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If English were written like Chinese (1999)
- wodenokoto 10y agoThis article is actually a lot better at explaining the characters system used in both china and Japan, than the articles that have hit the front page today and in the last week or so.
- disruptalot 10y agoWith the added bonus that it's accurate. Referring to these characters as they are originally: Chinese. Some people don't seem to be very happy about that fact.
- snaky 10y agoThere's too much politics involved. Try to find any even the slightest mention of proto-Korean language roots (which are Japonic) in Korean.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rangibaby 10y agoWho? The word kanji literally means "Chinese characters" lol
- fenomas 10y agoIn that 口 article yesterday, several commenters seemed angry that the author referred to kanji as "Japanese characters". So apparently this is some kind of thing, that some people take seriously. New one on me.
- rangibaby 10y ago"This is your brain on nationalism"
- disruptalot 10y agoYou can imagine being British and learning the American language. Of course people feel cheated if their culture is not credited where it should be.
- fenomas 10y agoWhen someone in Japan, talking about the Japanese language, refers to "Japanese characters", they clearly mean "characters used when writing Japanese". They are not suggesting anything about where the characters originated.
- bunderbunder 10y agoMy understanding (as a speaker of neither language) is that Japanese usage has diverged a fair bit from Chinese roots. The phonetic bits, for example, are based on how Japanese speakers of the time thought the equivalent Chinese sounded, with allowances for Japanese and Chinese having radically different phonics. And then you do that a few more times because the language both evolved in parallel, and you end up in a situation where each kanji can have more than one phonetic representation based on the original Chinese pronunciation. It can also have a phonetic representation based on the Japanese word that means the same thing, which will invariably be something radically different since Chinese and Japanese aren't terribly closely related languages. So while they might be using the same writing system, the fact that it's a fairly elegant writing system for Chinese doesn't imply that it's elegant in Japanese. Not any more than the Roman alphabet being a very good writing system for Latin implies that English's writing system isn't a bit of a mess.
- sova 10y agoFor not knowing either language, your knowledge is impressive. There are actually Japanese-originated Kanji, some that have no analogue in Chinese.
- rangibaby 10y agoJapan certainly adapted kanji to fit the Japanese language, but I was not aware of a dispute about the origin of the characters. Obviously they have diverged; Japan has made efforts to simplify kanji forms, although not to the extent of zh-cn, unless you count hiragana and katakana, which are derived from kanji: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana_origin.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Hiragana... As a side note, I was taught that Japanese "Chinese" readings have more in common with the Chinese spoken at the time than modern Chinese.
- fenomas 10y ago> Japanese "Chinese" readings have more in common with the Chinese spoken at the time than modern Chinese. Yup. There are even names for the various readings based on which era/dynasty they were borrowed during. E.g. for the readings of 明, "myo" was borrowed first, then "mei" a few centuries later, then "min" most recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Sino-Japanese_reading.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji#On.27yomi_.28Sino-Japane...
- sova 10y agoKan Ji or Letters of the Han Dynasty
- disruptalot 10y agoThe original article makes no mention of kanji (Han zi). Instead it ends with: "Well okay, I'll come clean. I've actually been secretly teaching Japanese to you. 口 actually really is the Japanese character for "mouth" and 食 really is the symbol for eating." Not exactly. Those are Chinese characters and Chinese meanings. The article does not teach anything exclusivly Japanese. For anyone who was not familiar, they would go around with the impression that these characters really originate from Japan. You can imagine how the Chinese people or people who study Chinese would feel being shown this cool new way to learn "Japanese".
- visarga 10y agoIt's a fucked up writing system that is pretty beautiful as well. Unfortunately it has limited the number of syllables (combinations of sounds) in the language. Why? Because they have to make due with just 2000 phonetic sounds (335 in modern Japanese) while English letters can combine in many more ways and form a much more diverse array of sounds. As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese, and in turn, it leads to isolation. It's like a "cultural moat" separating ideographic languages from phonetic ones. If they tried to give it up, it would be sad, because of all the history and beauty it has, but on the other hand, in these countries children in the 5th grade can't properly read a newspaper because they need to already know 2000 characters and many more combinations of characters by rote. By comparison, a first grader can read a newspaper in English. In terms of programming, Chinese is like Perl (even Perl6! - huge, complex, mysterious, beautiful) and English is like Lua (small, elegant, expressive). "There is a standing joke among sinologists that one of the first signs of senility in a China scholar is the compulsion to come up with a new romanization method"[1]. That's how much they are bothered by the huge initial cost of learning it. [1] "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard" - http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
- gfaure 10y agoThis is incorrect. You seem to be saying that the writing system is responsible for the fact that English is hard to learn for Chinese speakers because the phonetics are different? Many languages have phonetics very different from English and so are at a "disadvantage" when learning English as a second language -- this is orthogonal to the choice of writing system. Chinese speakers learn Pinyin from primary school and so know exactly how an alphabetic writing system works. Indeed, many Chinese who are not fully literate in Hanzi know how to read Pinyin. Furthermore, Japanese children in the fifth grade can already read about 850 characters -- this is not as difficult a feat as I think you imagine.
- muddyrivers 10y ago"As a result Japanese people (probably Chinese too) have a hard time processing some of the English syllables. This creates difficulty in learning English for Japanese and Chinese." We can also say that American/English have a hard time processing some of the Japanese/Chinese syllables. All the languages I speak a little bit have distinctive sounds that are difficult for most non-native speakers to master unless you put a lot of practices. It escalates to another level to speak a whole sentence, that is, a sequence of sounds. That is why it is easy to tell if a person is a native speaker of a language in most cases. It is true that Indo-European languages are difficult for Japanese and Chinese to learn. It is due to other reasons, which would be a long answer.
- allemagne 10y agoThe author really knocked it out of the park with this analogy. This explained things to me that I might have learned through experience but had never been explicitly told before. He even took the time at the end to point out where his own analogy breaks down. Zhongwen.com is also a fantastic site worth a look for students of Chinese. Overall extremely impressive, creative, and interesting.
- kwhitefoot 10y agoIs this meant to be serious (surely not) or rather like Mark Twain's take on spelling reform?
- bbctol 10y agoIt's really meant to explain what Chinese characters actually are and how they work, by an elaborate analogy.
- millcoo 10y agoAs regards Twain: the take you are thinking of was probably not written by him, but wrongly attributed to him after his death. He did, however, write an article[0] about spelling reform later in life, in which he sincerely advocated the use of a simplified "longhand, written with the shorthand alphabet unreduced." That is, he proposed the use of Isaac Pitman's phonographic alphabet—the basis of what was then the most popular shorthand in the English language—without the brief forms, phrasings, and abbreviations that allow stenographers to write (by omission) at the sound of speech, but slow down the reading back of what they've written; in Twain's preferred shorthand, every sound would be on the page. [0] - https://books.google.com/books?id=KoBYAAAAYAAJ&dq=what%20is%20man%20twain&pg=PA256#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=KoBYAAAAYAAJ&dq=what%20is%... (Unfortunately, the Project Gutenberg transcription of this essay does not include the plates of Twain's shorthand. This is why I've linked the Google Books scan.)
- kwhitefoot 10y agoI didn't realize it wasn't actually his. Thanks for the link, unfortunately Google doesn't seem to want to show me the content. I wonder if they are implementing some kind of region coding (I'm in Norway). I always wonder whether people advocating phonetic spelling have ever encountered someone who speaks a different dialect. In Twain's case it is pretty certain that he did as the Huckleberry Finn books include dialect dialogue. How did he think such people would use a phonetic script or worse a phonological one? Did he expect everyone to suddenly start speaking the American analogue of what in the UK we call Received Pronunciation (RP)? If not then surely another person's script would be even harder to read than it is already.
- Y_Y 10y agoI've been waiting for years for somebody to do something like this with emoji. All we'd need is a way to add radicals and a central dictionary.
- PeCaN 10y agoIn a way, eyes and mouths are like the radicals for emoji. I'm not sure how you'd sort emoji though, since there's no stroke order.
- WalterBright 10y agoThe increasing use of icons and emoji suggests that English will become like Chinese! (Ever try to look up an icon in a dictionary? This puts paid to the idea that icons are decipherable by people who don't know the language. Copyrighting the icons makes even that infinitely worse, as it prevents standardization.)
- Animats 10y agoA running joke in Gibson's "Idoru" is that the lead character, through all her adventures, carries an icon dictionary.
- drhodes 10y agoAn icon? no. There are however, online hanzi dictionaries where the user draws a character, here's one: http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home http://ce.linedict.com/dict.html#/cnen/home See the paintbrush next to the magnifying glass in the search field.
- yorwba 10y agoAlso not for icons but for math symbols: http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html Really useful when you want to use "that squiggly thingy" but don't know the TeX command.
- dTal 10y agoI usually jump straight to http://shapecatcher.com/ http://shapecatcher.com/ for arbitrary Unicode.
- Kirth 10y agoI'm not sure where you've seen this "increasing use of icons and emoji". When I encounter people (this is pretty much limited to teenagers) use emoji, they have very little communicative value. In the modern era the use of pictographs has become Chinese's Achilles' heel: the hanzi are not sortable. The very things that define the Chinese are what makes it stupidly difficult to get computers to grok the language.
- superobserver 10y agoFYI we're close to this with the use of acronyms and abbreviations, not just emoticons, given English's phonetic basis, etc.
- Animats 10y agoHe wrote this before the rise of emoji. We may see something like this as a cell phone writing form. Teenagers would use it to be incomprehensible to olds.
- hugh4 10y agoI don't think they need that much help.
- jl6 10y agoWhat a breath of fresh air is a 1999-era web page. Fast loading, simple, readable.
- bleachedsleet 10y ago...horrid color schemes, no support for mobile devices...yeah, what a breath of fresh air.
- Chronic9q 10y agoSounds like modern day bootstrap websites.
- Gracana 10y agoThe background is light colored and the foreground is 100% black, and the text is full width and large on my phone. What would mobile support mean, a hamburger menu and no zooming? No thanks.
- yoz-y 10y agoLuckily there's the reader mode. Those fonts are tiny and the background is too dark. But since there aren't any JS tricks this works very well. thumbs up.
- hawkice 10y agoLooks fine on mobile, header picture could be a bit thinner but other than that it's basically perfectly responsive.
- Ezhik 10y agohttp://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
- jl6 10y agoI read the whole thing on a mobile and had no problem whatsoever.
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- yomly 10y agoThis is a fantastic guide / insight for how Chinese characters work, and does a great deal to dispel the myth that Chinese characters are virtually random - that each individual character requires independent memorization. As someone who has studied both Chinese and Japanese, this article read very fluidly. Curious how other readers have found this?
- int_19h 10y agoAs someone with practically zero understanding of the Chinese writing system beyond the basic notion of what an ideogram is, it was very helpful in aiding understanding (assuming it is accurate).
- labster 10y ago[work] + [fight] + [sun] is poor Huffmanization of the common English suffix -tion. That's what, 14 strokes when English just takes 7? Well, maybe that was the point, though -- that the priorities of the language may change over time, and eventually you're dealing with 2000 year old Cockney rhyming slang baked into your written language. But that's just the opinion of one guy sitting on his Vannevar.
- gfaure 10y agoThat is a part of the analogy which definitely applies -- Chinese script (even Simplified) often completely ignores Huffman coding-like principles. Otherwise we wouldn't have words like 繼續 "continue" (41 strokes).
- yorwba 10y agoFor comparison, the letters in "continue" have approximately 15 strokes total.
- labster 10y ago続く is 14 strokes, so Japanese beats English! I could go on ... and "go on" is only 6 strokes.
- vacri 10y agoYou could just use the ellipsis, and use only three strokes. Or even simpler, an em-dash at one stroke. :)
- pacaro 10y agoOr two strokes and a dot in cursive. A principle that also applies in Chinese and Japanese
- leemailll 10y ago继续 21 strokes jixu 8 strokes
- gerbilly 10y agoPeople might be interested to know that Egyptian Hieroglyphics, despite looking even more like pictograms are actually an alphabet. Another cool fact, in hieroglyphics there is more than one way to write a word, because, unlike most alphabetic systems, some characters are multi syllabic and can represent two or more syllables.
- golergka 10y agohttps://xkcd.com/1709/ https://xkcd.com/1709/
- swort 10y agoThe letter 'M' in the Roman alphabet is derived from the symbol for running water in phonecian, and the letter 'A' is a rotated cow's head. Phonecian is partly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. I love this stuff. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
- ihaveahadron 10y agoI feel like English speaking people have come a long way to understanding Asian writing systems since 1999. Edit: After reading the comments here I take that back.
- force_reboot 10y agoOne thing that is glossed over slightly in these discussions is the distinction between collections of sound-meaning compound characters where the rebus is the same but the words aren't cognate, and where the words are cognate. I've read in some places that the scribes attempted to use the same rebus for cognate words but I everything I could find online was a re-hashing of wikipedia (or wherever the wikipedia article is sourced from) which states "However, the phonetic component is not always as meaningless as this example would suggest. Rebuses were sometimes chosen that were compatible semantically as well as phonetically." I'm not sure how important this really is or how many characters that share a common rebus are cognate. But to my aesthetic senses I much prefer characters to contain etymological information than just the pronunciation when the character was first written.