Cecil on Chinese and computers: http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_177.html
It’s a pity the Chinese and Japanese didn’t emulate the Koreans. Grammatically, Korean is very different from Chinese, but more than 60 percent of Korean vocabulary was borrowed from Chinese. As a result, Koreans found themselves in a situation analogous to that of the Japanese; the Koreans could write in Chinese but there were no characters for verb conjugations. For a while, Korean scholars tried using a syallabary system called * idu*, similar to Japanese hiragana, but it was clumsy and was soon abandoned. In 1446, King Sejong (really, the scholars he appointed) devised an alphabet called hangul. Initially, the aristicrats and the scholarly class resisted using * hangul* because they didn’t want the common people to intrude on the province of literature. During the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, however, hangul was embraced as a symbol of Korean national pride.
Nowadays, Koreans are required to learn 1800 Chinese characters, or hanja, and because Korean has a large number of homonyms, Korean newspapers use hanja where the meaning of a sentence might be unclear. At least one newspaper, the Hangureyeh Shinmun, uses no hanja at all. In North Korea, the media have completely abandoned all Chinese characters and foreign loan words and everything is written in hangul. The Korean alphabet is extremely easy to learn, one of the reasons why Korea has nearly a 100 percent literacy rate.
One advantage that Koreans have over Japanese, apart from using an alphabet as opposed to two syllabaries and Chinese characters, is that Korean hanja have only one pronunciation, while Japanese kanji have several, so a Korean can sight read a Chinese character if he’s already learned it, while a Japanese reader depends on hiragana next to the kanji to tell him how to pronounce it.
Actually, Evnglion, George Bernard Shaw’s example was “ghoti,” using the “gh” from “tough” and “rough.”
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- Okay, I been trying most of the morning and this just ain’t gonna happen. So instead of spending any more time trying to learn this stuff, I am circulating an electronic petition to the UN, requiring the following: written and spoken words of both China and Japan will be switched to English, except that Chinese will use “-chi” on the end of every word and Japanese will use “-ji”.
Somebody do one of those electronic petition things for me, okay? And maybe a website too, with Flash movies and stuff.
- Okay, I been trying most of the morning and this just ain’t gonna happen. So instead of spending any more time trying to learn this stuff, I am circulating an electronic petition to the UN, requiring the following: written and spoken words of both China and Japan will be switched to English, except that Chinese will use “-chi” on the end of every word and Japanese will use “-ji”.
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- MC
“big stupid orientals!”
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- Okay, I been trying most of the morning and this just ain’t gonna happen. So instead of spending any more time trying to learn this stuff, I am circulating an electronic petition to the UN, requiring the following: written and spoken words of both China and Japan will be switched to English, except that Chinese will use “-chi” on the end of every word and Japanese will use “-ji”.
Somebody do one of those electronic petition things for me, okay? And maybe a website too, with Flash movies and stuff.
- Okay, I been trying most of the morning and this just ain’t gonna happen. So instead of spending any more time trying to learn this stuff, I am circulating an electronic petition to the UN, requiring the following: written and spoken words of both China and Japan will be switched to English, except that Chinese will use “-chi” on the end of every word and Japanese will use “-ji”.
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- MC
“big stupid orientals!”
Regarding typing Chinese on computer, don’t forget that there are probably several different methods. The system in Taiwan is based on the phonetic “characters” that kids use to learn Chinese over there–a system commonly referred to as “bo po mo fo”. I do believe that a skilled typist could type more efficiently using that system rather than typing in English, because:
(1) Chinese already tends to be more succinct in expressing meaning–e.g., the four characters “hao jiu bu jian” compared with “I haven’t seen you in a long time”.
(2) Under the aforemeantioned system, in order to write a single character you will typically enter only two or three keystrokes for the phonetic “characters” and one keystroke for the tone. A menu will pop up on your screen with a list of matching characters, and that’s one or two more keystrokes to select the character you want. So, that’s about four keystrokes per character.
(3) Usually after you select one character, a list of whole phrases will pop up using that one character. Usually these phrases are four characters long (such as “hao jiu bu jian”). Two or three strokes might be needed to find and select the phrase you need.
Totaling up the number of keystrokes listed above, you can see that maybe as little as six or seven keystrokes can be used to write out “hao jiu bu jian”, compared with the 33 strokes needed to write out “I haven’t seen you in a long time”.
One important point is that the phonetic “bo po mo fo” characters are all based on the Chinese writing system, and have nothing to do with the Roman alphabet. In theory, a typing system using mainland Chinese pinyin (which is Roman alphabet-baseed) might be as efficient as the one I describe here. However, I think a typical typist would be slowed down by the significant cognitive shift involved in jumping back and forth between Roman and Chinese writing symbols.
And AFAIK, adults in Hong Kong and China aren’t as thoroughly familiar with pinyin as a typical adult Taiwanese is with “bo po mo fo”, so a pinyin-based “input system” might be rather alien to HK and PRC users. This might especially be the case in Hong Kong, where the Mandarin dialect itself would be pretty alien to begin with. To have an equally efficient and user-friendly typing system in HK, you’d have to base it on some widely-understood transliteration scheme for the Cantonese dialact, but I don’t know whether there is any such scheme out there.
Hmm.
“Long time no see.” I dare say English speakers are more likely to say to one another “Long time no see” than “I haven’t seen you in a long time.” The former is pretty well acceptable as normal colloquial English. Derived from Chinese Pidgin English? It works as a direct translation of that Chinese phrase. English parts of speech are so malleable that carrying over the exact Chinese syntax works as intelligible English (which would not be possible in, say, French). English started as a synthetic language, but over time has become nearly as isolating as Chinese (and often as monosyllabic).
Also: “can do” (neng zuo) and “no can do” (bu neng zuo). Direct from Pidgin?
Not to mention “no tickee, no lookee”.
I was just using “long time no see” as an example. There are other examples of these four-character idiomatic phrases, which are called chengyu. I believe that the English phrase “long time no see” is derived from the pidgin.
Other examples: ti xiao jie fei, not knowing whether to laugh or cry;
shi ban gong bei, put in half the work but get double the results (i.e., highly efficient or productive);
shui luo shi chu, when the waters subside the rocks will emerge (i.e., the truth will come out).
Direct translations aside, I believe that Chinese is generally more succinct than English in expressing ideas, which was the point I was trying to make.
You misspelled “Ghoti.” The “Gh” is pronounced like “tough.”
BTW, this little trick is attributed to George Bernard Shaw.
Gung hey fat choy!
After taking Chinese for a year, I am actually starting to prefer writing my notes from chinese class in characters rather than pinyin. It seems to me the only thing harder than characters is trying to figure what i wrote when there is only about 400 possible words in the language. Rather than bother trying to write which of the 3 or 4 de’s or a ten or so zuo, I prefer just to write the damn word in hanzi. It seems the rest of my class is gradually shifting towards this too. Characters seem to work allright for chinese, but I’ve always thought they are crazy in any other language.
When I was taking Chinese class, I always felt pretty smug when I would write exercises on the blackboard in traditional characters, and none of my classmates could understand them . . .
Actually…
“Hitome” written “one” and “eye” means glance. “Hitome” written “person” and “eye” means in the public eye, where you can be seen. So the fact that it means “man” is most certainly relevant to the way the word is written.
There are very few Japanese words where the individual meaning of the characters have nothing to do with the meaning of the word. The exceptions are called “ateji,” which means something like “characters made to be applicable.” These are words where characters have been arbitrarily assigned to a word because they make the right sound, or words where a completely unrelated pronunciation is forced on the characters because they have the right meaning. An example of the former is “hon,” meaning “book.” The character for it normally means “source,” but the pronunciation fit, so they used it for “book.” An example of the latter is “tabako,” which means (duh) “tobacco,” or, more specifically, “cigarette.” It is written with the characters for “smoke” and “grass,” and would normally be pronounced “ensou” or “kemurigusa” if the reading of “tabako” had not been forced on them.
However, as you said, there is often a relation between the way a character is written and the way it is read. It takes a few years of study, but you do reach the point where you can “sound out” a character you have never seen before. However, the possibility that you will be totally wrong is greater than it is when sounding out a new word in English.
Sorry to bore everyone, but I love this shit.
Here’s the scoop. chinese was invented and originally written on slats of bamboo instead of paper. Well, some might argue that Chinese was originally written on bones or turtle shells. Certainly, there are some really old bones (I forget but around 2000 years ago???) in the national palace museum with Chinese charatures and some of them are easily recognizable by laymen. If you’re gonna write on a goat’s theighbone, well, brevity springs to mind.
Generally speaking, written Chinese is the same and can be universally understood. That said, Chinese characters since 1949 have gone through two major simplifications. The first was just to codify common practice. The second really went to town on the simplification stuff.
Today, China and Singapore use the fully simplified characters. Taiwan and HK use the old form or long form or complicated characters. Now, it is not strictly true that all Chinese can read Chinese and be understood. Just try to read a newspaper from Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, china and one of the overseas Chinese communities. Even if they were all written in simplified or long form, it’s difficult if not impossible to understand all of the different papers. The honkies also make up a few characters for uniquely cantonese words like “mo” which in mandarin is “mei” as in “mei you do mei”.
To type Chinese, there are several input methods but basically either use pinyin or shuyinfuhao, either way you type in something and then select the character you want. Because Chinese is a “di-syllabic” language (get baby bush to say that one), it really narrows down or just leaves one character choice if you type in the pinyin for both characters. For those of you studying Chinese, type in “you” and you have a lot of choices, type in “you mei you” and you will have one choice. Some people get pretty fast, but I type 70 wpm in English and have yet to see the average Chinese on a typer come even close.
The only advantage of Chinese that I have come to see after studying it for over 20 years now, is that it is a very logical language. Once you get a base of characters, put together two characters that you know seperately but don’t know the combined meaning, often you can guess correctly what it should be. For example, fei means fly and ji means machine, so that becomes feiji or airplane. And there are no irregular verbs. One set of verb conjugations for all Chinese verbs. For example, “zhengzai” means in the “process of” and works for all verbs “zhengzai” read book means “I am reading a book.”
I have a degree in Chinese language as well as having studied Japanese for a couple of years. As far as I understand, Japanese uses Chinese characters roughly in line with the first simplification. For example, the character for country is a simplified form in Japan. I don’t have an example off the top of my head, but they use plenty of long form characters as well.
Since Japanese is limited to about 1000 standard characters, they make one character have multiple meanings and pronounciations.
I’m not sure if the Chinese are more succinct than English. Actually, Chinese is an extremely subtle language. Witness the whole Hainan plane thing where China wanted something anything that could possibly be translated as “daoqian” or “apology”. True, there are sayings that are very succinct provided that both parties are familiar with the quotation. It’s like saying “when in Rome” instead of trying to explain the entire concept.
Man, I’m rabbiting on here, but these Oriental languages are complicated. ya, and to all the PC heads out there, it’s been in another thread but Oriental is not a degrading term just out of date.
anyway, back to the point, Asian languagues are simply not as suited to the modern electronic internet age as roman languages are.