Writing in Chinese...

Factual Questions
1

As I understand it, the Chinese depend on gutteral sounds to interpret the meaning of a word…kinda like homonyms in English. Anyway, just how much do they depend on it? I mean, if they depend heavily on sounds, how do they get their meaning across in writing? Sure, context helps, but if too many words depend on sound…how do they even start to get the context???

I write this because an English email was interpreted differently by three of my friends - causing much confusion, anger, etc. So, this made me think…what would the Chinese do?

Thanks,

  • Jinx
2

I’m not sure about the “guttural” sounds, but from what I’ve read about speaking chinese, the meaning of words depends on the tone. As I understand it, for Cantonese at least, each word has either a rising tone, falling tone, or level tone. For example, one word could mean three completely different things, depending on the tone used.

I would think that there are so many Chinese characters available, that you could get across the meaning of the text by simply picking the correct characters for the situation.

I’m not Chinese and I can’t speak or write Chinese, but the above is based on what little I have read and understand. I would guess we’d need a Chinese speaker and writer to answer the question more precisely.

3

I think samarm is right – the different tones are the key. But where as in Romanised script the words would be spelt the same, but with accent marks to indicate the tone, the Chinese characters would be entirely different.

However, I believe that quite a lot of characters can have very different meanings depending on the context. Anyone with more knowledge care to elaborate?

4

In Romanized Chinese (called pinyin) there are indeed accent marks above the vowels to indicate tone. However, the characters for different words that would otherwise be spelled the same in pinyin (but have different tones, or even the same ones in some cases) have seperate characters.

Many characters have clues as to both pronounciation and meaning. For example, the character for “mother” has the radicals for female and a horse. Not becaue mothers are female horses, but because the word for mother sounds like the word for horse.

5

My friend’s Chinese last name is Yuan. When I said, “Then your name is essentially something like ‘dollar’” (yuan is the monetary unit in China), he said that it sounded similar to English speakers, but was a different written character. I assume it also had a different tone in Chinese, making the confusion pretty much nonexistant.

6

To correct what samarm said, it’s Mandarin that has four tones, steady, rising, descending, and down-up; Cantonese has 9 tones.

Some characters do indeed change meaning depending on context, owing to the natural drift of the language over time. Probably the most famous example of this is a character pronounced “ji”. The compound word “weiji” means peril, while “jihui” means chance or opportunity and “jixie” means machine. There are many others such as “zhiliao”, (medical) treatment, and “zhengzhi”, politics - both words are written with the same “zhi” character.

What’s important to remember, though, is that ultimately Chinese characters are independent of pronunciation. There are many, many different dialects and sub-dialects to Chinese and each will read the same text differently - though the meaning will stay the same.

In Japanese, there is a discipline called “kanbun”. It used to be taught fairly early on until WWII, and now still has a tiny spot in the senior high school curiculum. Kanbun consists in reading classical chinese texts with the Japanese reading of the characters. (I suspect the same thing exists in Korean and Vietnamese.) Buddhist prayers are still recited that way. Like the Heart Sutra:

“(…)Sha ri shi, shiki fu i ku, ku fu i shiki, shiki soku ze ku, ku soku ze shiki (…)”

In modern Mandarin Chinese it comes out:

“(…)She li zi, se bu yi kong, kong bu yi se, se ji shi kong, kong ji shi se (…)”

For English-speakers studying Chinese, getting the tones right is very difficult at first. However, and this should be obvious, this doesn’t mean native speakers have difficulty with them. Consider that to most Japanese the words “bath”, “bass”, “bus” sound exactly the same, just like “worm” and “warm” do.

7

I think you’re talking about the written language. That makes it simple. Tones do not play an integral part in the written characters as characters are unique. Furthermore, when two characters are combined together, the chance of ambiguity drops dramatically (although this is more important for spoken rather than written Chinese). Also, written Chinese tends to use a more literary as opposed to spoken vocabulary, which further reduces ambiguity. An example of this would be literary “wu” instead of the spoken “mei you.”

To make an analogy, it is pretty easy to understand the following when you read: “They’re unbearable talking about their bare bear over there.”

8

jovan:

Vietnamese has been using a roman alphabet for quite some time now. The study of Chu Nom (Vietnamese version of Chinese characters) is a lost art except for, literally, a handful of people who are interested in that.

9

Monty:

Of course, I know that Chu Nom are a thing of the past in Vietnam. However, considering the influence of China on classical era Vietnamese culture, I supposed that, like the Japanese, Vietnamese scholars then read Chinese text with their local readings. I found the Heart Sutra in Vietnamese and the segment I quoted comes out as:

“(…)Xá Lợi Tử, sắc bất dị không, không bất dị sắc, sắc tức thị không, không tức thị sắc(…)”

And in Korean:

“(…)sa ri ja, saek pur i gong, gong bur i saek, saek chuk shi gong, gong juk shi saek(…)”

So, it seems that as far as Buddhist texts are concerned my guess was right.

10

Written and spoken Mandarin have almost nothing to do with each other (which makes it a huge pain in the neck come midterms and finals). One “sound” may have a dozen different characters associated with it, each with its separate meaning.
However, you are speaking of an English e-mail, which is very different. If you don’t include the tones of the sounds, it makes for much confusion, because context would get you only so far.

Cougarfang (Off to do her Chinese homework… groan)

11

I’m curious… do Chinese characters usually only have 1 reading for them? Or is it similar to Japanese in which at least 2 readings have to be learned?

12

In Chinese, characters usually have only one reading to them. There is no equivalent to the Japanese on-yomi and kun-yomi readings. There might be more characters, but for that reason, IMO reading Chinese is a lot more straightforward than reading Japanese.

13

jovan:

Your guess is right if you’re completely unfamiliar with what all those diacriticals in the Vietnamese alphabet mean.

14

The tones used for syllables change in certain circumstances depending on the tone preceding it, so in that way, they can be “read” differently.

There are characters that can be read in different ways, for example, the character for “le” (a particle), is read as “liao” depending on circumstances.

15

Blue Curls, the differences between on- and kun-yomi in Japanese are usually pretty dramatic. For example, the charcter for “life” can be reid in kun-yomi as “nama” (living, raw, or in the case of beer, draft), and in on-yomi as “sei.” (For more - this link may require Japanese character readers - try here.

16

On an anecdotal note, the many readings of Japanese kanji led to a situtation similar to that described in the op. A good friend of mine was giving a concert and I promised I would go see her perform. One week prior to what I thought was the date, I got an e-mail that I read as:

“Kyo wa, iyo-iyo raibu da yo!” (Today, my gig is almost starting!)

Thinking I had gotten the date wrong, I phoned her to tell her I was about to catch the bullet train to make it in time. Of course, I did get the date right, what she wrote was:

“Konnnichi wa, iyo-iyo raibu da yo!” (Hi, the gig is getting close!)

Both phrases are written exactly the same way.
Monty, I reread your last post five times and I still can’t figure out what you meant. I know from your previous posts that you are infinitely more knowledgeble of Vietnamese than I am. Can you confirm that there was an equivalent to kanbun in Vietnamese? (Sorry for the highjack, I’m curious…)

17

jovan: There used to be a particular way of writing Vietnamese known as Chu Nom. Now there’s a particular way of writing Vietnamese using the Roman alphabet with diacriticals. The latter replaced the former. They weren’t used together. When the Chu Nom were used, they didn’t have a version of on and kun readings: Chu Nom were the characters to represent Vietnamese and Chinese Characters themselves were the characters used to represent Chinese (which all scholars and government officials/functionaries of the time had to know).

18

Blue Curls, the tonal changes you’re talking about are really minor and the pronunciation remains unchanged. I think it is more splitting hairs rather than providing the “big picture” to the non-chinese speaking layman.

Generally speaking, there is only one reading or pronunciation per Chinese character in Mandarin. There are a few common exceptions where one character can have two completely pronunciations as the previously mentioned “le” and “liao.”

19

It’s not that uncommon that a character have two or even more readings.

20

The second part is true. The first part about having one reading is not quite.

Though Mandarin does generally have the one-reading-one-character rule, there are occasions where characters have more than one pronounciation. For example, some verbs and nouns have different readings even though they share the same concept.

chu3 – to be in, eg chu3 yu2 kun4 jing4 (to be in a difficult position)
chu4 – the place of ~, eg bao4gao4chu4 (place for reporting)

A suitable analogy would be “record” (verb) and “record” (noun)
In some Chinese dialects, there are also different readings for the same character. This is similar to the kunyomi and onyomi system, except that the colloquial reading is known as bai2du2 (“white” reading) and the “classical reading” is known as yan2du2 (“literary” reading).

In reading prepared scripts like poetry, prose, speeches, drama, the classical reading would be used. When a less formal setting is required, the colloquial is used.

For example:

Character: (in Mandarin Chinese) tian1 = sky
In Chaozhou (=Teochew), a subdialect of the Min dialect group), there are 2 different readings for the same character depending on the context.

Colloquial: /ti~/ (nasalised i)
Literary: /tiang/

Other instances also exist in other dialects including Mandarin Chinese, but I can’t seem to recall any.:smack: