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The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would

The poem is written in Classical Chinese, which was spoken over 2000 years ago, and back then would have been intelligible to a listener because the words would have sounded different. Even today, they sound different in e.g. Cantonese. There's a close relative of Mandarin (Dungan) which is written in the Cyrillic alphabet. The spoken language is tonal, but tones aren't used in the written language because written words are polysyllabic, and if you know how to speak Dungan, you can reliably infer the tones. https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm https://www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm

porphyra 2y ago
The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.
- DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
  You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0]. In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
  - DonaldFisk 2y ago
    In normal texts, that's correct. However, written Chinese does contains semantic information which the spoken language and Pinyin lack and, unlike English, has fewer distinct syllables, and seldom borrows words from other languages. So someone who's literate in Chinese would usually be able to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words when written down, as they would already know the meaning of all their component characters, but might struggle if they were written phonetically. This is like having a good knowledge of Classical Greek when encountering words like nephropathy or myocarditis for the first time. It still isn't a very good argument, though. Most English speakers get by without any knowledge of classical languages, and accept having to look up words in a dictionary.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. Then, you can guess the meaning of the character based on context, and possibly hints from the character itself about pronunciation and/or meaning (though this is very hit-or-miss, because many characters don't contain obvious hints). In order to reliably know all of the context surrounding a character, you need to know about 3000 characters total (that's the point at which you can recognize 99% of characters on a page). This is still a very tall order, which takes years of study to achieve. The Chinese characters do indeed contain semantic information that Pinyin (the standard Romanization) does not, but in practice, you don't need that extra semantic information. If you write down a single word in Pinyin, it may have a few homophones, whereas the same word, written in Chinese characters, would be unambiguous. However, in written Pinyin texts, you would almost always be able to figure out which word is meant from context. In the few cases in which that would not be possible, the author could slightly rephrase the text to make it unambiguous. Most languages on Earth (that have a writing system) are written using alphabets. Chinese is not so special that it could not be written using an alphabet as well. The reason why China hasn't switched to an alphabetic script is because of cultural attachment to the script, not because the Pinyin doesn't work just as well in a practical sense.
      - DonaldFisk 2y ago
        > Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. In what I wrote, I was assuming there would be no unfamiliar characters, but there would be one or more unfamiliar words composed of two or more characters. I was trying to put forward the best argument I could think of for retaining the characters, but like you, have decided it isn't worth the additional effort of learning thousands of characters up front to become literate when you can use a phonetic script and look up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary instead.
    - int_19h 2y ago
      The argument isn't that the more complicated spelling is unlearnable, but that it could be much easier to learn. And yes, this is also 100% applicable to English.
  - Chathamization 2y ago
    It would result in a pretty severe loss of fidelity. You may think it’s not needed, because that information isn’t available in spoken Chinese. The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess. The same goes for Chinese. Written languages, for the most part, are more than a simple transcription of spoken sounds.
    - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
      > In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess. Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. Chinese would be just as intelligible if written in a phonetic script (like Pinyin) as it is when written using the characters. Now, it would be an incredibly shocking transition for Chinese people who have already spent their entire lives writing with characters. However, after the transition to Pinyin, especially for young people who wouldn't ever learn the characters, written Chinese would still be perfectly understandable. That being said, I don't favor replacing the characters, because the transition would be extremely difficult and because the characters are very culturally important to China. They've been in use for a good 3000 years, and people are very attached to them. Phonetic scripts are technically superior, but the cultural and practical arguments for sticking with the characters are still stronger.
      - Chathamization 2y ago
        > Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. I was talking about English in that paragraph: > The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.

porphyra 2y ago

The poem uses now-rare characters from classical Chinese but it was written in the 1930s and uses the modern Mandarin pronunciation of said characters. The whole point of the poem is to make everything "shi" in modern Mandarin pronunciation, to argue against switching from Chinese characters to Latin alphabet romanization.

DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
You can also construct ridiculous sentences in English that no native speaker will understand [0]. In normal texts written in modern Chinese, this is not a problem. Nobody writes real texts like the "shi" poem. In cases where something can only be understood in written form, you can rephrase it to avoid homophones. 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffal...
- DonaldFisk 2y ago
  In normal texts, that's correct. However, written Chinese does contains semantic information which the spoken language and Pinyin lack and, unlike English, has fewer distinct syllables, and seldom borrows words from other languages. So someone who's literate in Chinese would usually be able to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words when written down, as they would already know the meaning of all their component characters, but might struggle if they were written phonetically. This is like having a good knowledge of Classical Greek when encountering words like nephropathy or myocarditis for the first time. It still isn't a very good argument, though. Most English speakers get by without any knowledge of classical languages, and accept having to look up words in a dictionary.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. Then, you can guess the meaning of the character based on context, and possibly hints from the character itself about pronunciation and/or meaning (though this is very hit-or-miss, because many characters don't contain obvious hints). In order to reliably know all of the context surrounding a character, you need to know about 3000 characters total (that's the point at which you can recognize 99% of characters on a page). This is still a very tall order, which takes years of study to achieve. The Chinese characters do indeed contain semantic information that Pinyin (the standard Romanization) does not, but in practice, you don't need that extra semantic information. If you write down a single word in Pinyin, it may have a few homophones, whereas the same word, written in Chinese characters, would be unambiguous. However, in written Pinyin texts, you would almost always be able to figure out which word is meant from context. In the few cases in which that would not be possible, the author could slightly rephrase the text to make it unambiguous. Most languages on Earth (that have a writing system) are written using alphabets. Chinese is not so special that it could not be written using an alphabet as well. The reason why China hasn't switched to an alphabetic script is because of cultural attachment to the script, not because the Pinyin doesn't work just as well in a practical sense.
    - DonaldFisk 2y ago
      > Someone who's literate in Chinese would only be able to infer the meaning of an unfamiliar character if they already knew all of the surrounding characters. In what I wrote, I was assuming there would be no unfamiliar characters, but there would be one or more unfamiliar words composed of two or more characters. I was trying to put forward the best argument I could think of for retaining the characters, but like you, have decided it isn't worth the additional effort of learning thousands of characters up front to become literate when you can use a phonetic script and look up any unfamiliar words in a dictionary instead.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    The argument isn't that the more complicated spelling is unlearnable, but that it could be much easier to learn. And yes, this is also 100% applicable to English.
- Chathamization 2y ago
  It would result in a pretty severe loss of fidelity. You may think it’s not needed, because that information isn’t available in spoken Chinese. The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess. The same goes for Chinese. Written languages, for the most part, are more than a simple transcription of spoken sounds.
  - DiogenesKynikos 2y ago
    > In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess. Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. Chinese would be just as intelligible if written in a phonetic script (like Pinyin) as it is when written using the characters. Now, it would be an incredibly shocking transition for Chinese people who have already spent their entire lives writing with characters. However, after the transition to Pinyin, especially for young people who wouldn't ever learn the characters, written Chinese would still be perfectly understandable. That being said, I don't favor replacing the characters, because the transition would be extremely difficult and because the characters are very culturally important to China. They've been in use for a good 3000 years, and people are very attached to them. Phonetic scripts are technically superior, but the cultural and practical arguments for sticking with the characters are still stronger.
    - Chathamization 2y ago
      > Unless Chinese is somehow unique among all human languages, this isn't true. I was talking about English in that paragraph: > The same is true for written English - putting spaces between words, dividing texts into paragraphs, capitalizing them, differentiating between different pauses (a comma, period, semicolon, etc. all signifying what kind of pause something its), quotation marks, parenthesis, etc. - none of this is available in our spoken language, and we’re still able to understand it. In theory, we could get rid of them all and understand what’s being written. In practice, most people would find the result to be an incomprehensible mess.