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Is there any real advantage to having such a complex system rather than (some level of) a phonetic one like most other languages? Obviously there are cultural

by mehwoot 12y ago

Is there any real advantage to having such a complex system rather than (some level of) a phonetic one like most other languages? Obviously there are cultural reasons we would still like to be able to read old text and not lose that, but in general the Chinese system just seems like pain for very little gain...

rahimnathwani 12y ago
- The Chinese language does not have a single universal pronunciation standard. You may have heard of different Chinese 'dialects' such as Mandarin and Cantonese. The same characters are pronounced differently in different dialects, and it's more than just an accent: someone who speaks only Mandarin may follow something like 20% (ish) of an overheard conversation in Cantonese, if they concentrate hard. - Even in a single dialect, many words sound exactly the same, but mean different things. Using a phonetic system would harm comprehension. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone... for an excellent illustration of this point.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  But you don't choose the same characters for the same words in Shanghainese as in Mandarin as in Cantonese.
  - mchaver 12y ago
    Actually, Mandarin is the only one with a standardized written form. Hong Kong people (Cantonese speakers) write formally in Mandarin and pronounce the characters with Cantonese, but they way Cantonese is spoken has different grammar and lexicon. Written Cantonese is non-standardized and often requires new characters that are not found in Mandarin. I don't think there are many people writing Shanghainese because the language is actively discouraged by the government.
innguest 12y ago
Nature and evolution seem to be concerned with passing down information. For that, Nature came up with 4 letters: A, T, C, G. You see where I'm going with this.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Social Darwinism? Edit - I am not meaning this in its worst excesses, though I am meaning it pejoratively. Just because there are 4 bases on DNA doesn't mean anything about what makes a good written language. This is because they are not letters in a language, at least not as we commonly understand letters or language. Those are just the labels we have given them as they were some of the closest metaphors to hand. We could have called them notes and it would work just as well. However that would have no bearing on the best ways to write music.
- baconstrp 12y ago
  Which further down all merely protons and neutrons? If we could go further there maybe only 1 matter, or even Null? You see where I'm going with this. Arguing spiritual culture with physics theory is really comparing hot chicks with debugging assembly.
wesleyy 12y ago
Yes there actually is! English is a language that really favours the writer while Chinese favours the readers. Most of the time, you can read Chinese a lot quicker because the characters are all the same size (although they might have different complexity), and there is generally a lesser need for linking words to ease the awkwardness of sentences, unlike English, because each Chinese character carries more of a "concept"/"theme", where as english words usually have quite precise definitions, and have more specific places where the words would actually make sense. This is just my opinion as a native Chinese and English speaker, but I'm sure other bilingual English/Chinese speakers would tend to agree.
- kijin 12y ago
  Hangul (Korean) has the uniform, blocky look of Chinese characters, while also being a phonetic alphabet like English. Every hangul block is composed of two or more alphabets from a set of 24, so if you know those 24, you can read any of the 11K+ possible combinations. It's similar to the concept of "radicals" in Chinese, but much simpler and with fewer irregularities. So the reading advantage, if any, is not necessarily incompatible with using a phonetic alphabet with a small number of symbols. The lack of precision (or higher ambiguity) might also be seen as a disadvantage in the highly technical world of today, although I very much appreciate it in literary and philosophical works.
- danschuller 12y ago
  Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  A quick search seems to indicate it's almost a tie, overall. That is, Chinese readers end up reading at about the same speed add English readers. It seems like an unintuitive result though. From my own mild studies of Japanese and the kanji, the few kanji I can read, it feels like the information just jumps right into my mind. Also apart from the actual reading, which may be a tie, I'm not sure the complexity cost overall, e.g. teaching, fonts, IMEs, etc. are actually worth it. What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.
fenomas 12y ago
The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just 140 characters. ;)
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  Is the information density measured in bits and bytes still higher?
  - fenomas 12y ago
    Way higher. Partly due to the writing and partly due to grammar. Isolated concepts tend to use two Chinese characters, or 4 bytes, which is typically denser than English already. But on top of that English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.
    - burtonlang 12y ago
      >English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that. I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.
  - kijin 12y ago
    Universal Declaration of Human Rights: English raw text: 11KB Chinese raw text: 8.8KB (UTF-8), 6KB (GB18030) English compressed with xz: 3.8KB Chinese compressed with xz: 3.7KB (UTF-8), 3.3KB (GB18030) Yes, the information density does seem to be a bit higher in Chinese. Which, of course, is obtained at the cost of an encoding algorithm (writing system) that is more difficult to implement (learn), encode (write), and decode (read). It's the typical tradeoff between processing efficiency and memory consumption. I wonder how much time it takes for the average American to type or handwrite the UDHR in English, versus the average Chinese to type or handwrite the same document in Chinese. After all, hard drives are cheap today. Human brain processing power is not.
phil5 12y ago
Actually there is, IMHO. Chinese is in fact a group of spoken languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Southern Min. These are completely different languages at least in tones and pronunciations. Mandarin speakers could hardly talk to Cantonese speakers. But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally. Traditional Japanese (and similarly Traditional Korean and Traditional Vietnamese) uses a subset of Chinese characters which they call "Kanji". And "writing down the characters" (Bitan, 筆談) had been a very effective way of communication between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese until the last century.
- wodenokoto 12y ago
  No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script. The only reason why they can read Cantonese is because pop music from Hong Kong is popular enough that most kids teach themselves enough to get the jist of the written lyrics. > But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally. Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin.
  - phil5 12y ago
    > No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script. I'm not a native of Shanghai but I still get to understand written Shanghainese. Because even though I can't _read_ it, I can somehow _interpret_ it. It uses the same Chinese characters and I already knew what these characters mean. > Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin. There are still people native to Cantonese, Min Nan, or Hakka who don't speak Mandarin.
  - eva1984 12y ago
    You must be joking. Mandarin is not a written system at all. Even though I don't have the passion for HongKong pop music, I have no problem understanding traditional writing at all, cause it is just so similar to simplied one.
lern_too_spel 12y ago
The other commenters have listed some advantages, but you really meant to ask whether any of those advantages make this complex writing system "worth it." They don't. Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place. Now a more radical simplification of just using Hanyu Pinyin directly and not having a computer transliterate is an obvious next step. Hanyu Pinyin is not intelligible to speakers of non-Mandarin dialects, but this shouldn't be a showstopper for a government that is capable of this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_Regulations http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_R....
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  Minor point: simplified characters weren't intended to make Chinese easier to read (which is good, since they'd be a miserable failure at that). They were intended to make it easier to write (by hand!) -- the idea was to reduce the number of strokes used to write common characters, and the accompanying propaganda was to the effect that using simplified characters would cut a piece of typical text from so many strokes to so many (less) strokes. Characters were targeted for simplification not based on how ungainly they were but based on a combination of how many strokes they required with how frequently they were used. Then the advent of computers and typing made stroke count mostly irrelevant.
- seszett 12y ago
  > Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place While it was an interesting experiment, the fact that Taiwan still has a higher literacy rate than Mainland China, and one comparable to the other developed countries using the latin alphabet, shows that traditional Chinese isn't that much of a hindrance.
  - MichaelGG 12y ago
    How does that show it? In a developed country, even if literacy is more difficult, we'd expect the education system to have compensated or calibrated for it to achieve an overall good rate. If schoolkids must spend an extra 10% overall time due to increased literacy requirements, that's really but gonna show up on the overall literacy rates, right?
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

by mehwoot 12y ago

rahimnathwani 12y ago

- The Chinese language does not have a single universal pronunciation standard. You may have heard of different Chinese 'dialects' such as Mandarin and Cantonese. The same characters are pronounced differently in different dialects, and it's more than just an accent: someone who speaks only Mandarin may follow something like 20% (ish) of an overheard conversation in Cantonese, if they concentrate hard. - Even in a single dialect, many words sound exactly the same, but mean different things. Using a phonetic system would harm comprehension. See http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone... for an excellent illustration of this point.

wodenokoto 12y ago
But you don't choose the same characters for the same words in Shanghainese as in Mandarin as in Cantonese.
- mchaver 12y ago
  Actually, Mandarin is the only one with a standardized written form. Hong Kong people (Cantonese speakers) write formally in Mandarin and pronounce the characters with Cantonese, but they way Cantonese is spoken has different grammar and lexicon. Written Cantonese is non-standardized and often requires new characters that are not found in Mandarin. I don't think there are many people writing Shanghainese because the language is actively discouraged by the government.

innguest 12y ago

Nature and evolution seem to be concerned with passing down information. For that, Nature came up with 4 letters: A, T, C, G. You see where I'm going with this.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
Social Darwinism? Edit - I am not meaning this in its worst excesses, though I am meaning it pejoratively. Just because there are 4 bases on DNA doesn't mean anything about what makes a good written language. This is because they are not letters in a language, at least not as we commonly understand letters or language. Those are just the labels we have given them as they were some of the closest metaphors to hand. We could have called them notes and it would work just as well. However that would have no bearing on the best ways to write music.
baconstrp 12y ago
Which further down all merely protons and neutrons? If we could go further there maybe only 1 matter, or even Null? You see where I'm going with this. Arguing spiritual culture with physics theory is really comparing hot chicks with debugging assembly.

wesleyy 12y ago

Yes there actually is! English is a language that really favours the writer while Chinese favours the readers. Most of the time, you can read Chinese a lot quicker because the characters are all the same size (although they might have different complexity), and there is generally a lesser need for linking words to ease the awkwardness of sentences, unlike English, because each Chinese character carries more of a "concept"/"theme", where as english words usually have quite precise definitions, and have more specific places where the words would actually make sense. This is just my opinion as a native Chinese and English speaker, but I'm sure other bilingual English/Chinese speakers would tend to agree.

kijin 12y ago
Hangul (Korean) has the uniform, blocky look of Chinese characters, while also being a phonetic alphabet like English. Every hangul block is composed of two or more alphabets from a set of 24, so if you know those 24, you can read any of the 11K+ possible combinations. It's similar to the concept of "radicals" in Chinese, but much simpler and with fewer irregularities. So the reading advantage, if any, is not necessarily incompatible with using a phonetic alphabet with a small number of symbols. The lack of precision (or higher ambiguity) might also be seen as a disadvantage in the highly technical world of today, although I very much appreciate it in literary and philosophical works.
danschuller 12y ago
Scientific terms, especially biological, tend to more apparent. Our words have the legacy of Greek and Latin.
MichaelGG 12y ago
A quick search seems to indicate it's almost a tie, overall. That is, Chinese readers end up reading at about the same speed add English readers. It seems like an unintuitive result though. From my own mild studies of Japanese and the kanji, the few kanji I can read, it feels like the information just jumps right into my mind. Also apart from the actual reading, which may be a tie, I'm not sure the complexity cost overall, e.g. teaching, fonts, IMEs, etc. are actually worth it. What would a designed writing system look like? I think a properly phonetic/syllable approach like Hangul or even the Kana might be correct.

fenomas 12y ago

The information density of Chinese characters is enormous compared to English. This becomes very obvious when you find yourself trying to say something in just 140 characters. ;)

wodenokoto 12y ago
Is the information density measured in bits and bytes still higher?
- fenomas 12y ago
  Way higher. Partly due to the writing and partly due to grammar. Isolated concepts tend to use two Chinese characters, or 4 bytes, which is typically denser than English already. But on top of that English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that.
  - burtonlang 12y ago
    >English spends a lot of characters on structure - words that are required grammatically but don't change the meaning of the sentence. Chinese's famously simple grammar doesn't do that. I admit that I only got as far as Mandarin I in school, but it seems to me that the existence of classifiers in Chinese languages contradicts that.
- kijin 12y ago
  Universal Declaration of Human Rights: English raw text: 11KB Chinese raw text: 8.8KB (UTF-8), 6KB (GB18030) English compressed with xz: 3.8KB Chinese compressed with xz: 3.7KB (UTF-8), 3.3KB (GB18030) Yes, the information density does seem to be a bit higher in Chinese. Which, of course, is obtained at the cost of an encoding algorithm (writing system) that is more difficult to implement (learn), encode (write), and decode (read). It's the typical tradeoff between processing efficiency and memory consumption. I wonder how much time it takes for the average American to type or handwrite the UDHR in English, versus the average Chinese to type or handwrite the same document in Chinese. After all, hard drives are cheap today. Human brain processing power is not.

phil5 12y ago

Actually there is, IMHO. Chinese is in fact a group of spoken languages, including Mandarin, Cantonese, and Southern Min. These are completely different languages at least in tones and pronunciations. Mandarin speakers could hardly talk to Cantonese speakers. But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally. Traditional Japanese (and similarly Traditional Korean and Traditional Vietnamese) uses a subset of Chinese characters which they call "Kanji". And "writing down the characters" (Bitan, 筆談) had been a very effective way of communication between Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese until the last century.

wodenokoto 12y ago
No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script. The only reason why they can read Cantonese is because pop music from Hong Kong is popular enough that most kids teach themselves enough to get the jist of the written lyrics. > But all these languages share a common character set, so that different dialect speakers can communicate in the written form even they couldn't understand each other orally. Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin.
- phil5 12y ago
  > No, people from Beijing cannot read a text written in Shanghainese using simplified script. I'm not a native of Shanghai but I still get to understand written Shanghainese. Because even though I can't _read_ it, I can somehow _interpret_ it. It uses the same Chinese characters and I already knew what these characters mean. > Since everyone in China is taught mandarin Chinese they tend to write to each other in mandarin. There are still people native to Cantonese, Min Nan, or Hakka who don't speak Mandarin.
- eva1984 12y ago
  You must be joking. Mandarin is not a written system at all. Even though I don't have the passion for HongKong pop music, I have no problem understanding traditional writing at all, cause it is just so similar to simplied one.

lern_too_spel 12y ago

The other commenters have listed some advantages, but you really meant to ask whether any of those advantages make this complex writing system "worth it." They don't. Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place. Now a more radical simplification of just using Hanyu Pinyin directly and not having a computer transliterate is an obvious next step. Hanyu Pinyin is not intelligible to speakers of non-Mandarin dialects, but this shouldn't be a showstopper for a government that is capable of this: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_Regulations http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangdong_National_Language_R....

thaumasiotes 12y ago
Minor point: simplified characters weren't intended to make Chinese easier to read (which is good, since they'd be a miserable failure at that). They were intended to make it easier to write (by hand!) -- the idea was to reduce the number of strokes used to write common characters, and the accompanying propaganda was to the effect that using simplified characters would cut a piece of typical text from so many strokes to so many (less) strokes. Characters were targeted for simplification not based on how ungainly they were but based on a combination of how many strokes they required with how frequently they were used. Then the advent of computers and typing made stroke count mostly irrelevant.
seszett 12y ago
> Increasing literacy by slightly modifying the writing system is why the PRC created Simplified Chinese in the first place While it was an interesting experiment, the fact that Taiwan still has a higher literacy rate than Mainland China, and one comparable to the other developed countries using the latin alphabet, shows that traditional Chinese isn't that much of a hindrance.
- MichaelGG 12y ago
  How does that show it? In a developed country, even if literacy is more difficult, we'd expect the education system to have compensated or calibrated for it to achieve an overall good rate. If schoolkids must spend an extra 10% overall time due to increased literacy requirements, that's really but gonna show up on the overall literacy rates, right?

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]