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Basically Victor Mair's papers always come down to "I don't like Chinese characters", and "I don't like calques". I'm not so fond of characters either, but I al

by quant18 17y ago

Basically Victor Mair's papers always come down to "I don't like Chinese characters", and "I don't like calques". I'm not so fond of characters either, but I also think calques are a damn sight better than loanwords --- and as Mair notes, a character-based writing system has the side-effect of forcing you to make calques, rather than just stealing foreign words wholesale without understanding them. Among Аnglophones, the French have given calques a bad name. We hear the story all the time in the media: some French people start using an English word to talk about a new concept from the US/UK. Years later, a Language Academy bureaucrat belatedly notices. He wrinkles his nose. He comes up with a cumbersome, incorrect translation of the English word for that concept. Then, for his pièce de résistance, he forces everyone in France to use his new translation. But in Chinese, the process of coming up with calques is decentralised, immediate, and competitive. The first guy to publish a Chinese academic paper or newspaper article on a foreign concept puts together some Chinese word roots and comes up with a calque. The next guy to cite him might accept his translation, or abbreviate it, or reject it entirely. And so on. After a period of confusion, the best word wins. And the Chinese language has a new word whose meaning can reasonably be guessed at, even by someone who's never seen it before.

delackner 17y ago
I'm not familiar with his other papers, but is there an assertion in that very long article that you take issue with? I'm no scholar in the field, but my on the ground experience clicks with what he is saying. The impenetrability of chinese character-based written languages is a huge difficulty even for native speakers. As just one example, Japan supposedly has a 99% literacy rate. This is only possible by redefining literacy to mean "capable of reading at a childish level". A staggering number of the japanese people I encounter readily admit that they cannot read the newspaper, as just one example. For another, I received a notice at work a few weeks ago and asked a co-worker who had received an identical notice what it was about. He looked at it very intently for about 15 seconds, pronounced it to be about retirement funding or some such, and then the co-worker who actually handed the paper out explained that it was a government notice on some completely unrelated topic. We're talking about a piece of paper containing fewer words than your entire comment, and he completely misread even the topic of it. This is a university-educated Japanese person who is indeed "literate".
- quant18 17y ago
  Oh no, don't get me wrong --- I agree: Chinese characters are hard. People can't read them. An alphabet would be much easier. On the other hand, Mair seems to think that slaughtering your native lexicon and replacing it with a bunch of English/Russian loanwords would be a good thing, while I disagree. (This has been the exact consequence of alphabetisation in Dungan and Korean). And I also think that devoting a career to trying to get China to switch to the Roman alphabet is an irrational waste of brainpower --- it's never going to happen, for reasons totally unrelated to efficiency or practicality. But these are little quibbles compared to the real issue: even if China threw out Chinese characters tomorrow, all the historical linguists like Mair would STILL be mad, cuz the damage has already been done: we may never have any clear idea of the pronunciations of so many old languages from civilisations in China's orbit. In the rare event those civilisations' literate elites wanted to write in their own languages (instead of writing in classical Chinese), they had to use Chinese characters to try to approximate the sounds, because they never developed their own alphabets --- and their approximations sucked. In the mean time, the Indologists point and laugh cuz they can tell you exactly how Sanskrit sounded all those thousands of years ago.

by quant18 17y ago

delackner 17y ago

I'm not familiar with his other papers, but is there an assertion in that very long article that you take issue with? I'm no scholar in the field, but my on the ground experience clicks with what he is saying. The impenetrability of chinese character-based written languages is a huge difficulty even for native speakers. As just one example, Japan supposedly has a 99% literacy rate. This is only possible by redefining literacy to mean "capable of reading at a childish level". A staggering number of the japanese people I encounter readily admit that they cannot read the newspaper, as just one example. For another, I received a notice at work a few weeks ago and asked a co-worker who had received an identical notice what it was about. He looked at it very intently for about 15 seconds, pronounced it to be about retirement funding or some such, and then the co-worker who actually handed the paper out explained that it was a government notice on some completely unrelated topic. We're talking about a piece of paper containing fewer words than your entire comment, and he completely misread even the topic of it. This is a university-educated Japanese person who is indeed "literate".

quant18 17y ago
Oh no, don't get me wrong --- I agree: Chinese characters are hard. People can't read them. An alphabet would be much easier. On the other hand, Mair seems to think that slaughtering your native lexicon and replacing it with a bunch of English/Russian loanwords would be a good thing, while I disagree. (This has been the exact consequence of alphabetisation in Dungan and Korean). And I also think that devoting a career to trying to get China to switch to the Roman alphabet is an irrational waste of brainpower --- it's never going to happen, for reasons totally unrelated to efficiency or practicality. But these are little quibbles compared to the real issue: even if China threw out Chinese characters tomorrow, all the historical linguists like Mair would STILL be mad, cuz the damage has already been done: we may never have any clear idea of the pronunciations of so many old languages from civilisations in China's orbit. In the rare event those civilisations' literate elites wanted to write in their own languages (instead of writing in classical Chinese), they had to use Chinese characters to try to approximate the sounds, because they never developed their own alphabets --- and their approximations sucked. In the mean time, the Indologists point and laugh cuz they can tell you exactly how Sanskrit sounded all those thousands of years ago.