/n/ews: Pride - Why Chinese Language FAILS.

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/02/chinese-language-ever-evolving/

The Times recently published an article about China’s effort to manage the vast number of characters in the Chinese language. A government computer database, designed to recognize people’s names on identity cards, is programmed to read about 32,000 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, cutting out the more “obscure” characters.

This is not the first attempt to modernize a sprawling and ancient language. The most ambitious effort was the introduction of a simplified system of writing in the 1950s. As part of the Communist Party’s campaign to reduce illiteracy, simplified characters were promoted as the common written language, replacing many traditional characters.

More than five decades later, simplified characters remain the standard writing system of China, while Chinese elsewhere — especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong — continue to use traditional characters.

We asked several experts to explain the roots of this shift, and how it might affect the future course of the written language.

>>36

"And that's not counting how Korean has largely (though not completely) stopped using Chinese characters altogether. As Japanese would have long ago if their simple phonetics hadn't led to their language having homonyms galore."

I know Korean is harder to pronounce than Japanese, but I had thought that overall it had a similar amount of sounds. Is this not the case?

I'd love to learn Chinese.

In the translation business, if you know an exotic language like chinese, you get paid a lot more than for translating something from French or English.

http://www.thewebcomiclist.com/o/8538

>>39
alphabet based […] more efficient and easier to learn
Depends what dialect you're talking about. Or rather, how many dialects are being spoken. After all, that's been one of the main advantages with those word characters, once you're over the rather steep learning curve; no matter how you pronounce a word, it's written the same way. People can even speak different languages, and the characters will still look the same. (Somewhat extreme example: 施氏食獅史)

>38
They would have, if the move to Roman characters wasn't decided by the French rather than by Vietnamese. I guess that's what they get for not remaining independent like Japan or Korea.

>41
No, Korean is made by creating blocks of initial consonants, vowels, and sometimes final consonants to create vastly more than 46 sounds. There are some Chinese loans, but the compounds rather than the individual character values were loaned over. Japanese relies heavily on the loan of character values, and inadequately transliterated them (shi becomes shou, shu becomes shou, xiu becomes shou, etc), so there's a huge amount of homophonic compounds. Japanese probably could have abandoned Chinese characters if they hadn't decided to make half their language based on Chinese compounds, which actually were never necessary ultimately (you tend to see things like 返信 and 返事 both taking the place of 答え when 答え itself would have sufficed).

>>45
Korean has more sounds than Japanese, and it allows more sounds in each syllable than Japanese does. That's how Japanese can have so many homonyms, like "kami" (meaning "god", "hair" or "paper"). And that's a Japanese word, not a Chinese loan.

Oh, and that's 46 _syllables_, not _sounds_.

Also, Chinese loanwords aren't so much "inadequately transliterated" as they were taken into the language centuries ago, at a time when they were pronounced differently. After all, languages change over time; for example, the name of China's (current) capital was actually pronounced "Peking" some 2-3 centuries ago. "Beijing" is the modern pronunciation.

Which is also why modern Chinese have all these two-syllable words these days, put together of two synonyms to make a phonetically distinct word, to avoid homonyms in awkward places.

>>45
I predict that, in the near future, Japan begins to move away from kanji.  Their younger generation is speaking more and more English, and given most Western technology, they're unable to write kanji, forcing them to transliterate into Latin characters.

>>47

Are you kidding? There are reasons why Chinese characters may fall into disuse, but 'western' technology is not one of them. Are you trying to say that they simply can't write in Japanese at all? That's just not true; Japanese input is simple and intuitive across a wide variety of devices. Anything released in Japan is capable of it.

Or are you suggesting that this technology is what's causing them to be unable to physically write with a pen and paper? While it's certainly true that fewer Japanese retain this knowledge into later years, especially younger people, that has nothing to do with Western vs Eastern technology. We see the same phenomenon in young Americans these days as well (text speak, poor spelling due to the presence of spellcheck).

In either case, their ability to read and -type- it has not diminished. The wide variety of characters used in any basic light novel, for instance, which are generally targeted at a younger audience, shows this.

Have I just been trolled?

>>45

In addition to what>>46 said about sound shifts over time, there are large numbers of "unnecessary" words in every language. 返信 and 返事 are not fully exchangeable, and 答え and 返事 have different nuances (答え can be both "someone's answer" and "the correct answer", while 返事 can only be the former). Think about the difference between "reply" and "answer" in English. Having synonyms or near-synonyms is neither a weakness nor a flaw.

>>47
in the near future, Japan begins to move away from kanji
Hardly. They've had the telegraph for as long as we have, and katakana (to say nothing of romaji) made for a much simpler encoding, long before the first computer came along.
This Western tech of yours, gave them the possibility a century and a half ago. They chose not to, for a reason.
(And, yes, this reason has been mentioned earlier. Scroll up.)

unable to write kanji
Many Americans are unable to write English. Your point?

>>48

I could see China eventually going to a phonetic system, which I think would eventually solve the problem of learning tons of characters -- I've seen several schemes that would work and avoid the trap of not marking tones, thus making the homophone problem a bit less sticky than trying to use English characters with diacritical marks.  It's not hard to do, and it would make writing simpler.

Fail my ass. As soon as possible,chinese will dominate this shit.

>>51
The communists in the '50s had a plan to simplify the script in a several steps, and ultimately replace it all with pinyin.

Then they rolled back the last simplification and completely discarded the Pinyin-only plan.

Characters aren't going away, deal with it.

3000 more or less charactors is enough for daily use regardless the four-word slangs

If Chinese was going to go phonetic, They'd have done it back when they still had consonant clusters. In Ancient chinese, there were enough possible sounds that you could have one character and one syllable to a word, and they'd all sound distinct. Chinese probably would have kept this had they a phonetic script, since writing is more conservative than speech and phonetic writing would have forced speech to change more slowly by acting as a pronounciation guideline, but they kept the characters and the pronounciation changed rapidly with no phonetic guidlines to keep it under control. Nowadays, there are only 400 sounds (before tones) in standard Mandarin, and people still need to use two characters to a word, to make sure it's all distinct. Even in speech, you sometimes have to clear up an ambuiguity by writing the character on your hand. With 650 possible sounds, and 9 distinguishing tones, perhaps Cantonese could afford to go phonetic, but if Mandarin did, everyone would just give up using it.

>>55
Just a tip: Syllables != sounds. Hint: A syllable consists of several sounds in rapid succession.

Mandarin can go phonetic, but it would take 100 years for the language to adapt to the phonetic system.