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Cefte posted:I can't help but bring to mind Uncleftish Beholding... Yeah, that's about what I think would happen too. The language as it is now would have to change a lot.
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Feb 23, 2012 17:28
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Here's a Question I've always had. Why does the chinese government choose to treat it's muslim population like crap? ( I am referring to poo poo like THIS)Is there a racism towards muslims in Chinese society or is this a leftover of communist fanaticism they haven't bothered to fix yet? or is it some sort of revenge over the fact that some of the more important generals and forces of Chang Kai Shek were Muslims? Is there any kind of discussion in Chinese society or government on how it's muslim population is viewed or treated? do the Chinese value and celebrate the muslim heroes, scientists, and writers of it's history or are they swept under the rug and only used to market China to Muslim states? On more contemporary side, are there any Chinese Muslims who are reaching any kind of prominence or coverage in china? writers, entrepreneurs, businessmen etc.?
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Feb 23, 2012 17:39
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Al-Saqr posted:Here's a Question I've always had. Why does the chinese government choose to treat it's muslim population like crap? ( I am referring to poo poo like THIS)Is there a racism towards muslims in Chinese society or is this a leftover of communist fanaticism they haven't bothered to fix yet? or is it some sort of revenge over the fact that some of the more important generals and forces of Chang Kai Shek were Muslims? Most Muslims in China aren't Uyghurs? You're starting off with a pretty low level of knowledge on this subject.
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Feb 23, 2012 18:08
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Throatwarbler posted:Most Muslims in China aren't Uyghurs? You're starting off with a pretty low level of knowledge on this subject. I never said that. I pointed this out as an example of repression of a harmless religious rite, I dont know if this repression is being applied on han muslims as well. my question was about Chinese muslims in general both uyghurs and other ethnicities.
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Feb 23, 2012 18:26
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Barto posted:And why is it always western people who suggest this? I mean...I know characters used to be a big deal for me way back when I started studying, but now they're just as natural as anything and I don't even notice them- I just use them. I think foreigners blow it out of proportion because of their own learning difficulties. I really don't see what you're getting at, other than a desire to string together loosely connected anecdotes, and brag about your Chinese. You say that scientific texts would be impossible to write, but don't cite any specific examples of where possible misunderstandings could arise (purely anecdotal, but scientific texts in Chinese seem increasingly to use the Western system for elements and molecular structures, like Co2 instead of erhua tan). You post a chat log in Chinese, then don't even bother to critically dissect what your friend says. I doubt the lack of vertical writing would be a huge loss to Chinese culture, for example. And who's to say chunlian need to be written in pinyin? He then brings up huanjing as an example, but if those were three different syllables you would use an apostrophe to demarcate them, like this: hu'an jing. Supposing China ever went over to a fully pinyinized writing system, people would likely adapt by using apostrophes more actively. french lies fucked around with this message at 10:43 on Aug 27, 2013 |
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Feb 23, 2012 18:36
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french lies posted:You know, there's a proverb one could use to answer that question. I guess it sounds like bragging, but if your Chinese is good enough you will understand why you can't get rid of them; that's why Chinese people won't do it. Just today I went to the trouble of getting opinions about it from two researchers in Chinese Second Language Studies for you and they agree too. Maybe you can go read more academic papers about it? Anyway, I don't think you got my point. Maybe you can reread it (or not), I can only offer my own opinion and those of the experts I know. So I will leave it at that. I feel my point has already been made substantially. Barto fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 23, 2012 |
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Feb 23, 2012 18:42
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Barto posted:I guess it sounds like bragging, but if your Chinese is good enough you will understand why you can't get rid of them. Just today I went to the trouble of getting opinions about it from two researchers in Chinese Second Language Studies for you and they agree too. Maybe you can go read more academic papers about it? Anyway, I don't think you got my point. Maybe you can reread it (or not), I can only offer my own opinion and those of the experts I know. So I will leave it at that. I feel my point has already been made substantially. It's pure argument from authority, basically waving away a discussion on hypotheticals by saying that you know some Taiwanese people and read a lot of Chinese. I personally don't have any problems with characters, they're my livelihood after all. But I don't think that makes them essential, or impossible to replace. That's what we're arguing about, after all.
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Feb 23, 2012 18:53
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My Chinese is much more limited than Barto and French Lies -- I can only translate with a good deal of time and effort and a good dictionary -- but I'll throw in a few cents to the argument. The problem with pinyin-based literacy is less about the future of the language, to my mind, than the past of the language and culture. It is entirely conceivable that after a massive shift to pinyin, modes of writing, expression, colloquialism, and so on would adapt in a decade or two to create a coherent and effective langauge. I'm familiar with your argument, Barto, that many highly complex modes of writing or terminology would become extremely difficult to distinguish from one another in a pinyin-only environment. However, people are naturally inventive as writers and thinkers, and neologisms, abbreviations, colloquialisms and so on would spread quickly to alleviate that initial problem. This happened and is happening in other places where there is linguistic standardization -- Mexico's slow abandonment of regional dialects, the Napoleonic standardization of French, the post-unification imposition of Standard Italian and so on. But to my mind another, harder to deal with, problem emerges when you think about historical, social, and cultural studies. Even if new modes of expression develop after a pinyin shift, those who grow up or are educated after it will have to work a great deal harder to understand character-based media, especially classical and Imperial poetry and fiction (something I love). The sheer amount of pre-existing character based media that a post-character population would have to master a separate set of skills to enjoy and participate in is troubling. In addition, Chinese is not a nation-state language like, say, Turkish is. If any governing body in the PRC were to make the decision to move to pinyin-only or pinyin-centric literacy, the cultural and social continuity of ties between mainland China and the overseas Chinese communities across the world would likely become strained with time. I'd be curious to see how those two arguments filter into the great discussion you all are having on this topic.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:18
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Al-Saqr posted:Here's a Question I've always had. Why does the chinese government choose to treat it's muslim population like crap? ( I am referring to poo poo like THIS)Is there a racism towards muslims in Chinese society or is this a leftover of communist fanaticism they haven't bothered to fix yet? or is it some sort of revenge over the fact that some of the more important generals and forces of Chang Kai Shek were Muslims? There are three very distinctly different Muslim populations in China. The Hui, Uygher, and Turkic populations have extremely different takes on Islam and its relation to China, Chinese culture, and the modern PRC. They also have radically different histories within China. Which one are you curious about? For a moment of pure silly anecdote, it seems to me on the PRC/North China "street" the most common association for Islamic groups is tasty food, not Civil War generals. For a 10-second overview to help you refine your question: Hui are ethnic Chinese with a Chinese dialect descended from early converts and travelling merchants. They have a long history in Chinese politics and society, and, though they have some troubles in the modern PRC, these are really few and far between. Uyghurs live in far Western China (Xinjiang province), speak a dialect of their own language in addition to Chinese, have a shorter history of participation in the Chinese political sphere and a more troubled one. They are a regional near-majority with some ethnic nationalism and ties to other Central Asian peoples, and have been in for the most trouble and repression of all the Muslim groups in modern China. Turkic and other peoples are related to the nomadic and sparse populations that invaded China in its distant past, or to other nonviolent migrations or foced resettlements. They are rarely numerous or active enough to encounter the same levels of repression as Uyghurs, but are generally not as inegrated by any means as the Hui. They speak their own languages and have unique traditions, though.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:26
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I don't understand what problem converting to an alphabet based writing system is supposed to solve. If you want to raise literacy rates wouldn't it be easier to spend more money on teachers and paying the parents of poor children more than $1 a day so the kids can stay in school instead of making the rest of the country adopt a different language? It boggles the mind that there are actually people seriously arguing for this.
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Feb 23, 2012 19:54
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BrotherAdso posted:There are three very distinctly different Muslim populations in China. The Hui, Uygher, and Turkic populations have extremely different takes on Islam and its relation to China, Chinese culture, and the modern PRC. They also have radically different histories within China. Which one are you curious about? Ok, starting with this one since they are the most accepted group out of them, are there any Hui individuals who have reached any form of prominence or affluence in china today? For example, are there any who rank high in the communist party or military are most of them appointed as a quota to give an air of minority representation? Have any of them reached high within societal circles, are any of them national celebrities, acclaimed writers or powerful businessmen? or are they victims of an unofficial discrimination (for example business contracts given to Han Chinese over Hui people, or perhaps a Hui writer is more censored than a Han)? Do Chinese textbooks and media mention any Muslim contributors to Chinese history (such as the Kansu Braves in the boxer rebellion and the Generals who led the fight against the japanese) or are they swept under the rug? quote:Uyghurs live in far Western China (Xinjiang province), speak a dialect of their own language in addition to Chinese, have a shorter history of participation in the Chinese political sphere and a more troubled one. They are a regional near-majority with some ethnic nationalism and ties to other Central Asian peoples, and have been in for the most trouble and repression of all the Muslim groups in modern China. Is the policy china has undertaken with the Uyghurs generally the same kind of policy like Tibet or is there a special reason why they have to crack down as hard as they do on them?
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Feb 23, 2012 21:38
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Al-Saqr posted:Ok, starting with this one since they are the most accepted group out of them, are there any Hui individuals who have reached any form of prominence or affluence in china today? A simple internet search provides a list of prominent Huis from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hui_people#Prominent_Hui The CCP has been very friendly with the Hui. Something to do with solidarity with their Muslim brothers within China which can easily translate to better relations with third-world Muslim nations abroad. A united front against the US and Soviet spheres of influence! Personally, from unscientific surveys, the Han majority that I meet and their views of the Hui are usually "fierce," "violent," "smell like mutton," and "don't eat pork."
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Feb 23, 2012 23:02
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BrotherAdso posted:There are three very distinctly different Muslim populations in China. The Hui, Uygher, and Turkic populations have extremely different takes on Islam and its relation to China, Chinese culture, and the modern PRC. They also have radically different histories within China. Which one are you curious about? Possibly stupid question, but why aren't the Uighurs considered Turkic?
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Feb 24, 2012 00:22
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Xandu posted:Possibly stupid question, but why aren't the Uighurs considered Turkic? They are a Turkic people linguistically and ethnically, but the Chinese government treats them differently and their demographic and cultural situation is pretty different from, say, Uzbeks, so it's good to treat them as a separate category. Good point though - Kazakhs are only slightly distinguishable in many ways, but since they're a more scattered smaller population (like 2 million?) they have slightly different issues.
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Feb 24, 2012 00:55
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Throatwarbler posted:I don't understand what problem converting to an alphabet based writing system is supposed to solve. If you want to raise literacy rates wouldn't it be easier to spend more money on teachers and paying the parents of poor children more than $1 a day so the kids can stay in school instead of making the rest of the country adopt a different language? It boggles the mind that there are actually people seriously arguing for this. It's an idea that has been seriously considered by plenty of prominent Chinese figures for a very long time. I wouldn't go so far as to call it facially ridiculous. Phonetic scripts have plenty of advantages to consider. I think it's also debatably true that the gap between writing and pronunciation is pretty pronounced in Chinese compared to other languages with more phonetic scripts, that basic reading/writing proficiency requires somewhat more memorization in Chinese, and that bad spelling in a phonetic language like English is marginally less catastrophic than it is in Chinese. How important this is is questionable but certainly not at all a well settled matter. The arguments presented so far tend to focus far too much, in my opinion, on the specific orthographic weaknesses of simple pinyin and not as much on the more far-reaching cultural implications. For example, Classical Chinese would already be borderline unintelligible to most modern Chinese speakers if it wasn't taught as a separate unit at the middle-school/high-school level with tons of reference materials and commentary.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:11
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Al-Saqr posted:Do Chinese textbooks and media mention any Muslim contributors to Chinese history (such as the Kansu Braves in the boxer rebellion and the Generals who led the fight against the japanese) or are they swept under the rug? "Han-washing" history is definitely a thing, to some extent. Your examples of the Boxer Rebellion are one of them. I will drag up a pretty good article if I can. China's policy towards Uighurs is definitely similar to their policy towards Tibet, and it's arguably based on the same basic paranoia about separatist movements.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:13
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BrotherAdso posted:They are a Turkic people linguistically and ethnically, but the Chinese government treats them differently and their demographic and cultural situation is pretty different from, say, Uzbeks, so it's good to treat them as a separate category. Good point though - Kazakhs are only slightly distinguishable in many ways, but since they're a more scattered smaller population (like 2 million?) they have slightly different issues. The Kazakhs are still today mostly nomadic herders living in Yurts. They, together with Mongols and smaller groups of Turkic nomads, graze their herds on the mostly non-viable desert areas and are pretty marginalized economically, much more so than the Uyghurs. The Uyghurs have historically(well, within the last thousand years anyway, there was a nomadic Uyghur Khanate in the remote past tenuously linked to the modern Uyghurs) been a sedentary agricultural kingdom centered around the oasis cities surrounding the Tarim basin. You might recall that the Mongols under Genghis Khan, lacking a written script, adopted the ancient Uyghur script(modern Uyghur is written using the Arabic script) after their conquest of the region, as well as many Uyghur administrators to oversee their conquered settled populations because at the time the Uyghurs were already an established literate culture of farms and cities and were seen as civilized sedentary people. The modern Uyghurs in the 19th century used the term specifically to describe the non-nomadic settled Turkic peoples of the Tarim basin.
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Feb 24, 2012 01:54
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The biggest obstacle is the high degree of homophony in modern Mandarin. Pinyin even with tones simply isn't specific enough. The number of dialect speakers is a problem as well.
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Feb 24, 2012 02:04
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Brennanite posted:The biggest obstacle is the high degree of homophony in modern Mandarin. Pinyin even with tones simply isn't specific enough. The number of dialect speakers is a problem as well. You'd just use characters or situational parentheticals for the most common or confusing homophones, just like plenty of other sinosphere countries do like Japan or Korea. Hell, languages like Korean don't use tones at all when they transliterate Chinese and end up with like 4-5 common words at a time that all sound and are spelled exactly the same. The point would be to reduce the need to memorize particularly rarely used or weird characters to make the language easier to learn quickly. Dunno how useful that would be, but I think the general idea has some merit to it. Also, gently caress Chinese transliterations of foreign names. That poo poo is impenetrable and awful, especially if you don't know exactly who they're talking about. Far worse than the reverse situation with pinyin Chinese names, which is for the most part intelligible and doesn't break down as badly. "Gee, I wonder what this '梅德韦杰夫' thing is..."
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Feb 24, 2012 02:16
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french lies posted:The problem with your points is that you offer up little to nothing to substantiate them. You can't just throw out a claim like "scientific texts will be impossible to write in pinyin", and then not show specific examples of where misunderstandings may arise. What did your researchers say? Where are these papers? You're asking him to prove that something doesn't exist or won't work, which is kind of hard regardless of his position. Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked? The Chinese have done a lot of thinking about this themselves and I don't know of any real efforts to promote a phonetic system as a replacement for characters, even though there's been a lot of discussion from people who could potentially enact such a change. Cream_Filling posted:Also, gently caress Chinese transliterations of foreign names. That poo poo is impenetrable and awful, especially if you don't know exactly who they're talking about. Far worse than the reverse situation with pinyin Chinese names, which is for the most part intelligible and doesn't break down as badly. "Gee, I wonder what this '梅德韦杰夫' thing is..." Ugh, yes. But how would you spell foreign names in pinyin? If you just spell them in their native language that's not really any different from writing them in Roman characters amid characters. Either way Chinese people will have a hard time pronouncing them. If pinyin was more commonly used they'd just be more familiar with roman script, not with foreign languages or names. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 02:22
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Arglebargle III posted:You're asking him to prove that something doesn't exist or won't work, which is kind of hard regardless of his position. Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked?  Arglebargle III posted:Ugh, yes. But how would you spell foreign names in pinyin? If you just spell them in their native language that's not really any different from writing them in Roman characters amid characters. Either way Chinese people will have a hard time pronouncing them. If pinyin was more commonly used they'd just be more familiar with roman script, not with foreign languages or names.
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Feb 24, 2012 03:12
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In regards to Muslims in China, I recommend reading Familiar Strangers: A History of Muslims in Northwest China by Jonathan N. Lipman. It is a pretty comprehensive history about Muslims in China. Some interesting topics in the book include the Han Kitab which attempts to synthesize Islam with mainstream Confucian Chinese culture as well as the practice of Sufism in areas farther away from the center of Chinese Han culture.
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Feb 24, 2012 03:51
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Arglebargle III posted:You're asking him to prove that something doesn't exist or won't work, which is kind of hard regardless of his position. Do you have an example of a large scale implementation of pinyin that intentionally displaced characters and worked? The Chinese have done a lot of thinking about this themselves and I don't know of any real efforts to promote a phonetic system as a replacement for characters, even though there's been a lot of discussion from people who could potentially enact such a change. As you touched on, Mao was very clearly in support of alphabetization, as were a significant number of Chinese intellectuals, including Lu Xun. DeFrancis has a great article about this which shows some of the efforts that have been made towards this end. Among some of the interesting things he mentions is a program of experimental elementary school classes where the children were being taught to read and write exclusively in Pinyin for the first two years, only to significantly outperform students being taught with traditional methods. John DeFrancis posted:Rohsenow further expands on the details of the Z.T. experiment, both in Heilongjiang and after its spread to every province and autonomous region in the PRC. Of special interest are his notes on further examples of the astounding success of the program, of which I mention only three: (1) In a 1988 writing competition, of the 4,091 students who took part, three Z.T. students received first prizes and four received second prizes. None of the non-Z.T. students won prizes. (2) Of the same 4,091 students, 6.61 percent of Z.T. students recommended for admission to “key middle schools” were accepted, whereas only 2.15 percent of the non-Z.T. students were accepted. (3) In a countrywide graduation competition based on the sixth-grade curriculum, a Z.T. fifth-year class had a pass rate of 100 percent compared to a sixth grade pass rate of 88.89 percent. If that is true, I do think it is significant enough to merit serious consideration. I should probably clear things up by saying that I do not support a switch to pinyin, nor have I ever done so, and that I'm purely arguing for the sake of discussion here. That being said, the arguments against have been pretty bad so far. Barto's argument seemed to boil down to "it will be impossible because X will happen", then when I asked him to cite specific examples of X he posted some chat logs from a random Taiwanese person and invoking argument from authority, saying that "if your Chinese is good enough, you will agree with me". Well, not to brag but my Chinese is likely better than his and I don't agree. Claims that pinyin would be unworkable because of homophones and possibilities of misunderstandings are baseless IMO, other than in the remotest of situations. BrotherAdso and Cream_Filling had a better approach, accepting the fact that people will work around and find solutions to the problems that arise, but stressing how disconnected people will become to their heritage. This is probably one of the more incisive argument against a full switch, and probably part of the reason why revolutionaries like Mao were in support of it in the first place: They were advocating a break with traditional Chinese culture and abolishing characters would hasten the process. But let's suppose I was a hardcore MTWer, couldn't I just say that a poor peasant cares squat about reading the original versions of the Analects or the Dream of Red Mansions, and more about the educational prospects of his children? Wouldn't a ton of literature be produced in Pinyin explaining the contents and significance of these texts? I mean, I can't read Norse but I can read Snorre and the Eddas in translation, which works fine for me. What you're left with is the linguistic unity argument, but wouldn't Pinyin based on Putonghua as the official writing system actually further promote the spread of Putonghua and therefore linguistic unity? I dunno, I think it's an interesting discussion to have. And funnily enough, the better my Chinese has gotten the less I'm convinced that it is somehow impossible or impractical to do.
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Feb 24, 2012 09:09
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Maybe I'm missing a large and obvious point, but how would switching to a pinyin based system increase literacy? The same kids still would and would not be attending school. Is it just because you think a pinyin system would be easier to teach yourself or learn from a sibling who went to school or whatever?
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Feb 24, 2012 09:58
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Arakan posted:Maybe I'm missing a large and obvious point, but how would switching to a pinyin based system increase literacy? The same kids still would and would not be attending school. Is it just because you think a pinyin system would be easier to teach yourself or learn from a sibling who went to school or whatever? I'm really not sure what kind of effort is required to learn characters when we're talking about primary school children. For me, as an adult learner, it took about three years to get to the point where I had full comprehension of simplified and traditional characters and could write most of them by hand. This was as a full-time student, including a pretty intense year of study at NTU in Taipei. The account I've gotten from Chinese friends is that they would learn a set number of characters per week in their first years of primary school. Now, compare this to learning the alphabet, which took, I don't know, maybe a month or something in total when I went to primary school? If you are talking about rural areas where funding for education is scant, and children are routinely taken out of school to work, I guess you could make the argument that the teaching of characters is a huge waste of the students' time. I don't know how relevant this is, but I know two heritage learners that taught themselves characters when they were children by watching Chinese TV and singing karaoke with their parents. They don't know how to write them by hand, obviously, but using a pinyin input system they get along just fine. So for all I know, pro-Pinyin advocates might be greatly exaggerating the difficulties of reaching a level of passive reading comprehension in Chinese.
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Feb 24, 2012 10:56
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french lies posted:DeFrancis has a great article about this which shows some of the efforts that have been made towards this end. This is a good link. The email exchange at the end was surprisingly readable. In fact, I think if that was in characters I would have had to stop to look up some words that I know how to say but might not recognize on a page. So that's definitely got me thinking. There was only one instance of an ambiguous homophone, and would bet a native reader could get it from context even if I couldn't. The word separation was a big help in particular, since all the compound words (is it okay to call them polysyllabic words yet?) were grouped together. I often find it mentally taxing to separate a line of characters into discrete ideas-units if the grammar or vocabulary is somewhat advanced. This was done for me by the writers in the pinyin version. The word separation also made it much easier to figure out meaning from context, since if you know one of the two syllables you can now be sure that they are part of a compound and not two separate ideas. There were a couple compounds related to publishing that I didn't recognize, but I could tell their general meaning because I knew half of the compound. In characters that would have been a lot harder to parse. This has made me question my thinking on writing in pinyin. The homophone issue just did not pop out at me in the examples; instead I found myself noticing how easy it was to read. The homophone thing was just what I was always taught but maybe Chinese professors aren't the most impartial judges. Now I'm not sure. What are the odds someone will mistake a complimentary angle for a banana in context?
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Feb 24, 2012 11:48
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I think one of the biggest unanswered questions for me regarding a potential switch to pinyin is: how would the increased literacy, if any, help those who are currently illiterate? Right now, there are so many systematic and institutional hindrances in class mobility that a limited knowledge of characters isn't the real problem. The economic costs associated with a switch could better be applied to any number of areas which would eliminate the need for a switch in the first place. I also think that there have been a number of Chinese academics and researchers who have successfully taught rural Chinese large numbers of characters, only to find that a year later they've forgotten them because of lack of use. Anecdotally I've found that very educated Chinese also have trouble writing characters at time, mostly due to their reliance on computers. Not that that's and endorsement one way or the other, rather just highlighting the importance of regularly using characters to remember them.
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Feb 24, 2012 12:09
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Cream_Filling posted:You'd just use characters or situational parentheticals for the most common or confusing homophones, just like plenty of other sinosphere countries do like Japan or Korea. Hell, languages like Korean don't use tones at all when they transliterate Chinese and end up with like 4-5 common words at a time that all sound and are spelled exactly the same. The point would be to reduce the need to memorize particularly rarely used or weird characters to make the language easier to learn quickly. Dunno how useful that would be, but I think the general idea has some merit to it. Yeah from previously being in Korea and listening to kids explain Sino-derived vocab to other kids, it seems like the confusion was kept to a minimum. The Sinified forms of both "white" and "one hundred" have the same spelling/pronunciation, but they had very common collocations, which qualified as built in parentheticals to use quickly in a conversation as an example in the rare event that context didn't spell it out completely. So I'm sure Mandarin speakers could use similar techniques as well. As far as writing, it doesn't seem like such ambiguity would come up that often, especially in specialized topics. There was a mountain near my first school called 백년산, which meant "One Hundred Year Mountain", but could also have been translated as "White Whore Mountain". :ambiguity:
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Feb 24, 2012 13:14
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Curved posted:I think one of the biggest unanswered questions for me regarding a potential switch to pinyin is: how would the increased literacy, if any, help those who are currently illiterate? Right now, there are so many systematic and institutional hindrances in class mobility that a limited knowledge of characters isn't the real problem. The economic costs associated with a switch could better be applied to any number of areas which would eliminate the need for a switch in the first place. This... It's not characters causing literacy problems. It's lack of eduction. Switching to pinyin isn't going to solve literacy problems, improving education will. I just looked it up and at least according to the articles I looked at Taiwan has a literacy rate of a little over 98% and Hong Kong's stands at 94.6% (2011 figures). I think this supports the idea that there isn't an inherent problem that makes learning characters too difficult and that increased development of education could solve existing literacy problems. Not to mention the intensive effort that a full writing reform would take. You would need to translate every book ever written to this point into pinyin, computer software, government records, etc. would all need to be translated...It seems like the more logical thing to do would just be to fund and improve education.
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Feb 24, 2012 13:26
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Curved posted:Anecdotally I've found that very educated Chinese also have trouble writing characters at time, mostly due to their reliance on computers. Not that that's and endorsement one way or the other, rather just highlighting the importance of regularly using characters to remember them. Yep, that's because of pinyin. People who use a 字形 method don't really have a problem with character memorization after using computers. When it comes down to really really really basic literacy levels, to the level of those who really have no use for that much literacy in their lives. Swapping them to pinyin or something is just cruel. It doesn't match their dialect and letters don't carry any meaning on their own. Characters... even if you can't read them, you can get the meaning at a glance. It also makes skimming text for relevant parts far more simple. As an added benefit, it results in nice solid blocks of text... again, making skimming very easy. At the most basic levels you don't even need to know how to read the character as long as you know what it means and can copy it and a good chunk of the characters just give away that meaning for free just by looking at them. The fact that foreigners can't understand them doesn't make it China's problem. Chinese speakers make up over 1/5th of the world and regardless of what dialect they speak, the same characters are used and understood by all. Pinyin'ing it would also have the fun effect of effectively killing a living language. Coining clever new words more or less requires characters, or they are meaningless. It completely kills puns and wordplay. You might as well say that english has too many words and it's impossible to learn them all so it means that illiteracy is actually much more prevalent than official stats claim. Obviously, the problem is too many words and weird grammatical rules, so it's best to just hack it down to size. Makes about as much sense.
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Feb 24, 2012 14:05
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 People who can't read characters know what they mean? Solid blocks of text make skimming easier? Chinese creates new characters every time they need a new word? You and people you know pun with characters instead of sounds?Nothing you just said except the part about dialect-speakers being shut out of written Chinese made sense.
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Feb 24, 2012 14:20
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menino posted:Yeah from previously being in Korea and listening to kids explain Sino-derived vocab to other kids, it seems like the confusion was kept to a minimum. The Sinified forms of both "white" and "one hundred" have the same spelling/pronunciation, but they had very common collocations, which qualified as built in parentheticals to use quickly in a conversation as an example in the rare event that context didn't spell it out completely. So I'm sure Mandarin speakers could use similar techniques as well. As far as writing, it doesn't seem like such ambiguity would come up that often, especially in specialized topics. I don't have a firm opinion either way on the educational merits/problems of a proposed conversion and my refusal stems from cultural/historical reasons. Your example of white/hundred is an interesting one because when I saw the "Lion-eating poet in the stone den" example brought up early I thought of an early lesson I had in pronunciation - Zhang Fei promised to reform his ways, stop drinking and abusing his men and be a good brother for Liu Bei. As part of his reform he wanted to look smart so he ordered his men to make him a white suit of armour for the next day. His men misunderstood this as 100 suits of armour for the next day and decided that it was impossible (and fearing execution) they resolved to kill him. I can't for the life of me find the story (no Chinese input on this work PC) but if anyone's got a source for that story would love to have it to hand.
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Feb 24, 2012 15:24
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I can't for the life of me find the story (no Chinese input on this work PC) but if anyone's got a source for that story would love to have it to hand. quote:After Zhang Fei became aware that Guan Yu had met with misfortune, he hastened back to Xichuan, to urge Liu Bei to send out soldiers to exact revenge. He also ordered Fan Jiang and Zhang Da to make him a white coat and a suit of white armor, but Fan and Zhang did not make them well enough. This made Zhang furious as a thunderstorm, and he gave them hundred lashes each with the whip. french lies fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Feb 24, 2012 |
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Feb 24, 2012 15:51
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Arglebargle III posted:
You can look at a character and know the meaning but not know how to say it. I run into this problem a lot learning new words, I always end up learning the meaning first but the pronunciation later so it doesn't seem too far fetched that this might happen to native speakers as well when they are learning characters. It's much easier to skim a text for important information and look for characters rather than skim a text and look for bai1 bai2 bai3 or whatever, because when you are using pinyin you have to derive meaning from context since there are so many homophones, but that's not the case with characters. They do create new characters for new words, although I don't think its super common, I've only learned a few. Puns with characters are like half of my news feed on qzone, though that wouldn't be such a great loss I guess.
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Feb 24, 2012 16:13
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Arglebargle III posted:
Yes, Yes, No, Yes. On the "no" there, it's not new characters that are created, it's new words or ideas expressed using characters which with absolute context *might* make sense. Without complete understanding of said context, it makes none at all. You'll also be destroying the aesthetic nature of the language and it's just really really stupid to do. http://tieba.baidu.com/p/41811921?pn=1 Here, have 6.5 years of discussion on this very topic and why it is stupid.
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Feb 24, 2012 16:46
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Hong XiuQuan posted:I don't have a firm opinion either way on the educational merits/problems of a proposed conversion and my refusal stems from cultural/historical reasons. Your example of white/hundred is an interesting one because when I saw the "Lion-eating poet in the stone den" example brought up early I thought of an early lesson I had in pronunciation - Zhang Fei promised to reform his ways, stop drinking and abusing his men and be a good brother for Liu Bei. As part of his reform he wanted to look smart so he ordered his men to make him a white suit of armour for the next day. His men misunderstood this as 100 suits of armour for the next day and decided that it was impossible (and fearing execution) they resolved to kill him. That's fantastic, whether true or not. Actually I think it's pretty amazing that the words were so close together that early. On an unrelated tangent, I think it's pretty interesting that so many of the RTK major players (at least in the book) died right around the establishment of the Three Kingdoms (Xiahou Dun, Huang Zhong, Yue Jin, Lu Meng, Cao Cao, Guan Yu, Liu Bei, Xiahou Yuan, Zhang Fei, Ma Chao). Most of them were within three years of Cao Pi taking the throne, but I guess this is related to the conflict that the conquest of Shu set off.
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Feb 24, 2012 17:00
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Hey guys Micheal Pettis' blog is back up.
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Feb 24, 2012 17:06
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Yes, Yes, No, Yes. Lots of people who are not you speak and read Chinese, so cut out the "yes, no" unsupported assertions. I understand what you are saying and I disagree. I was not asking you questions about your dumb assertions. I was being facetious in an attempt to gently point out the problems with your hyperbolic statements. If you can look at a word and know what it means, you are reading. You said solid blocks of text make skimming easy; whatever I guess that's your opinion, that point's not even about characters. You said new words can't be coined without characters; even if you didn't mean creating new characters, people could still create compound words without characters. Yes, they might be more confusing. You said latinization "completely kills puns and wordplay" which is just plain wrong; there are zillions of phonetic puns. I understand your points and don't even disagree with what you probably actually believe, but all your statements were hyperbolic. I guess you mistook me calling you out on that as a chance to lecture someone. And that "go educate yourself" poo poo is annoying when it's a long English article, doing it with a 6 year old foreign language discussion thread is just obnoxious and in obviously bad faith.
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Feb 24, 2012 18:43
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In part, the argument is about people in the PRC who are technically "literate" but who nonetheless have a lot of difficulty reading anything beyond really basic vocabulary because, unlike in phonetic languages, advanced vocabulary has to be learned first as speech and then again in written form instead of in a phonetic system where after the initial investment of time learning the alphabet and spelling conventions, so long as you know how to say a more difficult word you can at least sound it out and recognize it when reading as well as write it (though not necessarily properly due to the vagaries of spelling.)
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Feb 24, 2012 18:48
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Cream_Filling posted:advanced vocabulary has to be learned first as speech and then again in written form instead of in a phonetic system where after the initial investment of time learning the alphabet and spelling conventions, so long as you know how to say a more difficult word you can at least sound it out and recognize it when reading as well as write it (though not necessarily properly due to the vagaries of spelling.) I don't know if this is true though. As a foreigner, when I study Chinese on my own I pretty much always learn the meanings of the written forms first and then learn how to say them in the correct tone. Maybe it is completely different for native speakers where they learn how to say the character first, then learn how to read/write it, but I find it hard to believe this is always the case, especially for a native speaker who starts learning characters at a young(ish) age.
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Feb 24, 2012 19:00
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