sailor wrote,
I wasn’t asking if the meaning was related to the two characters,because I’m sure it’s not a close relationship,if there’s one at all.I’m asking if the writing system is based on sound (phonetic- as English mostly is, and some other languages entirely are -each sound is written one way and each character has only one sound) In terms of writing English, it makes sense to say understand is composed of “under”+“stand”. It only doesn’t make sense in terms of meaning.
Wendell: I see you’re a mathematician in metro DC. Don’t you have some Chinese-speaking colleagues? Or some colleagues who have some Chinese-speaking colleagues?
Doreen, the Chinese writing system is not phonetic, the characters represent concepts, not sounds. It is like “56” represents the same to you and to a Chinese person but you would pronounce it differently.
jcgmoi,
I’m not an academic. I work for the government, and all my colleagues are American citizens.
doreen,
Each character has one sound, but there are several (sometimes more than a dozen) characters with the identical sound. (By sound, I include everything about the pronounciation, including the tone.) When you learn a new word in Chinese, you have to learn which character is used for each syllable in the word.
It is interesting to note that sometimes characters that share the same sound are similar, clearly indicating that they were derived from each other phonetically.
For example the qing (ching) meaning blue or green is also part of a number of other “qing” with different meanings. Add the radical for water (the three strokes on the left) and you have “clear”. The connection is phonetical more than conceptual. I believe many characters were developed through phonetic connections more than conceptual connections. It makes you think the old Chinese were not so bright when they didn’t develop the idea of a totally phonetical alphabet.
Even many Chinese today believe it cannot work in Chinese because the same sound is written differently depending on the meaning. But, of course, that is nonsense. If you can understand it when it was said because you derived the meaning from the context, you can understand it when you read it.
My first impression of Chinese was that it was a language invented by children or mentally retarded people because it is so simple in many ways. The verbs don’t conjugate etc. Size = big-small etc. If I would have invented a lenguage when I was 10 I probably would have invented something like this. What makes it so difficult for Westerners is that many sounds share many meanings, that it is tonal and the having to learn so many symbols to write it.
I have given up for the time being on any serious attempt to master Chinese. I found I was not dedicating enough time and the tones were just too difficult for me to master so I am not an expert by any means. But I do travel to China for a few weeks every year and I will probably go next winter.
Wendell, I am in DC as well. My Chinese girlfriend just returned to China a few days ago after spending some weeks here. I do not know what part of town you are in but there are plenty of Chinese to meet. We went to downtown Chinatown and several chinese places in the outskirts and everywhere we would strike up conversations with Chinese people. If you are interested I am sure it is quite easy for you to make contact with Chinese people.
And, as I said before, it is also very easy to meet Chinese people online.
a) sailor, please clarify that you no longer consider Chinese a childish language, ok?
b) The word for train is not the characters for ‘iron’ and ‘horse.’ It is composed of the characters ‘fire’ and ‘chariot.’ I realize that it was a hypothetical, but it’s exactly the sort of thing people “remember” later and send me in an email of “true facts!!”
c) In Chinese, generally, the right radical represents pronounciation, and the left, meaning. For instance, in the word for mother, pronounced ‘ma’, a female radical, pronounced ‘nu’, is on the left and a radical meaning horse, pronounced ‘ma’, is on the right.
–John
All pronunciations approximate. Exact pinyin available on request.
Whoever posted that meiguo is a phonetic approximation of the word “America” is right. France is “Faguo.” Enlgand is “Yingguo.” Japan is “Riben.” Canada is “Jianada” (IIRC).
“Guo” is the term for “country.” There are some idiomatic elements, but because it is by no means used exclusively, it’s pretty hard to conclusively determine if multisyllable “words,” in general, are true words or idiomatic expressions.
I’ve got the flu, so sorry if that doesn’t make sense.
Since we seem to be getting more and more detailed on this thread, I would just point out that what John describes is the system used for only one “category” of Chinese character (albeit most likely the most common one). Other categories include pictographs like the words for “sun” and “moon” (simple pictures of those bodies); ideographs, or characters representing ideas, like the word for “three” (three lines one on top of another); combinations of ideographs like the word for “male” (the ideograph for “field” placed on top of the ideograph for “strength”); and two others, loan characters and derivative characters. Did I hear someone say that this system–created a couple of thousand years before your European ancestors could even spell their names–was created by “retards”? What a white-assed twerp.
Re my last comment–maybe I completely misunderstood the said poster’s tone or meaning. But Christ, after spending the better part of ten years learning this language, and living several years over there, BTW, such a comment seems asinine on the face of it. I’m far from considering myself fluent, even though I can talk and read and write fairly well. There’s subtleties and a sophistication to the language we haven’t even approached in this little discussion, and to hear the whole thing dismissed as being invented by retards–to say the least, I can understand why someone would quit, with that attitude.
You obviously didn’t even bother to read and understand what I wrote so I am not even going to waste my time. But I will express my heartfelt personal and humble opinion that the term asinine applies very correctly to people who blurt things without even understanding what the other guy said.