China Develops an Alphabetic script...China smash?
- Thread starter Brunaburh
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I can't say as my knowledge of Chinese is limited, but it happens often when I'm seeking to check the pinyin transcription in my Chinese dictionary (it lists some 4,800 characters and 12,000 expressions). I just opened randomly at ōu and found 4 different ideograms for it, still randomly for huì and counted 14 ideograms, looked for mǎ and found 5, 3 for ráo, 8 for fǔ, 4 for cái, 5 for wū, 4 for tián ...
Either the dictionary has badly written the pinyin or as I have only learned basics, I may have missed some subtleties over the use of tones when it comes to written only language, but owing to random search over the entire dictionary and the findings of multiple characters with the same pinyin, making me supposing on probability grounds that it happens frequently (otherwise, it would have been very unlikely for me to find any just by opening any page randomly).
But just looking at the dictionary, with the table of possible pinyin vowels and consonants, we have some 759 possible pinyin syllabes (without distinction of tones), or 3795 with the 5 possible tones. Given the dictionary gives 4,800 characters, that gives a minimum 26% of pinyin syllabes having at least two different characters.
But that's over the sample of the dictionary and list of 56 pinyin consonants and vowels (23 and 33) it gives. As there exists much more Chinese characters (I read often that's around 50,000), even though you don't need much more to have fluent understanding, and surmising that there isn't much more possible pinyin syllabes than implied by the table of the dictionary, that gives an average 12 characters per pinyin syllabe. You'd then have to apply to that number the frequency of actual use for a given character to have an idea of the precise odd, surmising too that some pinyin are more used than others.
Now, that's a very mathematical approach, but you can guess why I'm so concerned with the monosyllabic system (on a mathematical point of view).
Either the dictionary has badly written the pinyin or as I have only learned basics, I may have missed some subtleties over the use of tones when it comes to written only language, but owing to random search over the entire dictionary and the findings of multiple characters with the same pinyin, making me supposing on probability grounds that it happens frequently (otherwise, it would have been very unlikely for me to find any just by opening any page randomly).
But just looking at the dictionary, with the table of possible pinyin vowels and consonants, we have some 759 possible pinyin syllabes (without distinction of tones), or 3795 with the 5 possible tones. Given the dictionary gives 4,800 characters, that gives a minimum 26% of pinyin syllabes having at least two different characters.
But that's over the sample of the dictionary and list of 56 pinyin consonants and vowels (23 and 33) it gives. As there exists much more Chinese characters (I read often that's around 50,000), even though you don't need much more to have fluent understanding, and surmising that there isn't much more possible pinyin syllabes than implied by the table of the dictionary, that gives an average 12 characters per pinyin syllabe. You'd then have to apply to that number the frequency of actual use for a given character to have an idea of the precise odd, surmising too that some pinyin are more used than others.
Now, that's a very mathematical approach, but you can guess why I'm so concerned with the monosyllabic system (on a mathematical point of view).
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IIRC, both Hokkien and Cantonese have seperate written forms. Are they the only Chinese languages, aside from Mandarin, that do ? Why, in your mind, did not written "vernacular" forms develop for other Chinese languages?
If you don't mind, I will try to provide an example. This is the Japanese character for language: 語
The left-hand bit is a box with lines coming out of it. The box is supposed to be a mouth, the lines, speech. So far, that is picture-writing. The right-hand bit has another mouth, and then the character for "five". Why five? Because five is pronounced "go", just like the word for language. So, the way you are meant to "read" it is to think to yourself "OK, something to do with speaking, sounds like go... Oh, it's language". The vast majority of Chinese characters have both a radical to suggest meaning, and a radical to suggest the phonetic value, and thus they are not just pictures.
Egyptian Hieroglyphs is not an alphabet it is a mix of phonograms and ideograms.
Chinese Script is essentially an extension of such a system complicated by language change so that a lot of phonograms have become somewhat disconnected from their phonemes. This means some characters have to be reinforced by other semiphonetic characters and "ideatic" ones.
In theory one could use a fully ideogrammic script but it doesn't happen due to the sheer impracticality and the usefulness of phonetic shorthand. The usefulness of ideatic shorthand also limits pure phonetic scripts (alphabets, abjads, abugidas, etc).
My point was more, how often do you get a situation where you need to know the precise meaning of a single word without any context whatsoever? In any plausible situation where you're communicating with someone, there's going to be a context to help you work out what a word means. Again, if Chinese speakers are able to make themselves understood when speaking Chinese, they'd be able to make themselves understood when writing it with an alphabetic script.
I think that's confusing spoken and written considerations, as we are speaking modifying the written way, not the spoken one.
While written, another script would have to exist on his own, otherwise existing only through context would remove any sense to the word itself.
Thus, you would want to pass from a writing system where the character and the word or idea behind it are not suffering any ambiguity, since you can write down a single character and still it would have a clear, precise meaning, to a system where you must surround it with other words to give it any sense at all.
While written, another script would have to exist on his own, otherwise existing only through context would remove any sense to the word itself.
Thus, you would want to pass from a writing system where the character and the word or idea behind it are not suffering any ambiguity, since you can write down a single character and still it would have a clear, precise meaning, to a system where you must surround it with other words to give it any sense at all.
It might be worth mentioning that there is a limited form of this in English, too. One of the reasons we spell "meet" and "meat", or "see" and "sea", differently is to help distinguish between words that sound the same. It's not strictly necessary--I can't think of a context where it would be difficult to tell which was intended--but it probably does make things easier for the reader.
Except for the most part Chinese characters represent morphemes, not words. In an entirely monosyllabic language, one syllable = one morpheme = one word. However, none of the Chinese languages are entirely monosyllabic, and Mandarin is more disyllabic than other forms of Chinese. Let's take one of your examples: There are 4 common characters for cái as you have found: 材, 才, 财, and 裁. Now, all of these characters are pronounced the same (notice the common phonetic component 才 in the first three), but to my knowledge they are never found in isolation, only as part of disyllabic words:
棺材 -guān cái- 'coffin'
刚才 -gāng cái- 'a moment ago'
财产 -cái chǎn- 'property'
裁剪 -cái jiǎn- 'cut out'
While these characters may be assigned their own meanings in a dictionary, that doesn't necessarily mean that they can exist in isolation.
Well modifying how Chinese was written would have likely made a major impact on how the language developed depending on when an alphabet is adopted. Old Chinese had no tones, complex consonant clusters, and many more final consonants than modern forms of Chinese (and fewer homophones). A purely phonetic writing system would probably have prevented the loss of some of these elements. Or not - Tibetan and Burmese have also lost many of the elements in older forms of the languages yet they have been using alphabets for a very long time.
In Old Chinese the four characters above were probably pronounced /*zlɯː/ or /*zlɯːs/.
I believe the government has created a standardized Hakka written form in Taiwan as well. Notably, Hokkien, Cantonese, and Hakka are spoken by people with at least some autonomy from China in regions where Mandarin was not widely spoken until recently.
I think the major factor preventing the development of other written vernacular forms is the long tradition of writing in Literary Chinese, which never really reflected spoken Chinese. Replacing Literary Chinese with Written Vernacular Chinese was simply a continuation of the tradition for non-Mandarin speakers.
Just to make everyone clear on this. You understand that a diglossia has existed throughout Chinese history? It is very easy for the ruling government to create a standard Chinese script that all dialects and people can use. And I think the alphabet will be a zhuyin like one. Very simple and easy, and easy to develop.
Edit: I really feel like everyone in this thread should preface their language proficiency. I am semi-proficient in Chinese language, and well thanks to Bay Area education - also the culture and history. I am able to read, write, and speak in Chinese. (I know right, an Indian kid who speaks Chinese, I must be Singaporean).
Edit: I really feel like everyone in this thread should preface their language proficiency. I am semi-proficient in Chinese language, and well thanks to Bay Area education - also the culture and history. I am able to read, write, and speak in Chinese. (I know right, an Indian kid who speaks Chinese, I must be Singaporean).
Jerry Kraus
Banned
Hence, my point, that the logographic/pictographic script is retained by the Chinese, and the Japanese, because it is powerful, and highly expressive. Also, overwhelmingly complex, but, everything has its costs and benefits, you know.
Not "to give it any sense at all"; just to show which possible meaning is the intended one. And in real-life communication, words are almost always surrounded by other words. For example, in English the word "bark" can mean either the noise which a dog makes, the act of making such a noise, or the outer layer of a tree. Does this lead to confusion? No, because, whilst if you wrote the word down with no context you wouldn't know which meaning was intended, in regular communication you do have context to help tell you the meaning. Similarly with Chinese, although switching to an alphabetic writing system might theoretically introduce ambiguity, in practice this is unlikely to be much of a problem, because you'll almost always have context telling you which meaning to use. Chinese homophones don't seem to stop people talking to each other in Chinese, so why would they stop them writing?
Optical_Illusion
Banned
That's an excellent point, though I would note that it has been reported that Chinese speakers use an unusually heavy amount of explicit disambiguation in spoken language beyond contextual clues - http://nautil.us/issue/59/connections/is-the-chinese-language-a-superstition-machine-rp
"Chinese speakers seem to have a more sensitive radar for ambiguity. Psycholinguists Michael Yip and Eiling Yee have shared with me their impressions that Chinese speakers are more likely to take pains to clarify the intended meaning of an ambiguous word, even when its meaning should be obvious from the context. For example, Yee reported that they might say the equivalent of “I have to renew my mortgage, so I have an appointment with my bank—you know, the financial institution, not a river bank.” This type of attunement to ambiguity, if it turns out to be a general characteristic of Chinese speakers, certainly meshes with the elevated role of homophony in Chinese culture."
Again of course you can do this in writing as well, so no real barrier to alphabetized Chinese...
"Chinese speakers seem to have a more sensitive radar for ambiguity. Psycholinguists Michael Yip and Eiling Yee have shared with me their impressions that Chinese speakers are more likely to take pains to clarify the intended meaning of an ambiguous word, even when its meaning should be obvious from the context. For example, Yee reported that they might say the equivalent of “I have to renew my mortgage, so I have an appointment with my bank—you know, the financial institution, not a river bank.” This type of attunement to ambiguity, if it turns out to be a general characteristic of Chinese speakers, certainly meshes with the elevated role of homophony in Chinese culture."
Again of course you can do this in writing as well, so no real barrier to alphabetized Chinese...
You are definitely right there Kraus, logography has amazing benefits. But I mean a China with an alphabet makes their printing press viable, gets mass book consumption, and boosts literacy rates. So, we definitely also should wonder what China would turn into.