Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[ala]

It is agreed that English spelling isn't as purely phonetic as it should be. The number of words with the same pronunciation but different spelling is much lower in English than in Chinese' date=' and it is even lower in proper phoneticically spelled languages like Spanish.

I would not wish to spend too much time comparing English and Chinese writing, though.[/quote']

Though English spellings are somewhat initially irregular, one can develop a sense of heuristics to the system after more exposure to various spellings and their sounds. This is not easily possible in Chinese.

For example, you can read the below with relative ease, even though you've never been exposed to this spelling system, and it gets easier as you read on; with our current English spelling, you would need a larger exposure, but still doable. Comparing the two below, you realize that our current traditional English spelling is not too bad either.

Tha Gettysburg Adres (PHONETICALLY WRITTEN)

For scor and seven yérz ago, our fátherz braut forth on this continent a nu naision, consévd in liberty and dedicaited tu tha propozision that aul men ar creaited équal. Now we ar engaijd in a grait sivil wor, testing wether that naision or eny naision so consévd and so dedicaited can long endur. We ar met on a grait batelféld uv that wor. We hav cum tu dedicait a porsion uv that féld az a fínal resting-plais for thóz hu hér gaiv thair lívz that that naision mít liv. It is aultúgether fiting and proper that we shood du this. But in a larjer sens, we canot dedicait, we canot consecrait, we canot halo this ground. Tha braiv men, living and ded, hu strugeld hér hav consecraited it far abuv our por power to ad or detract. Tha world wil litel nót nor long remember wát we say hér, but it can never forget wát thay did hér. It iz for us tha living rather tu be dedicaited hér tu the unfinisht wurk wich thay hu faut hér hav thus far so nóbly advanst. It iz rather for us tu be hér dedicaited tu tha grait task remaining befor us -- that frum théz onord ded we taik incrést devósion -- that we hér híly rezolv that théz ded shal not hav díd in vain, that this naision under God shal hav a nu burth uv frédom, and that guvernment uv tha pépel, bi tha pépel, for tha pépel shal not perish frum the urth. -- Abraham Lincoln

The Gettysburg Address (OUR TRADITIONAL SPELLING)

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. -- Abraham Lincoln

[SAINT]

Alveranter wrote:

come on Saint.. can't you ever grow up.. first a poll about preference of women.. and now another one about preference of LANGUAGES.. where will this end.. a poll about the chinese writing system?? (horrible thought)

Now that's what I consider impudence.. Is there a problem with that?

Which sounds better, blue or cake?

Closing, waste of time

Roddy

Hey, does that poll waste your time? What criteria do you base on saying that it's a silly question? I can't figure out.

[roddy]

And you posted this here because?

Tell me by email, your account's inactive.

Roddy

[Guest Yau]

Though English spellings are somewhat initially irregular, one can develop a sense of heuristics to the system after more exposure to various spellings and their sounds. This is not easily possible in Chinese.

Can it drive us to the conclusion that character-language kids express less than their phonetic-language kids?

P.S. the 4-month birthday of this topic is coming. You can now search it in Google too. Celebrate!

[woodcutter]

If we performed an experiment where we read a paragraph aloud to English and Chinese native speakers and asked them to write it down as best they could, I think the English speakers would make fewer mistakes. Passing their efforts on to another native speaker, however, I do not think there would be a significant difference in the ability of someone else to interpret what was written. A faulty attempt at a character is surely usually able to be understood in context.

[Green Pea]

Quote:

Though English spellings are somewhat initially irregular, one can develop a sense of heuristics to the system after more exposure to various spellings and their sounds. This is not easily possible in Chinese.

Can it drive us to the conclusion that character-language kids express less than their phonetic-language kids?

No, it drives us to the conclusion that characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese.

[Guest Yau]

it drives us to the conclusion that characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese.

What i can conclude is that the further conclusion on ability to express is either arbritary or thoughtless.

[jz87]

I think it's worth the time and effort to learn hanzi because as a written representation of the Chinese language it is more efficient than alphabetical or syllabic systems. Reading speed and comprehension would not be the same under pinyin.

It's true that all language in this world can be encoded with 1s and 0s, which is the simplest possible alphabet. Afterall, why waste your time learning 20 something letters when you only need to learn 2? But you don't see any civilization on this planet that actually represent their language in binary. Can you imagine what the reading speed in binary would be?

The eye scans across the page in lines. In order to accomodate this physiological fact, an alphabetized version of Chinese would ideally embed tone information between the consonant and the vowel, since that's when the tone is expressed in speech. If it comes before the consonant then you have to commit extra scrap information to memory, which is inefficient, and if it comes after the vowel, then you have to go back to figure out how to pronounce the word. Therefore reading it twice, also inefficient. So Chinese would have to be written like this: f1ei h4an z4i zh1ong w2en x3ie f3a.

Actually it'd be even better that instead of pinyin a alphabet system similar to Korean Hangul can be devised. One symbol for each consonant and one for each vowel. Organized spatially so that the eye only have to scan through once to identify the consonant, the tone, and the vowel.

This thread has got me thinking, what would be a good way to represent a spoken language in writing? Any pure phonetic written system would have to be linear since that's the only way we can vocalize the words. By a writing system which has the freedom of 2 dimensions could conceivably be more creative. Do we have to vocalize whole sentences to comprehend it or do we vocalize only words or syllables and reconstruct the structure of the sentence without vocalization? In other words, would it be possible to represent words phonetically and sentence structure spatially?

[Claw]

This thread has got me thinking, what would be a good way to represent a spoken language in writing? Any pure phonetic written system would have to be linear since that's the only way we can vocalize the words.

Well, it's been shown that once people have learned how to read a word, they no longer use any vocalization cues in order to be able to read it, so a system doesn't necessarily need to be linear. When reading, people recognize a word as a whole and no longer need to sound it out. For instance, in English, you can often mix up the letters within a word and people will still be able to read it just fine. They only sound it out if it's a word that they've never seen before. Likewise, once a person has learned how to recognize Chinese characters, there's usually no appreciable difference to alphabetic systems.

dmoser's argument though, has more to do with reliably producing the characters rather than recognizing them. That's been going back and forth on this thread for 23 pages now so I don't think I have anything more useful to add in that regard.

[Bob Dylan Thomas]

i apologise if this point has already been covered (i could only bring myself to read the first few hundred posts on this thread before i skipped to the end) but several people have been talkking about a "purely phoenetic writing system", as if it was something of an ideal, but i don't think such a system would be possible at all. speaking in thee terms neglects the crucial facts that pronounciation of the same language varies over time and space.

to illustrate my point, these is considerable LOGIC behind seemingly illogical english spellings that lazy columnists with nothing better to write about constantly bemoan (for which they are bizarrely called "language gurus").

Lots of the words ending "ough", for instance, used to be pronounced far more similarly than they are today (evidence for this can be foudn by looking at old poetry, Shakespeare etc where lines that should rhyme don't any more). pronounciation changes over time; so a "phoenetic" writing system would have to alter its standard spellings as pronouciation changes. but these changes are slow, gradual and often region-specific, so of course changing spellings is impractical, hence why the vestiges of english pronounciation from centuries ago remain in english spellings today (which is what many people brand "illogical").

secondly, pronounciation of a language with a common writiten system varies immensely even over small distances. For example, even in the same region of Britain, people pronounce "controversy" differently; in northern england "bath" and "grass" have a much shorter "a" sound (sorry, i don't know the linguistic jargon) compared to the south; and that's not to mention the huge variations between Britain and North America, Australia etc. either different regions of each country would have to create its own "phoenetic" writing system, or they would have to make do with a "standardized" version of some other area's pronouciations, in which case the point of a phoenetic writing system would be defeated. another favourite example of this (stolen from Pinker) are the words "career" and "Korea": to me there is a distinct difference, but to many people the two words are identical.

i have used english as an example; Chinese is admittedly different, given the existance of "standard" putonghua, theoretically identical everywhere - but there's no denying that, even when (supposedly) speaking putonghua, there are still massive differences in pronounciation in different areas, for example the use of "er". Even assuming "standard" putonghua was enforced everywhere uniformly, languages still shift and change over time, they are not static (despite what dickheads like William Safire would have us believe), and so the "phoeneticly pure" written system would be impossible. thus, pinyin and zhuyin are flawed too: they tell me that 是 is pronounced shi, or 汁 is pronounced zhir, whereas friends from Guagzhou or Penang or Taiwan might insist on si and zi respectively.

Characters, in only having vague phoenetic implications, are flexible enough to allow for these variations, just as english spelling is necessarily unphoenetic, since "standard english" does not exist.

[jz87]

Well the Hanzi system is so flexible that even a completely different language like Japanese can use it to represent words.

[beirne]

i apologise if this point has already been covered (i could only bring myself to read the first few hundred posts on this thread before i skipped to the end) but several people have been talkking about a "purely phoenetic writing system", as if it was something of an ideal, but i don't think such a system would be possible at all. speaking in thee terms neglects the crucial facts that pronounciation of the same language varies over time and space.

I believe I'm one of those people. I agree that achieving a truly pure phonetic writing may be next to impossible. What I was trying to do when I said that, though, was move the discussion from the weaknesses in the English writing system to languages with better phonetic alphabets like Italian and Spanish. Some of the replies seemed to imply that moving from characters to a phonetic system as good as English would be bad, and I agree. Comparisons should rather be made to languages with good phonetic alphabets like Spanish.

[dmoser]

several people have been talkking about a "purely phoenetic writing system", as if it was something of an ideal, but i don't think such a system would be possible at all.

Such a system is quite possible, or close to it. What is required is a standard dialect which the writing system is designed to represent.

Pinyin, for all its flaws, is really pretty close to perfectly phonetic, IF you only take standard putonghua as the standard. This is why they chose a standard dialect to represent. One system can't represent all the different dialect pronunciations. There is standard British English, and more-or-less standard American English, though the Americans have not attempted to fix a standard. But the "standard" is represented in dictionary pronunciations, which attempt to give the most common neutral pronunciations for words. Some people may pronounce "pen" as a homophone of "pin", but that's not the "standard" pronunciation, according to the dictionary.

You are quite right that accents vary all over the map, and sounds can differ wildly. All that matters is consistency within the standard, which is the (usually arbitrarily chosen) standard or "correct" pronunciation.

The string of letters "president" can be pronounced perfectly in both English and French, with the letter strings representing the sounds of either language quite well.

Of course, all phonetic writing systems "leak", since even speakers of the standard dialect can vary randomly. But Beirne's point is that Spanish comes a LOT closer to perfect consistency than English, which is pretty pathetic. I'm not a great fan of pinyin, but at least it's pretty consistent.

I love the name "Bob Dylan Thomas", by the way. Reminds me of a book that came out many many years ago wherein various famous people were "blended together" in this way, such as "James Joyce Carol Oates", and Eldridge "Beaver" Cleaver, etc.

[Alveranter]

Now that's what I consider impudence.. Is there a problem with that?

Thanks Saint.. you just taught me a new word: impudence. Might come in handy.. No.. there's absolutely no problem with that..

[Bob Dylan Thomas]

dmoser: i'm flattered that you like my name, but i would challenge the existance of "standard" pronounciation of British English (not so sure about American, is there any sort of governing body who decides these things over there?). Presumably this "standard" is that which the OED, or Webster's or whatever, lists in their dictionary: but who gave the dictionary writers the right or authority to choose a particular pronounciation and brand it "standard"?

It might work in a country with strong centralized power like China, but where i come from (England) there shouldn't be anything superior (or "standard") about, for example, Southern pronounciation over Northern pronounciation (Northerners get right pissed off about London-centric attitudes) - which is why i always tell Chinese friends that "standard" British English does not exist. (and please no-one bring up RP, (received pronounciation) - who speaks like that, apart from the Queen and Boris Johnson???). And none of us are any the worse off for it - in fact, since newsreaders may have regional accents (instead of the "standard"), everyone is a lot happier with the situation, and it also brings us a step closer to getting rid of snobbish classism.

[Bob Dylan Thomas]

dmoser: i'm flattered that you like my name, but i would challenge the existance of "standard" pronounciation of British English (not so sure about American, is there any sort of governing body who decides these things over there?). Presumably this "standard" is that which the OED, or Webster's or whatever, lists in their dictionary: but who gave the dictionary writers the right or authority to choose a particular pronounciation and brand it "standard"?

It might work in a country with strong centralized power like China, but where i come from (England) there shouldn't be anything superior (or "standard") about, for example, Southern pronounciation over Northern pronounciation (Northerners get right pissed off about London-centric attitudes) - which is why i always tell Chinese friends that "standard" British English does not exist. (and please no-one bring up RP, (received pronounciation) - who speaks like that, apart from the Queen and Boris Johnson???). And none of us are any the worse off for it - in fact, since newsreaders may have regional accents (instead of the "standard"), everyone is a lot happier with the situation, and it also brings us a step closer to getting rid of snobbish classism.

[Bob Dylan Thomas]

dmoser: i'm flattered that you like my name, but i would challenge the existance of "standard" pronounciation of British English (not so sure about American, is there any sort of governing body who decides these things over there?). Presumably this "standard" is that which the OED, or Webster's or whatever, lists in their dictionary: but who gave the dictionary writers the right or authority to choose a particular pronounciation and brand it "standard"?

It might work in a country with strong centralized power like China, but where i come from (England) there shouldn't be anything superior (or "standard") about, for example, Southern pronounciation over Northern pronounciation (Northerners get right pissed off about London-centric attitudes) - which is why i always tell Chinese friends that "standard" British English does not exist. (and please no-one bring up RP, (received pronounciation) - who speaks like that, apart from the Queen and Boris Johnson???). And none of us are any the worse off for it - in fact, since newsreaders may have regional accents (instead of the "standard"), everyone is a lot happier with the situation, and it also brings us a step closer to getting rid of snobbish classism.

[dmoser]

And none of us are any the worse off for it - in fact, since newsreaders may have regional accents (instead of the "standard"), everyone is a lot happier with the situation, and it also brings us a step closer to getting rid of snobbish classism.

Yes, of course. There is nothing "superior" about any dialect or pronunciation, and linguists do not support such an idea (and neither do I).

That's why I used the word "arbitrary". There is nothing "better" about the northern dialects in China. There was a lot of infighting at the time about which pronunciation to adopt as the standard. So there's no issue of snobbery here at all (except for who wins the battle about the final choice.)

The question is, how would you do it otherwise? We can't just delete all the phonetic pronunciation cues in the dictionary and say "Pronounce these words however you want." We can't just discard pinyin and say "Retroflex, Schmetroflex, pronounce the initials and finals, pronounce the characters in whatever way your region does." This is the problem the Chinese were trying to SOLVE. Everyone pronounced the characters differently, and many dialects were mutually incomprehensible. What could they do if not adopt a standard?

English has somewhat the same problem, though there is no need to go as far as the Chinese did, since there is no problem with comprehensibility. I see no need for RP or some such (American or British) for newscasts etc. Who cares? We all understand each other. The problem is in dictionary compilation and English language teaching.

You've got to adopt SOME standard, or these all collapse into chaos. But of course, no one is under the illusion that the standard adopted is "better" than any other. This is just 没办法.

The phonetic components of characters were also based on certain standard pronunciations, all of which have morphed drastically over time.

But in the 20th and 21st century we are able to artificially "freeze" pronunciations for longer periods of time. But we're straying off the topic, sorry.

[amperel]

that's why we use characters case closed.

[roddy]

But we're straying off the topic, sorry.

After 23 pages, who wouldn't . . .

Roddy