The Great Chinese Debate

[DavidHouston]

For an interesting discussion regarding the Chinese language and the continuing debate regarding simplification, see:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/200...-ever-evolving/

It's lucky for us that Thai is both alphabetic and mostly phonetic!

[Jungian]

Chinese is a pictorial written language although Mandarin has lost of lot of the meaning the older languages such as Wu can convey a great deal of information with few characters. As Confucius said "a picture is worth a thousand words".

[Gaccha]

Chinese is a pictorial written language

No it is not. This is a common erroneous belief. About 4% of the characters are pictographs. The remainder are logograms-- they represent words or morphenes, as opposed to languages where the writing represents sounds (phonemes).

Wu can convey a great deal of information with few characters. As Confucius said "a picture is worth a thousand words".

It depends what you mean by "information". I suspect you mean an idea, a concept, a thought, since you approvingly quote Confucius in his use of the word "picture". In fact, since they are not pictures a better way to understand them is to think of them as highly compressed English or Thai, as if you had squashed an English sentence close together. That's all there is to it. And that is why Chinese and Japanese use up less space than English, and can be quicker to write on a computer (as the computer is given a good chance to guess a word) but slower to write (so many lines...).

[Johpa]

Chinese is a pictorial written language

No it is not. This is a common erroneous belief. About 4% of the characters are pictographs. The remainder are logograms-- they represent words or morphenes, as opposed to languages where the writing represents sounds (phonemes).

Back in ancient times when I was a linguistics grad student, I remember some studies that suggested that the brain processed most writing systems in a similar manner, and although those symbols representing phonemes increased the learning rate, in the end we all tend to see whole words as individual symbols, little different than logographs. That is, when a fairly literate person is reading in English, they are not processing the letters as individual representations of phonemes or morphemes, but processing the word as a single graphic entity.

[Rikker]

Back in ancient times when I was a linguistics grad student, I remember some studies that suggested that the brain processed most writing systems in a similar manner, and although those symbols representing phonemes increased the learning rate, in the end we all tend to see whole words as individual symbols, little different than logographs. That is, when a fairly literate person is reading in English, they are not processing the letters as individual representations of phonemes or morphemes, but processing the word as a single graphic entity.

Yes, this is what I've learned too, and any "speed reading" course is theoretically based upon this principle, except they attempt to train you to read larger chunks at once (never could learn to speed read, though).

This also makes good sense from a layman's observational perspective. If you've ever known people who weren't strong readers, sometimes they make what seem like really dumb reading errors, that are obviously not correct if you just "sound out" the word. But if they're not actually processing the individual letters, then it makes more sense why these errors are made.

Interesting discussion.

[katana]

Going off on a tangent slightly, one similarity between Chinese and Thai is in the use of sentence final particles, which seem common in tonal languages, as opposed to non-tonal languages such as English which lack them.

eg for Mandarin:

"Most final particles are used in Chinese to convey differences that languages such as English often convey by especific expressions or even just by intonation. They can provide information about the speaker's intentions, perspectives, attitude, impressions etc. They are always pronounced in the neutral (fifth) tone, and they're literally the last element to appear in a sentence."

http://www.unilang.org/wiki/index.php/Sent...final_particles

And similarly for Cantonese:

"Cantonese is a language that's famous (or infamous, depending on how you look at it) for its sentence final particles (尾音 mei2 jam1). In English, we usually modify the mood or meaning of a sentence by uttering it in a different tone. However, since Cantonese is a tonal language, where changing the tone of a word may actually change the word into a different word, there is much less flexibility to do so. This is where the sentence final particles come in. These particles are often used to modify the mood or sometimes even the meaning of a sentence. Its purported that Cantonese may have up to a hundred of these particles, but in reality the ones used in daily life number much less. This article lists some of the most common ones encountered in everyday speech."

http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/essays/ca...e_particles.htm

Just a few thoughts. Any further comments welcome.

[RickBradford]

English is already becoming a more symbolic/pictographic language -- that is, using brief symbols which hold no information except that which we agree on. We already have plenty of these: + - & % $ > < @, smileys are another nod in this direction, and the need for more pictures is underlined by the desperate efforts to shorten text messages -- tmw, c u l8er m8, etc.

I'm sure it's already happening in txt wrld, and I'm sure symbol use will deepen and broaden. We have the luxury of an ever-flexible alphabet to handle new words (which Chinese lacks, but Japanese has), so we don't need to be scared of symbols. What is 'you guys' in txt world? Maybe 'uu'?

[Gaccha]

Going off on a tangent slightly, one similarity between Chinese and Thai is in the use of sentence final particles, which seem common in tonal languages, as opposed to non-tonal languages such as English which lack them.

Just a few thoughts. Any further comments welcome.

Think I might have to put this idea to bed: Japanese, certainly, and Korean, almost certainly, use these same final particles. Neither are tonal languages. It might be an Asian language thing.

In Japanese we have: ne, na, sa, ze, zo, na- (the ne is used in the Thai word "ano ne", which means someone a bit childish in Thai, but in Japanese where it is derived, it is simply a pause strategy, like the English word "well..." or "ehhhhh...")

In fact, some are remarkably close to Thai sentence flourishes.

[jerrylee]

(which Chinese lacks, but Japanese has)

No true, lots of the abbreviations now have become chinese language symbols