And they, in turn, are probably humbled by how long it took them to reach it! 
I mean, if Iād spent this much time on learning Spanish, I could probably teach it to Mexicans! 
[/quote]
But would you have the same satisfaction? 
[/quote]
No, I wouldnāt. Iām attracted to things of maximal difficulty, like reading oracle bones, and falling for lesbians. But Iād have so much less frustrationā¦ Oh well, back to the shrink.
Thatās basically all it is, but I think it could be a practical system if there was any chance of it taking hold.
Several problems come from that, and most deal with the fact that this would destroy the cross-dialectal phonetics, which is an essential part of the idea. I donāt think I have to explain why that would be the case. (I understand you donāt think my idea will work for keeping the system cross-dialectal, but I address that at the end of the post.)
The other problem is that adding in a tone mark to the character would require completely reworking how they are typed. My current suggestion would leave how the characters are encoded in computers and printed out without even the slightest alteration. The ease of adopting the new system will be a huge advantage.
Any sentence written in Standard Written Chinese can be read in Cantonese or Taiwanese just as well as Mandarin. That is the big advantage of the Chinese script.
There is also a systematic difference between the sounds in dialects. For example, pretty much anything pronounced āmihnā in Cantonese is pronounced āmianā in Mandarin. (An exception to this is the /p/, /t/, /k/ ending sounds in Mandarin because they related to a tone category from Middle Chinese that is no longer in existence in Mandarin.)
A Cantonese speaker need not know what the symbol sounds like in Mandarin. You only need to know how that character is pronounced in Cantonese. Speakers of any dialect can see the character and know how it is pronounced in their dialect. What I am suggesting would be no less intelligible to everyone than the current system.
Thatās why the tricky part will be finding a minimal set of characters that can handle the task. Iām not certain we can eliminate enough characters, but from my initial attempt with a limited number of sounds it looks very promising.
[quote=ārice_tā]PWH, although it may work in common spoken language, I believe there are many areas where it would not be feasible. Technical language, specialised terminology, botany, Chinese medcine, etc.
One of the advantages of Chinese written language would disappear, the possibility to write in a very compact, abbreviated way. Try to apply your idea to the headlines of a daily newspaper.
Also what would happen to registered company names, there would be thousands of double, triple, quadruple entries in the register.[/quote]
You bring some challenging questions.
First: I donāt think it would be impossible in technical language, but you are certainly right that it would make things more difficult. The degree is the question. Perhaps if we have a working model we could try it out and see if using the reduced character set made technical documents unreadable. It may be that the context of such material would be strong enough that most words would not be overly obscure without the original characters.
But that would only be a real concern if the system were to completely replace the current system straight away. It may be necessary to keep the old characters in use for a long period of time. I would certainly think you would need a long transition period where the older characters would still be used whenever it would be necessary.
Perhaps a way to think of it would be similar to Kanji in Japanese. Sometimes you would throw an entire term in using the old characters.
Second: Youāre right about losing a degree of compactness. I donāt think thereās any way around that. Again, weād have to see the degree to which this would be an issue, but I donāt think it would bloat writing so much that it would be unworkable or any more unwieldy than other writing systems.
Third: Registered company names would not be an issue as the original characters will still be in use for a long time. There would be a long transition period where this could get worked out. You would have:
ęåå
¬åø and ę話å
¬åø on the official register, but on a name sign you may have (ęåå·„ę) written below the official name so those who only read the new script can pronounce it.
Still, youāve highlighted some good conerns that would have to be given due consideration if the plan Iām proposing were to ever be implemented. But note, all these objects you raise apply at least equally to a phonemic script such as pinyin or bpmf.
Would Kids still need to learn bpmf? If so, then we would be giving them three things to learn bpmf, the new script and the old script.
If not, they still need to learn the new script and the old script (and the new script would be more difficult than bpmf). Granted, eventually the old script would fade away, but that would take a long time.
Wouldnāt it be creating a burden rather than alleviating it?
Wouldnāt things get a bit confusing once the old characters were fazed out?
By your example it is easy to see which company I would need to go for for which need. But once the old characters are gone it would not be so obvious, especially in a listing or something similar.
[quote=āGongChangZhangā][quote=āpuiwaihinā] Would Kids still need to learn bpmf? If so, then we would be giving them three things to learn bpmf, the new script and the old script.
If not, they still need to learn the new script and the old script (and the new script would be more difficult than bpmf). Granted, eventually the old script would fade away, but that would take a long time.
Wouldnāt it be creating a burden rather than alleviating it?[/quote]
The new script would not really be a new script. It is a subset of the old script, which they would have to learn anyway.
[quote]Wouldnāt things get a bit confusing once the old characters were fazed out?
By your example it is easy to see which company I would need to go for for which need. But once the old characters are gone it would not be so obvious, especially in a listing or something similar.[/quote][/quote]
Maybe, but in this case I think not. For one, most company names donāt really explain the function of the company. āLucky Companyā does nothing for telling you what it does. So, if you canāt tell if it is āluckyā or some other proper name it wonāt really matter.
The words that describe what the shop does are recognizable enough. can ting, bai huo gongsi, wu jin, fan dianā¦ these give you the function. The rest is just brand recognition. Though this will dent the advertisers ability to appeal to homophones in characters to come up with more auspicious namesā¦
[quote]Any sentence written in Standard Written Chinese can be read in Cantonese or Taiwanese just as well as Mandarin. That is the big advantage of the Chinese script.
[/quote]
No it canāt. If the reader was truly unfamiliar with Mandarin, they would struggle with it at the very least. A coupleof years ago there was a section written in Hokkien (Taiwanese) int he public services examinations. Tzhey used hanzi, but non-Hokkien speakers couldnāt understand it. Thjere are a lot of similarities, but they are not close enough that you can write in one language and be understood by a speaker fo the other. It works in HKJ only because Hongkies are trained to understand what is essentially Mandarin grammar.
[quote]
There is also a systematic difference between the sounds in dialects. For example, pretty much anything pronounced āmihnā in Cantonese is pronounced āmianā in Mandarin.[/quote]
Is it really that close? Wouldnāt work for Taiwanese. In some cases yes, but not enough for you to say this syllable=this syllable.
Brian
zeugmite gave a good response already, so some of what Iām saying here will be a repeat.
That isnāt Standard Written Chinese. Dialectal characters are not cross-dialectal and I wouldnāt be including them in the system Iām creating. However, the system Iām creating may make dialectal characters unnecessary.
ä»å飽äŗåļ¹(Standard Mandarin for ''have you eaten yet?")
ä½¢é£åé£ÆęŖéæļ¹(Cantonese w/ dialectal characters for the same thing)
ä»åäæäŗ馬ļ¹(Mandarin using an example of the new system)
å·Øé£å·¦é£ÆęŖéæ? (Cantonese using an example of the new system)
A Cantonese speaker could read any of those and understand what it means. A Mandarin speaker could read either of the Mandarin ones. But thatās ok. I donāt need to have colloquial Cantonese be able to be read and understood by Mandarin speakers. But at least in my proposal Mandarin speakers will be able to give a pronunciation to the Cantonese dialectal sounds, even if they are confused on the meaning.
You may notice that only a couple characters changed, but thatās because the characters used in these sentences are some of the most obvious choices to represent their sound/tone combinations. ęŖ and äŗ would are preserved because they have different pronunciations in different environments in one or both dialects.
Is it really that close? Wouldnāt work for Taiwanese. In some cases yes, but not enough for you to say this syllable=this syllable.[/quote]
No, it isnāt that close. Itās only that close for about half of the characters. I provided a comprehensive chart of sound-sound correlations for Mandarin-Cantonese (and reverse) earlier in the thread. But if you broke it down to sound/tone-sound/tone, which I didnāt do originally, it would actually be somewhat more regular.
But it doesnāt have to be a 1 to 1 correlation. If there is a 1 to 2 correlation then you can reduce the number of characters needed to represent that correlation to 2. Some sounds are going to have like a 1 to 5 correlation, and in such a case you need to keep 5 charcters. For some sounds it may not even be possible to make a reduction. But when I can convert a sound/tone with 47 characters to just 5 characters, you can see how we can get a big reduction in total characters.
Puiwaihin, Iām not really sure what you;re talking about now. My first impression was that you were talkign about a simplified set of characters. These would be phonetic (or phonemic). Thus all āma2ā would use the same character, etc. Then I thought you were suggesting that you could use this to write in any Chinese dialect, and it could be understood by the speaker of another dialect. That wouldnāt work. But, now Iām not sure if youāre saying that, or something else.
Yes, but those who canāt sepak it, can only read it becuase theyā;re trained to read it. It doesnāt work the other way. If someone writes in Hokkien, a non-sepaker can not understand it because of different grammar and more importantly vocabulary. As for Chenās speech, those speeches are basically translated into Mandarin, not written in Taiwanese.
Yes. Other Chinese languages have a large amount of vocabulary not found in Mandarin.
Brian.
How else would they have learned to write? Before the āspeak Mandarinā campaigns, schools taught the classics (all written) and other things in the local pronunciations. This was true in all parts of China.
Nah, the grammar is not all that different. If someones writes in dialect (using the correct orthography, instead of making up things that sound close), then a non-speaker may not be able to understand everything perfectly, mostly due to dialect-specific lexicon. By dialect-specific lexicon I mean those words that are purely phonetic in nature (usually for proper nouns) or those whose character combination is interpreted very differently from Standard Chinese. Words that are only found in a dialect are not sufficient to be considered dialect-specific lexicon as far as the writing goes.
Those speeches were written in Standard Chinese baihua. There was no translation process. They were just read in Min-nan-hua, which is an age-old thing to do. Mandarin is not involved, except for the fact that Mandarin was chosen decades ago as the standard national speech and so it became a standard reading for written Standard Chinese.
In a sometimes ideologically driven attempt to define the Chinese dialects as 'languages," Westerners go to the other extreme and forget that there is really something different about the Chinese dialects than just separate languages, and that is caused by the early unification of the written script.
Your misunderstanding is in bold. Otherwise you have it right. Itās not that you would write in the dialect, itās that the people who speak whatever dialect could read any character written and it will still come out right no matter what dialect you speak just as it is now-- just with fewer characters needed.
All Chinese and Taiwanese learn Standard Written Chinese as part of their education. A few dialects also have dialectal characters, but they learn these on top of Standard Written Chinese as well. Anyone who has learned Standard Written Chinese will be able to use the new script since it is just a subset of the old script.
Not Mandarin, Standard Written Chinese. The difference here is that #1- there are differences in syntax and lexicon similar to what you see in vernacular English and literary English. But SWC is very close to Mandarin grammar, and closer to Mandarin than other dialects in lexicon.
#2, which is more important for this idea, is that written Mandarin implies keeping the pronunciation. In the case of pinyin, that would be unintelligible to those who donāt speak Mandarin. But if you write Mandarin (baihua) in SWC, people of any dialect can read it since the same character set accurately encodes pronunciation for all the dialects. It would still maintain the distinctive features of spoken Mandarin as it differs from Standard Written Chinese, yet because these distinctive features are slight, anyone who knows SWC (regardless of dialect) will be able to understand it.
Written Cantonese, Hokkien, Hakka, etc. is currently not easily understandable to speakers of most other dialects, even when standard characters can be used because the word choice is so far removed and the grammar differs just a bit too much. I think that is what you were saying canāt be done using my suggestion, and in that you are 100% right. The cross-dialectal compatability (to borrow browser terminology) only applies to Standard Written Chinese.
So, my suggestion is to create a subset of characters that reduces the total number of characters needed to be learned, but preserves that cross-dialectal property of the current Chinese script.
Iāve made suggestions as to precisely how to do it earlier in the thread.
*I havenāt seen the translation, so it may be that it was written in vernacular Mandarin using standard characters to preserve the sense of it being a speech rather than being an essay.
Ok, at this point, it is time to clear up some confusion about what is Mandarin.
This is kind of unfortunate, because Mandarin is both the name of a dialect group and the name of the adopted standard speech.
Letās for the sake of this post not use it and call the dialect group the āNorthern Dialect Groupā (one of 7 or 8 in China) and the standard speech āNational Speechā = putonghua ~= guoyu.
āNational Speechā was an idea invented along with the baihua movement. One standardized the spoken language, one standardized the written language. You see, before, writing in Classical Chinese, there was no problem of what dialect you used. Written and spoken were kept strictly separate, but characters still had readings in every dialect.
But then in the 20s people began to write in baihua ā¦ this is not their colloquial local dialectā¦ but a kind of formalized writing that was based on late ācourt speechā and āhighā forms of dialects in terms of grammar (not too different), augmented with Western grammatical elements, as well as Western formatting and punctuation conventions, etc. In fact, a lot of the writing at that time incorporated dialect lexicon because people who wrote in baihua added in their own flavors. For grammatical particles and personal pronouns, various characters like äŗ ē å° å¾ ę ä½ ä» å„¹ å® -å ä¼ å ę± etc. were used. Sometimes new ones were coined or old ones were pressed into new use, though evidently mostly the ācourt speechā forms, not the dialect forms, survived in common use.
When it was time to standardize the āNational Speech,ā which had already taken shape, the decision at the end of the day was:
But it is important to note that āNational Speechā is not completely like anybodyās home language. One will note that native Beijinger pronunciations and lexicon are emphatically not standard āNational Speechā and will be rejected on putonghua exams. In fact, many āNational Speechā pronunciations for characters and words were deliberated and decided by committee. This accounts for some of the multiple pronunciations of one character as well as differences in readings between putonghua and guoyu (I donāt mean the accent, but actual difference), as guoyu kept an earlier standard.
As it happened, baihua writing basically evolved into a transcription for āNational Speechā and is the written portion of what people take to be āStandard Chineseā nowadays. But just as in old times, baihua writing can be read in dialects. Itās just that āNational Speechā pronunciation is the associated standard reading for Standard Chinese writing.
Still, even today, the vast majority of people in China speak a dialect (in colloquial form) as a first speech, and can read characters in it for the most part. (They arenāt taught in dialect any more.) In school, they learn āStandard Chinese,ā which should be the same as what laowaiās learn. This includes āNational Speechā and being able to writing it down.
Writing in colloquial dialect as spoken was never really done (except notably in works by ēę (late 80s) incorporating colloquial Beijinger dialect), though for āhighā forms of dialect it was done (āhighā forms of dialect were used in the regional operas). āHighā forms of Chinese dialects are a dying art nowadays, in the hands of a few opera performers. It is easy to read āhighā dialect because the only differences are generally lexical (and they are easily understood in characters). It is more difficult to read ācolloquialā dialect when written, and indeed, sometimes there are no known characters to represent something. But it is still understandable to a very great extent, much more than if just heard.
CSBās speech was written in Standard Chinese. He read it using the dialect readings.
Good post, Z.
That should help clear up some confusion for anyone following the thread and not quite getting what the proposal is about. And thatās the reason for having so many different words in Chinese for, well, Chinese, as discussed in Which word for Chinese? on this forum.
<deleted the rest of my post-- after looking over it all, I think all the details I was giving wouldnāt help many people and might actually confuse some othersā¦ so best to leave it at Standard Written Chinese is not the same as Mandarin (meaning putonghua/guoyu), even though they are really close>
I understand the subtle difference between Mandarin, putonghua, baihua, Northern dialect, but the differences are not that big. In this discussion, Iāll just use the word Mandarin. Baihua is basically āNorthern Dialectā. Cantonese, Taiwanese, Hakka, Shanghainese etc are different languiages altogether.
My point is that peole who speak Chinese languages other than Mandarin can only read written Mandarin (and I call it written Mandarin, becuase thatās basically what Baihua is) becuase they are trained to do so. Hongkies are trained to read it. If they wrote Cantonese as it was spoke it would be unreadable to non-Cantonese speakers. Of course written Mandarin is also different from spoken Mandarin. But this difference is less - itās mroe like the difference between wirtten and spoken English.
The only reason non-Mandarin-speaking Cantonese can read Mandarin is because they have special training in it. That this is something special (ie not just like the difference between spoken and written Mandarin or English) can be shown byt he way something written in Taiwanese or Cantonese (as it is spoken) would be unintelligble to a Mandarin speaker.
So no different than Cantonese reading Mandarin now?
Brian
No, baihua generally refers to writing. Maybe you meant Putonghua. And putonghua is not basically āNorthern Dialect.ā If youāve been to northern China, youād know. Or maybe you were totally misled by people in northern regions speaking putonghua (albeit accented) to you, thinking it was their native dialect.
[quote]The only reason non-Mandarin-speaking Cantonese can read Mandarin is because they have special training in it.
[/quote]
Again, everybody in school has that āspecialā training, making it not so special.
Apologies for jumping in, but I agree with Bu Lai En here, no one has yet to explain how knowing chinese characters enables one to read different dialects. I know mandarin (or standard chinese or putonghua or whichever) and there is absolutely no way I can read and understand anything in Cantonese. Or Taiwanese.* This is not due to lack of knowledge of dialect specific characters, its because the characters are used in completely different ways.
This is saying the same thing as being able to write english with the roman alphabet enables one to read French (written in the roman alphabet of course) and communicate with French speakers. Umm, no.
[quote=āzeugmiteā][quote]
The only reason non-Mandarin-speaking Cantonese can read Mandarin is because they have special training in it. [/quote]
Again, everybody in school has that āspecialā training, making it not so special.[/quote]
So youāre supporting Bu Laiās (and my) point. Dialect speakers are taught a different language (SC) in order to understand that languageās (SC) publications. That in no means implies that the medium used to transfer the information (Han zi) transcends language barriers and allows two dialect groups to communicate. They would be communicating with a different language. A similar solution could be obtained teaching everyone SJ (standard japanese) or Thai.
Yes, grammatical differences with the two examples are far greater than SC and most dialects, but the amount of difference is not important, the fact that they are different is.
Another note, the star above, I have not met two Taiwanese teachers/professors/whoever who āwriteā Taiwanese the same way. Almost mutually unitelligible, more guesswork than reading, with most people writing phonetically. Saying that there is a standard Taiwanese written language with hanzi is a huge stretch of the imagination. I wish there was, but due to history, there still isnātā¦
Characters have meaning. Thatās how. Shared written lexicon that would be pronounced differently (hence different words in the usual case of two languages). Thatās another way.
Dialect specific characters is one thing. The rest of them (if written in correct orthography) are not used in completely different ways. They are used sometimes to form different words (really just variations), true, but I donāt consider that ācompletely different.ā
Letters of the alphabet carry no meaning by themselves, so of course when you combine them differently words become meaningless. Hence characters.
Kind ofā¦ On the other hand, they are taught characters too, and that does transcend what partricular langauge, be it SC or a dialect, it is that is being taught, just like learning the alphabet transcends a particular language. Except that, again, characters have meaning.
It does evidently imply that.
If you also taught them the full character set, then yes, it would be more of a similar situation. In fact, thatās a good example of how even vastly different languages can be transcended (i.e. understood to some extent) with the use of characters.
I would be surprised if Taiwanese teachers canāt write Taiwanese. You can get character and word dictionaries with Taiwanese pronunciations. There is an (abridged) version here:
daiwanway.dynip.com/cgi/tdict.acgi
Some people write phoneticaly because they donāt know any better and are illiterate in their own dialect ā not their fault obviously. I donāt know about Taiwan specifically, but Chinese dialects were definitely written down historically, esp. for use of operas and other specialized artistic works. Lack of standardization is another issue. I mean SC wasnāt standardized till the last century. The existing corpus served as a standard.
#1- I figured you did, so much of the details in my explanations were to give us a common starting point, and for the benefit of those following the thread who have no idea about this. But I think itās important in this instance to make it clear that Mandarin and SWC are not one and the same.
#2- I think the best translation of ābaihuaā is āvernacular speechā, which is a contrast to classical speech (as opposed to written speech). Baihuawen is now what is written according to how people talked, while baihua refers to both spoken and written. (Someone correct me here if Iām wrong, but I donāt think I am.)
#3- Cantonese, Mandarin, Wu, Min, etc. are different languages, but they all use Standard Written Chinese as their primary means of writing.
Itās only special in the sense that it is separate from how they learn their native language. All Chinese- Taiwanese, Cantonese, Shanghainese, Mandarin speakers, etc.-- are taught Standard Written Chinese in school. They are not first taught to write in their own dialects, but rather in SWC. Only after they learn āstandardā writing do they learn to write in their own vernacular style.
It is, essentially, learning a second language when writing. In the case of Mandarin speakers it is more like learning formal Mandarin since SWC is bascially a form of Mandarin more or less equivalent with Standard Mandarin.
So no different than Cantonese reading Mandarin now?[/quote]
Again, as long as you understand Mandarin to strictly mean the written characters, then yes. But this does not apply to just Cantonese. Shanghainese read the characters just fine, as to people who live in Xinjiang, and everywhere else.
Give a book written in Chinese to any literate Chinese person and they can read the book no problem, no matter what dialect they speak or what dialect the writter speaks.
Not all characters are used in completely different ways, just some. Iām not sure what percentage, but it will be much closer to 90% of all vocabulary than 60%. Unfortunately, some of the most common words and grammar markers are used differently, so even though most vocabulary is the same youāll still understand little more than half of what is written unless you catch on to the pattern.
No, thatās a bad comparison, but there is a similarity here Iāll explore.
Alphabets encode phonemes. Characters encode sound at the syllable level and meaning at the morpheme level (there are only a few exceptions to this). In French you have the same Roman alphabet as in English, but in English the simple āaā represents a different sound than in French. Both use the same symbol, but pronounce it differently.
Now take a word in French and a word in English that are spelled the same way and have the same meaning- letās say, petite. (Difficult to find a good one since English preserves the French pronunciations in most cases) English pronounces the ending /t/ sound distinctly, while in French it is barely said. We both see the same symbols, get the same understanding, but pronounce it in our own language.
Chinese is like this, but for every word within the written standard.
Yes. Except that Standard Written Chinese is the primary written language of all Chinese languages. When they write to each other within their own dialect (except in such things as personal letters, comic books, a few poplular magazines, or when trying to appeal to the identity of the regional language) they use SWC rather than their own dialect.
As Z said, yes it does.
Not unless you can spell English words with Thai letters and can use the same spelling and get the meaning in both languages. Since I donāt know how to write in Thai I wrote ācarā and we pronounce it /kar/ and they pronounce it /quun/ and we both understand the meaningā¦
Chinese accomplishes this for all Chinese languages.
Hereās an idea. Go listen to the classic Min-nan-hua song ęę¼ęęč“ (thatās how it is written in the title). If you canāt understand from listening, then read the following lyrics. Then see if you understand. Easy experiment.
äøę失åæęÆå
ęØå
äøęč½éęÆå
č½åÆ
é£é失å»åøę
ęÆę„éč«č«
ē”éęé«č¦ŖåēØ»čå
äŗŗēåÆęÆęÆęµ·äøēę³¢ęµŖ
ęęčµ·ęęč½
儽éę¹é
ēø½åē
§čµ·å·„ä¾č”
äøå天ę³Øå®
äøåé ęę¼
ęę¼ēŗęč“