prefer either DE or RU in movies. Years ago I had the pleasure to finally subscribe to AdoredTV on Youtube because of his content. Previously, I had skipped a video or two due to his Scottish accent. Slowly I have got used to it though. Admittedly, he had been trying to have an understandable pronunciation; some of the funny "Scottish English" videos I still can't understand. But when we had shown Adored's videos to friends, it was them who couldn't understand a word, because they were new to his accent. Therefore I can second that subtitles are helpful, especially if you are distracted from listening or need assistance to understand spoken language (thus serves as a "gap filler"). Now knowing that the Chinese have THIS much trouble with their own tongue, I feel pity for them.

simiones 2y ago

As far as I understand this, this is quite an oversimplification. The differences between different dialects of Chinese is huge, especially in terms of vocabulary. The writing system isn't as purely logographic as it is often touted. There are only ~4000 characters in common use (university level literacy), but many more common words. So, lots of words are written with multiple characters. In Standard Chinese (corresponding mostly to the dialect of Beijing), each of the characters in a word represents a syllable in that word. This correspondence doesn't hold for other dialects. Overall, people speaking other dialects of Chinese than the standard essentially write in a different language then they speak, unless they also adapt a different variety of written Chinese and lose any mutual intelligibility (a lot of such varieties exist, though few are standardized). It is in some ways like writing English words with the latin spelling of their etymology, say writing the English phrase "Jules appreciates art" and the French phrase "Jules apprecie l'art" both as "Iulius appretio ars".