Using the Latin alphabet, if you hear something weird it’s generally petty easy to come up with an approximation so readers will be able to imagine it, or at least something very close. Using Chinese characters how easy is it to say “wow I heard the weirdest sound, it went like this…” and come up with a good approximation?
Pinyin is a common modern method. Unsure how it went before the Roman influence came into contact with Chinese
As previously mentioned, you can use Pinyin to describe the phonics of a Chinese character. Besides Pinyin, you can use a number of the simpler Chinese characters to describe the phonetics, since the phonemes in Chinese are relatively limited and there are a lot of homophones. However, because there are many homophones for each sound, just knowing the pronunciation of a word does not necessarily give you much insight into which particular character you are describing, or the character’s meaning.
Pinyin is not really relevant to the OP’s question. Pinyin is a representation of the pronunciation of Chinese characters, it does not add to the repertoire of sounds for a Chinese writer.
Chinese has fewer phonemes than English, in particular no consonant clusters. The use of pictographs rather than an alphabet is a further limitation, because only whole standard syllables can be represented in writing. The pronunciation of each Chinese character is a single syllable, roughly a consonant+vowel, and that’s all you have to work with in representing unusual sounds in Chinese. Many characters are homophones, and a certain subset of characters are traditionally used for onomatopoeia, some of them specialized to the task, with a “kou” (mouth) radical. Google “Chinese onomatopoeia characters” for more information. These are the characters that would be used to represent an unfamiliar sound in Chinese writing.
A related topic is the phonetic transliteration of foreign proper nouns into Chinese characters. These do not generally use the onomatopoiea characters, and are often creative composites of approximate sound with desirable meaning - look at the brand names listed after Coca-Cola on this page:
Pinyin certainly does add to the repertoire of sounds that can be written, since as you say Chinese words do not have consonant clusters. So in pinyin you could write, for example, “plop” which is not (and could not be) a Chinese word and therefore cannot be represented in hanzi. But any literate Chinese person could read the pinyin and understand the sound being represented. Although they might have trouble reproducing the “pl” cluster, just as English speakers have trouble reproducing the “x” phoneme in Mandarin.
BTW, consonants are phonemes, consonant clusters are not. Chinese actually has more phonemes than English, if you count tones. But it has far fewer possible syllables, about 1500 in Mandarin (counting tones, only about 400 if you don’t distinguish tones), compared to over 10,000 in English.
–Mark
The OP’s question was about representing sounds in Chinese characters as opposed to the Latin alphabet.
In any event, the purpose of pinyin is to represent the sounds of Chinese characters in the Roman alphabet. Many pinyin pronunciations (qi,xi,zhi) bear no resemblance at all to English or any other language.
At the same time, you will often see interspersed English words in informal Chinese writing, but this is not really “pinyin” - it’s English. Although I grant that “pinyin” may now sometimes be used more broadly to mean “anything written in the Roman alphabet”. And, of course, we may reach a point where adopted English words written in the Roman alphabet are considered part of the standard Chinese language.
Many Chinese people (especially those who are younger, urban and well educated) have good familiarity with English and English pronunciation, and could make something of the sound “plop”. But in doing so they are not really reading pinyin - they are reading English. And the many literate Chinese speakers who still have no familiarity with the Roman alphabet would have no idea what to make of “plop”.
No you can’t. The only reason pinyin exists is to represent Chinese sounds using letters and diacrtical marks from the Roman alphabet. “Plop” would be meaningless to someone who knew only Chinese and pinyin but no English, supposing your “plop” is meant to be pronounced using the rules of English and not Turkish or Romanian.
People sure have a lot of problems with the concept of a system of Romanization vs a system of Anglicization.
Well, the only reason English writing exists is to write English sounds. Nevertheless, when English speakers see a string of letters like “gzishkobr”, they can pronounce it, and most will pronounce it identically, even though it’s not an English word and violates principles of English phonology.
If shown the string “plop” I would wager that most literate Chinese speakers who know no English would be able to make an attempt at it, and would pronounce it pretty much the same (though not the same as English “plop” because of the vowel; that would be “plap” perhaps). They would not just look at it blankly and say “I have no idea what sounds that represents”.
–Mark
You seem to be addressing the question of how well a Chinese person who knows only the pronunciation of pinyin (i.e. the conventional pinyin mapping of Chinese syllables to letters in the Roman alphabet) can guess the pronunciation of English or pseudo-English words (i.e. the mapping of the Roman alphabet to sounds in English). There is considerable overlap, so of course the answer is “to some extent”. But this really has nothing to do with Chinese, and nothing to do with the OP.
Again, to avoid confusion, Chinese people sometimes now use “pinyin” in a loose sense to mean “any stuff written in the Roman alphabet”, but this semantic drift does not transmogrify English into Chinese or vice versa.
But the ability to arrange the letters of the roman alphabet in the order “gzishkobr” does not “add to the repertoire of sounds that can be written” in English, because with nothing else to go on an English speaker can only attempt to pronounce the world using sounds that already exist in the repertoire. In the same way, simply writing “plop” would not help the Chinese Pinyin user because as you said, the best he can do is make a guess using his existing repertoire of sounds represented by Chinese characters which are in turn represented by Pinyin. Maybe he will try something like “Pu-lao-pu”, but these are sounds that already exist in Chinese.
Anyway a local Chinese government had the same idea and has produced a handy list of English phrases rendered in Chinese characters.
It seems pretty good to me although the user would have to be told clearly that the spaces between the clusters of characters are supposed to represent pauses in the cadance.
This is reminiscent of
[QUOTE=Proust, Flaubert or Victor Hugo, I can’t remember]
Pas d’elle yeux Rhône que nous.
[/QUOTE]
All the writing systems of Chinese (hanzi, pinyin, bopomofo in Taiwan) can only reproduce indivisible consonant/vowel syllables which exist in that language (or some spoken form of that language). So that more strictly limits their ability to mimic consonant/vowel combinations in other languages which don’t appear in Chinese, as compared to an alphabet of independent consonants and vowels.
An actual alphabet, the Latin one or others (the Korean one too for example) are basically more capable of expressing sound combinations that don’t appear in the language they are generally used to write. Although, alphabets still have limitations in this regard. As English/Korean speakers know, the Latin alphabet and hangul both have limitations in accurately reproducing phonemes which appear in Korean and English respectively. Therefore they would have limitations reproducing any given arbitrary sound people can make.
And the OP takes for granted that the desired sound matches the normal sounds of Latin alphabet as pronounced in English. But it might not. For example a real word in Korean is 뽀뽀, informal or childish way of saying ‘kiss’. But let’s say it was a made up sound, which it might as well be for an English-only speaker. It would usually be written po-po, but that’s only close, not exactly the right consonant sound, po-po might be transliterated as 포포. Nor would be bbo-bbo be exactly right, which is the literal transliteration assuming the letter bi-eup, ‘ㅂ’, is ‘b’, but it isn’t exactly. The Latin alph as pronounced in English is still limited in reproducing consonant and vowel sounds which humans can make but aren’t included in English.
Here’s some:
voice of a bee = ZZZZ ZZZZ ZZZZ
嗡 嗡
voice of a wild bird = caw
哇 哇
voice of a cat = meow
喵 喵
voice of cow = moo, low, bellow
哞
voice of a dog = woof woof
喔 呒
Notice the square symbol to the left of the character. This means mouth or sound.
But to be clear, the English onomatopoeic words that you give (caw, woof, etc; I’m not sure what you mean by ZZZZ) are not the sounds represented by the Chinese characters (with the exception of “meow”). The bee for example is “weng-weng” in Chinese.
There’s suprisingly wide variation in the sounds that animals supposedly make among all languages, see here: