Does Chinese language need to be scrapped?

[HMS_Irruncible]

@filmyak

Why not keep current Chinese writing systems as an artform, but move the language (especially the writing) forward into one that simply makes more sense?

That’s what they did in Korea, and Korea seems to be happy with it. Actually someone made the comment that Japan contaminated the meanings of the ideograms, but that’s not strictly true. Japan has largely discarded the meanings and used them for phonetic value. The meanings still exist, but meaning-based learning of kanji is discouraged. And if that doesn’t prove that Japanese are completely mental gluttons for punishment, I don’t know what does. But writing them is still held as an art form.

I would be cautious about making judgements on “what makes more sense” in languages. It’s a fair statement to say that any language was “a good idea at the time.” The question is how the language will continue to serve the interests of the speakers on an ongoing basis. If Chinese or Japanese ever wish to wield global influence on the order of past European powers or the US, they’ll need to make their system more accessible, end of story. Until they do, they’ll just be a very large, enigmatic trade partner.

Also, I have to note the fallacy (mentioned in other posts, not the quoted one) of meanings transferring from Japanese to Chinese and vice/versa. The two are mutually legible only for simple words. The written Japanese language mostly looks like gibberish to a Chinese speaker, and vice versa. I have to think this must be true among Chinese dialects, although perhaps to a lesser extent because of the linguistic proximity.

Some have advanced the interesting concept of basing all written languages on the Chinese system. It’s a seductive idea when you consider the putative cross-literacy of Japanese and the various Chinese languages. It could be done, but it would require some simplification and standardization. It would also require eternal vigilance to ensure that languages did not fall into the same trap as Japanese, neglecting the meanings for phonetic convenience. I think that tendency would be impossible to avoid. The fate of all other ideographic languages, Japanese most prominent among them, suggests that written languages want to converge on phonetic representations rather than ideas. In the end, sounds are much more objective than ideas.

What I believe the world needs is a universal syllabary. Not alphabets, not ideograms, but one syllabary with tonal marks which could capture all sounds of all languages.

[Richard_Parker]

@filmyak

People who DO speak Chinese have explained to me that it is very difficult to convey emotions while speaking the language, as what we use to do so in Western languages – changing tones, emphasis, etc – would change the actual meaning of the words in Chinese.

Emotions are conveyed through relative changes in the “pitch” of a word (e.g. a different pitch for a sarcastic word). In Chinese, meaning is conveyed through the change in tone across the word (rising, falling, etc.). So it is entirely possible to convey emotion using the pitch of a word even while changing the tone to convey the meaning (i.e. the tone still increases in pitch, but it starts at a pitch higher relative to the rest of the sentence). Not to mention all of the other ways to convey emotion – the myth of the stoic Chinese who convey no emotion has evidently worked its way into some people’s understanding of the Chinese language.

@dole

I agree that the chinese need at least to adopt an alphabet to allow for quick and easy typing.

Actually, the beauty of typing is that it makes writing Chinese so much easier. Most word processing programs allow one to enter the romanized version and output characters. Its as easy to type Chinese as English.

[Aeschines]

Many fine points by you in this thread and in this post.

@NattoGuy

That’s what they did in Korea, and Korea seems to be happy with it.

Yep, good example. Same with Vietnamese, as has already been pointed out.

Actually someone made the comment that Japan contaminated the meanings of the ideograms, but that’s not strictly true. Japan has largely discarded the meanings and used them for phonetic value. The meanings still exist, but meaning-based learning of kanji is discouraged.

Japanese people see the character for “now” (ima) and know that it means “now.” It is used in both kun-yomi and on-yomi words so the consistent meaning across widely varying phoneme is readily apparent (tadaima, kondo, kinjyou). One could give countless other examples. So I don’t know in what sense you mean that the meanings have been “discarded.”

If Chinese or Japanese ever wish to wield global influence on the order of past European powers or the US, they’ll need to make their system more accessible, end of story. Until they do, they’ll just be a very large, enigmatic trade partner.

Quite so! I cringe when people say that we might all be speaking Mandarin a hundred years from now (somewhat like the canard that, had the Japanese won the war, we’d all be speaking Japanese–hah).

Building on what others have already said, the Chinese system of writing (while one of the most culturally deep and artistically pleasing things of all time) is just not geared to mass literacy. Which is not to say that it can’t be done. Japan has proved that nearly 100% literacy is possible with a writing system almost equally difficult.

But there are costs. Japanese kids spend an awful lot of time studying kanji and don’t really get a grip on the written language until they are done with high school. It really is a harder, more time-consuming system to learn. Further, the “100%” literacy of Japan can be a little deceptive. Adults continue to struggle with the system once they have learned it, and there are many different levels of fluency in society (just as there are anywhere).

But I guess the more important point is that non-Chinese and non-Japanese simply aren’t going to learn the system in great numbers. Just too much time and effort is required–you could easily learn two or three European languages for one Chinese or Japanese, and frankly I think that’s the better deal.

Also, I have to note the fallacy (mentioned in other posts, not the quoted one) of meanings transferring from Japanese to Chinese and vice/versa. The two are mutually legible only for simple words.

I would say that the reverse is actually true: the on-yomi words (Chinese-based vocabulary), that is, the technical and philosophical vocabulary has a huge overlap, while the words for simple, everyday things are all different. It’s kind of how like technical French is pretty easy to grasp because of all the Latinate words.

The written Japanese language mostly looks like gibberish to a Chinese speaker, and vice versa.

Despite what I said about tech vocab, this is certainly true. Chinese people don’t have a clue with hiragana and katakana, and the basic connecting vocab and grammar are hard to penetrate for a Japanese speaker.

I have to think this must be true among Chinese dialects, although perhaps to a lesser extent because of the linguistic proximity.

From what I understand there is a great deal of overlap between Mandarin and Cantonese, but I don’t know about the really far-out dialects/languages.

Some have advanced the interesting concept of basing all written languages on the Chinese system. It’s a seductive idea when you consider the putative cross-literacy of Japanese and the various Chinese languages.

I agree that it’s totall unfeasible.

What I believe the world needs is a universal syllabary. Not alphabets, not ideograms, but one syllabary with tonal marks which could capture all sounds of all languages.

Those systems already exist and are in use by linguists (OK, not sure about total universality, but something close). They are still quite complex and probably can’t capture the nuances.

What, then, is the future of the Chinese language? Sad to say, the writing system is already half dead, owing to its destruction in the last several decades through “simplification.”

I see an unstopable force hitting an immovable object. Chinese is an unwieldly language that can’t possibly “convert” foreigners, but it has a hell of a lot of inertia behind it in the form of 1B+ people (the writing system, plus almost 1B for Mandarin). No matter what forces serve to wear it down, it is going to last another millenium in some form or another.

At the same time, the future definitely belongs to other tongues, and English seems to have the momentum–for many good reasons.

[Lamia]

@filmyak

How would it be devastating? Yes, it would require Mandarin and Cantonese to merge, agree on a standard pronounciation of a word for an alphabet to work… but that would also allow Chinese people to communicate with each other across larger swaths of the country. Isn’t that inherently GOOD?

Do you think it would be inherently GOOD if the English, French, and Germans were required to merge their languages to facilitate communication across Europe? Heck, wouldn’t it be jolly good fun to stamp out linguistic diversity altogether and force everyone on the planet to speak English?

Even if one supported this kind of cultural imperialism, it wouldn’t be easy to put into practice. Mandarin and Cantonese are not as closely related as you seem to think. Merging the two dialects wouldn’t be like merging American and British English. Mandarin and Cantonese are really only considered “Chinese dialects” instead of completely different languages for political reasons…and the fact that they share a written language.

And this isn’t even taking into consideration the fact that people do not take kindly to being told to abandon their mother tongue. This is the type of issue that can lead to violent conflict. The Chinese government may someday succeed in getting everyone in the country to learn to speak fluent Mandarin, and implementing a new writing system might also be workable, but if they tried to eliminate all other spoken dialects in favor of Mandarin (or some new hybrid dialect) they might wind up with a civil war on their hands. I don’t think I’m overstating when I say that it probably could not be done without bloodshed.

@NattoGuy

Also, I have to note the fallacy (mentioned in other posts, not the quoted one) of meanings transferring from Japanese to Chinese and vice/versa. The two are mutually legible only for simple words.

I thought I’d qualified my earlier statement more, but looking back I see I did make an overly broad generalization. I should have said something like “even a Japanese speaker could understand the meaning of some characters written by a Mandarin speaker”.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Aeschines

Japanese people see the character for “now” (ima) and know that it means “now.” It is used in both kun-yomi and on-yomi words so the consistent meaning across widely varying phoneme is readily apparent (tadaima, kondo, kinjyou). One could give countless other examples. So I don’t know in what sense you mean that the meanings have been “discarded.”

Largely discarded, I said. The number of characters with identical meanings in Japanese and Chinese is far from “countless.” Westerners tend to make too much of the meanings because they serve as very convenient mnemonic points for us. But quite often, kanji are taken only as sound value, and the meaning is derived from the sound. For example, ask a Japanese to explain the meaning of the “saka” character in “Osaka.” Most will tell you it has no meaning. Some will tell you it has a meaning, but its significance has been lost in antiquity. Only the most highly educated of the Japanese or Chinese langauges will tell you it means something like “acropolis” or “heights.” There are many other examples exactly like that.

[cckerberos]

@NattoGuy

Largely discarded, I said. The number of characters with identical meanings in Japanese and Chinese is far from “countless.” Westerners tend to make too much of the meanings because they serve as very convenient mnemonic points for us. But quite often, kanji are taken only as sound value, and the meaning is derived from the sound. For example, ask a Japanese to explain the meaning of the “saka” character in “Osaka.” Most will tell you it has no meaning. Some will tell you it has a meaning, but its significance has been lost in antiquity. Only the most highly educated of the Japanese or Chinese langauges will tell you it means something like “acropolis” or “heights.” There are many other examples exactly like that.

This has not been my experience, since the saka in Osaka is just an itaiji for the normal saka, meaning hill. Could you provide another example as to what you mean, preferably not involving a place name?

[HMS_Irruncible]

@cckerberos

This has not been my experience, since the saka in Osaka is just an itaiji for the normal saka, meaning hill. Could you provide another example as to what you mean, preferably not involving a place name?

Try 頓馬. (fool, or idiot). The second means “horse” when used alone, and the first means… what, precisely? My dictionary says “stumble”, “bow low”, “sudden.” Any fit will arise either from a desire to fit the mnemonic to a pattern or some obscure etymology that most Japanese speakers wouldln’t know. (or perhaps a folk etymology which is probably incorrect).

[cckerberos]

@NattoGuy

Try 頓馬. (fool, or idiot). The second means “horse” when used alone, and the first means… what, precisely? My dictionary says “stumble”, “bow low”, “sudden.” Any fit will arise either from a desire to fit the mnemonic to a pattern or some obscure etymology that most Japanese speakers wouldln’t know. (or perhaps a folk etymology which is probably incorrect).

Okay, I can kind of see what you’re saying.

(BTW, my dictionary lists that word as ateji, so there is no necessary connection between the meaning of the word and the meaning of the characters； it works the opposite way as well: in the case of 五月蠅い (urusai), the kanji provide meaning but no clue as to phonetics… this example isn’t the most common, but was what came to mind first)

[HMS_Irruncible]

@cckerberos

Okay, I can kind of see what you’re saying.

(BTW, my dictionary lists that word as ateji, so there is no necessary connection between the meaning of the word and the meaning of the characters； it works the opposite way as well: in the case of 五月蠅い (urusai), the kanji provide meaning but no clue as to phonetics… this example isn’t the most common, but was what came to mind first)

Right… kanji do fall across a wide spectrum of strong vs. weak meaning association. I don’t deny that some fall on the stronger side, but many also fall under the weak, ambigious, or meaningless side. Too damned many. grumble.

Anyway, this is instructive of nothing except the fact that if writing systems are too complex or abstract, they’ll drift away from meaning and back to phonology. Japanese is an example of this deterioration. This is why I disagree with the utopians who think we could use an international ideographic writing system, reducing the need for learning how to speak foreign languages. Phonology and cultural nuance are just too important to communication; a purely ideographic language would not work.

[Dubious_Weasle]

@furt

Well, it is, sort of; except that you never see a “letter” by itself, only as part of a syllable. link

Hmm, I’ll have to see if I can find a link but I’ve seen individual consonants used frequently when listing items [ka, na, da, ra etc obviously in hangul but otherwise in the same fashion as using a, b, c, d. i.e. consant only with no following vowel]

Similiarly, when you use a dictionary it is organized by first consonant. While it is certainly true that individual consonants don’t form meaningful sounds by themselves that is also true in english. It is only through consonant vowel combinations that sounds are formed. Finally, while some of the sounds can be difficult to distinquish you can in fact ‘spell-out’ words in korean using the consonants and vowels.

Once again, is there a critical detail of the definition of ‘alphabet’ I’m missing. My korean skills aren’t that hot but I’ve never had an instructor refere to hangul as anything other then a true phoentic alphabet. The only real difference between hangul and the english that I can think of is that english doesn’t have strict pronunciation rules. For instance you could write, as indicated by your link, korean out as a string of vowels and consonants just like english. Pronunciation would be less intuitive and require knowing the word already [just like english] but perfectly doable.

[China_Guy]

Okay, first point that because Chinese is tonal it’s a challenge to convey emotion. It may be a challenge to non native speakers, but native speakers do just fine. Chinese may be an alien tounge but a lot of people have been using it to communicate for a long time.

I want to point out that Chinese is a very logical language. If one sees two individual characters put together into a new compound, one has a decent chance of guessing the meaning.

There are basically no irregular verb tenses. Chinese uses modifiers that work in practically every case. For example, one just says verb + modifier for the tense. It works for every verb. So one just learns how to say “past tense” and tack on a verb and it works.

The characters are a pain in the ass to learn. I probably could write about 6,000 at my best. It’s just brute memorization. This pictographic language process has to influence the way chinese thought process works versus an alphabet style language.

Anyhoo, to answer the OP, given the level of computerization, written Chinese characters are adapting quite well into the modern age.

[BrainGlutton]

If the Chinese language is to be scrapped, what is to replace it? I propose Anglo-Chinese Pidgin! “We no chargee more for rice . . .”

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

If the Chinese language is to be scrapped, what is to replace it? I propose Anglo-Chinese Pidgin! “We no chargee more for rice . . .”

Re pidgin, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_English_Pidgin.

[Aeschines]

@NattoGuy

Largely discarded, I said.

Do you mean that the original Chinese meaning has been largely discarded from the Japanese kanji, or that the Japanese have largely discarded any meaning for each within their own system? I would not agree with either contention.

The number of characters with identical meanings in Japanese and Chinese is far from “countless.”

OK, thousands. I have studied both languages.

Westerners tend to make too much of the meanings because they serve as very convenient mnemonic points for us. But quite often, kanji are taken only as sound value, and the meaning is derived from the sound.

You give the example of place names. Sure, that example is more true than others–the characters in Nagoya don’t mean very much, being (to the modern eye) almost pure ateji. But something like Ikebukuro (Pond Bag) still conveys an image because it’s composed of everyday words.

But beyond place and personal names, you have most kanji conveying a clear meaning in a wide variety of compounds. Nin/jin means person, period. I’m not telling you anything you don’t know; in fact, I’m baffled somewhat by your contention. In on-yomi compounds, meaning is clearly key.

[Marley23]

@filmyak

1. People who DO speak Chinese have explained to me that it is very difficult to convey emotions while speaking the language, as what we use to do so in Western languages – changing tones, emphasis, etc – would change the actual meaning of the words in Chinese.

I don’t think that could be true. Languages are about communication and if they don’t allow you to express emotions, they’re not working, and thus would have changed to allow it long ago.

As far as scrapping an entire country’s language… this country is still not on the metric system for the same reason.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@Aeschines

You give the example of place names. Sure, that example is more true than others–the characters in Nagoya don’t mean very much, being (to the modern eye) almost pure ateji. But something like Ikebukuro (Pond Bag) still conveys an image because it’s composed of everyday words.

Which demonstrates my point. Ikebukuro is a mnemonic. Is there anything about the Ikebukuro area that relates to ponds or bags, outside of a mnemonic stretch? I don’t think so. Maybe if you dug far back in history you might find an archaic etymology. Either way, to modern Japanese, “Ikebukuro” is not “pond bag.” It’s “ike” plus “bukuro” and that’s the end of it. They treat many of the kanji as if they were nothing but kana on steroids.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@cckerberos

in the case of 五月蠅い (urusai), the kanji provide meaning but no clue as to phonetics… this example isn’t the most common, but was what came to mind first)

“Urusai” means noisy or boisterous, unless you’re citing a different homophone I don’t know. (insert grumble about excess of homophones in Japanese). But if you take the meanings of the characters individually, the suggest a meaning of “may fly” or “possibly five flesh fly”. Maybe I am showing the limitations of my studies, but I don’t see how 五月蠅い supports your point.

[shijinn]

i’ve never heard of this problem of conveying emotions. as for the difficulty of the language, it is mostly centered around the written vocabulary. it is easy to pick up the language, but it takes time to learn the words.

i’m no linguist, so someone correct me if i’m wrong - for an English speaker learning French, he’ll have to learn the spelling, vocabulary, grammar and speech. on the other hand, a Mandarin speaker learning Cantonese will just have to concentrate on speech and the colloquial words. if this is true, and if the world had Chinese as the standard in the first place, it’ll be much easier to be a linguist in this scenario; because every character that you learn how to write will be recognised by another language speaker.

[cckerberos]

@NattoGuy

“Urusai” means noisy or boisterous, unless you’re citing a different homophone I don’t know. (insert grumble about excess of homophones in Japanese). But if you take the meanings of the characters individually, the suggest a meaning of “may fly” or “possibly five flesh fly”. Maybe I am showing the limitations of my studies, but I don’t see how 五月蠅い supports your point.

The ateji comes from the perception that swarming summer flies are noisy and annoying.

[HMS_Irruncible]

@cckerberos

The ateji comes from the perception that swarming summer flies are noisy and annoying.

That may very well be. But absent an explanation of the supposed etymology, it’s quite a leap from “noisy” to “may fly.” To me, this is illustrates how the kanji lose meaning by gaining ambiguity.