Why no Chinese alphabet/syllabary?

I thought Chinese charactors had a far back origin dealing with oracle bones and the patterns formed in them from the cracks.
 
A Chinese alphabet? It can debated as to how well a Mandarin speaker can understand written Cantonese, but the fact remains that there are SO DAMN MANY words that sound exactly the same that an alphabet would fuck the language's comprehensibility up totally. Chinese characters depend on the picture, not so much the sound to convey meaning; this is particularly true in Classical Chinese which is quite cryptic as it leaves out so many modern particles.

This. Even Korean, which has largely phased out Chinese characters, can't get rid of them completely. They use them in high level tests because there are so many Korean words derived from Chinese characters which sound and look exactly the same in hangul. An example (taken from just opening the dictionary) would be 고원 (高原, plateau, highland) and 고원 (雇員, a government employee). If you have a sentence in a text where it would be easy to mix them up, they tend to write the Chinese characters in brackets. With purely Korean words or reasonably obvious Chinese-derived words it's not as necessary.

Since words with the same pronunciation are much more common in Chinese, so even if you switched over to an alphabetic or hangul type system you would end up using bulk characters in all texts above middle school level anyway, just for the sake of accurate comprehension.

The reason why Japanese needs a supporting script (kana) to go with the kanji is because Japanese has declensions and particles that Chinese doesn't, so it's needed to form endings for the kanji. IIRC Japanese used to only use Kanji but then kana evolved. I doubt they really needed to introduce kana actually, instead of just reforming their Kanji usage.

Same reason that hangul was developed in Korean, really. Chinese characters were really grossly inappropriate for Korean writing, unless you were just a scholar reading the Chinese Classics (which for most of history were the only Koreans reading). But linguistically, with the politeness levels and particles and pure Korean words that don't have corresponding Chinese characters, another system was developed.

But Chinese itself? The character system, linguistically, makes the most sense for the language/language family.
 

loughery111

Banned
Umm, those Chinese who learn Mandarin do have to learn some form of noun declension and verbal conjugation in order to make any sense of the language, and the lack of an alphabet does not help with that. How would you like to learn, for example, that there are only two tenses - the present and the preterite (no distinct future tense, folks) - and that the sole distinction between those two is aspect, as in the Slavic languages? For non-native speakers of Russian learning how to speak Russian, for example, that bit would be pretty confusing.



Lots of languages do not have articles - definiteness is expressed through other means, such as the demonstratives (in English, that would be the equivalent of using this or that).



Umm, as far as I know Mandarin does use prepositions.

As to the "how would I like to" question... I'm doing it right now and enjoying it quite well. I'm not well enough trained in linguistic theory to really follow you on this, but as there are fixed ways of defining past and present, future is generally clear based either on context (打算,to plan, and 可能, probable/ly, can tip that off) or on the presence of 会 (which can mean "will"), and Chinese lacks most of the 500 different ways English uses to signify any of them, it seems damned simpler to me.

And on prepositions, I can assure you that things like 在,里,离,下,上, etc. are NOT actually prepositions, but rather describe locations while omitting the use of a preposition entirely. A friend here, who is otherwise entirely fluent in English, absolutely CANNOT fathom why we use prepositions in cases for which they clearly make no sense ("in class", for instance, rather than "attending class" or "in the classroom")
 
I've alwyas thought that a sort of oposite Japanese system might be fun: root morphemes are written in some kind of alhpabet/syllabary, but there are special symbols for all of the derivational, declensions, and verb conjugation morphemes attached. The interesting thing about doing this would be that even with sound change, since the morphemes are so abstract, they could be kept. Say in English, the plural might be represented with a symbol (I'll assign it <S> for covenience) and then all roots written with it from the unmarked (singular version): i.e. horse v. horseS, cat v. catS. So all the allophones would be unmarked, as can be seen from the previous example; and so would irregulars: goose v gooseS.
 
I've alwyas thought that a sort of oposite Japanese system might be fun: root morphemes are written in some kind of alhpabet/syllabary, but there are special symbols for all of the derivational, declensions, and verb conjugation morphemes attached. The interesting thing about doing this would be that even with sound change, since the morphemes are so abstract, they could be kept. Say in English, the plural might be represented with a symbol (I'll assign it <S> for covenience) and then all roots written with it from the unmarked (singular version): i.e. horse v. horseS, cat v. catS. So all the allophones would be unmarked, as can be seen from the previous example; and so would irregulars: goose v gooseS.

That sounds a bit like Hangul to me. ;)
 
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