David Moser's essay Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard [1] has an amusing and enlightening passage about this "character amnesia".
I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
"I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character."
Simple! 嚏 is spelt 口十冖田厶止. The first character, 口, meaning "mouth", is on the left of the other 5 characters, 十冖田厶止, which are stacked on top of each other on the righthand side. Those five are the picture of a body: 十 is the head, 冖 are the shoulders, 田 is the sixpack abs, 厶 are the privates, and 止 means "stop walking", for the legs. When he sneezes, the mouth becomes detached from the body, comic book style. Perhaps when Chinese students learn characters in primary school, they don't remember them because they learn them in rote style, not remembering WHY a character has a certain shape.
The character amnesia is because of the rote learning, not because of the enlarged character lexicon.
That is a great way to remember the character but it doesn't work as an explanation for why it's written that way. It is NOT a picture of the body. In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything.
The character amnesia is because the monosyllabic sound of each character doesn't not provide enough information to make it easy to remember how to write that character. (A consequence being that rote learning is practically the only way to memorize the characters.)
"In fact, most Chinese characters are not pictures of anything."
Originally, most of them were pictures. Around 2000 yrs ago, they were simplified into "Clerical script", and many lost their pictorial resemblance. When new phonetic characters were created (i.e. one component semantic, the other phonetic) there were many choices of what to use as phonetic (e.g. any of 体提替etc could have been chosen for righthand side of "ti" to sneeze) and the one providing the most semantic clues is often chosen.
Another example of "ti" with mouth radical is 啼, meaning "to cry". The 帝 on the right (actually "di", close enough) looks like an eye (立) with tears flowing down (冖 and 巾).
I believe the reason I've had character amnesia as a foreign learner of Chinese in the past is because I was initially never shown how to "spell" characters into their components. One of the first characters I learnt was 喜 in 喜欢. I was told to practise writing it many times over until I knew it. But I needed to learn it as being spelt as 士口八一口 before I could remember it easily.
I know the ancestors of Chinese characters were pictures but not the current characters (with a few unconvincing exceptions). Most of the characters now are "phono-semantic compounds".
Not to be offensive or anything but those "oh they picked that cause it looks like this" stories are bullshit. In my opinion at least. Take the example you chose 啼. That also means "wild animal cry". How does that help the picture theory? And even if this one story happens to be true, how does that explain all the other thousands of characters?
I understand that you're trying to apologize for the Chinese writing system. But there is no need. It just sucks. Horrible, hard-to-use designs are cobbled together all the time, the Chinese character system is just a particularly prominent example.
Now for a quote from David Moser's Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard speaking about learning a French word.
And voila! I've learned a new word, quickly and painlessly, all because the sound I construct when reading the word is the same as the sound in my head from the radio this morning -- one reinforces the other. Throughout the next week I see the word again several times, and each time I can reconstruct the sound by simply reading the word >phonetically -- "a-mor-tis-seur"
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji.
The failings of these writing systems are manifold, but perhaps the most pernicious is the effect on education. The countless classroom hours wasted on memorising characters poison the classroom with a culture of rote learning. It should be no surprise that when the fundamental skill of literacy can only be acquired through mindless drill, that will almost inevitably become the default approach to the rest of schooling.
Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved.
As a native speaker, I really don't feel character rote learning is that big of a deal. I was educated in China until the fifth grade - by that time I could read most newspapers and contemporary novels. I never felt the process as gruelling, dry, or a significant time investment.
Most of the character rote-learning and grammar occurred in kindergarden, first, and second grade. The "rote-learning" part was writing each character five or ten times, then use them in sentences. It took maybe half an hour of class + ten to twenty minutes of homework each day.
From the third grade on the focus shifts toward idioms, styles, poetry, etc. Essays began in the second grade. By the end of the sixth grade students are expected to be functional writers. I think high school focuses more on Classical Chinese and western literature.
As a native learner, the process actually felt quite effortless. Most of the student's time was spent on math, science, and classical music, which were much, much more painful for me in terms of the sheer amount of practice and rote memorization.
Character amnesia had never been a problem for me while I was in China (this was before computers were popular). Admittedly it is a problem now, since I haven't written by hand for 10+ years, but the characters come back to me if I write them out a few times.
> "Most of the student's time was spent on math, science, and classical music, which were much, much more painful for me in terms of the sheer amount of practice and rote memorization."
are you saying that science, math and music are areas where rote memorization is a problem? i think most definitely that these are three areas where creativity and critical thinking are far more important than learning a static corpus.
a general problem being discussed here is that any system that isn't being constantly invented by its instructors will tend towards static corpus teaching rather than procedural skills, instincts and passion.
>are you saying that science, math and music are areas where rote memorization is a problem? i think most definitely that these are three areas where creativity and critical thinking are far more important than learning a static corpus.
The advantage of Hanzi is that it can be used for any dialect of spoken Chinese(or any spoken language), of which, in China there are hundreds. China is really 30 countries bound together by a unified writing system.
The tradeoff is that it's difficult to learn.
If you want a totally phonetic alphabet then look at Hangul(Korean characters). Beautiful in it's simplicity and how it mirrors the spoken language. But Korea would only be a small province in China, and Hangul would be useless to those who spoke a different dialect.
Hanzi will be around for quite some time, so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.
The obvious counterexample is Arabic. Multiple, mutually-unintelligible dialects across national borders, but a single Modern Standard Arabic used in writing and international communication. I expect that as China develops, virtually all Chinese speakers will learn Standard Mandarin in addition to their local dialect, allowing pinyin to become a perfectly serviceable written language.
Most European languages had a diversity of mutually-unintelligible dialects, including English. What did for those dialects was national media and compulsory schooling; I can't imagine China developing any differently, but I don't know enough about China to say with any degree of confidence. I'd be interested to hear if there are any compelling reasons why this wouldn't happen.
Standardized written dialects in Europe were often established by written literature, generally a translation of the Bible. That's why standard German, for instance, is so heavily influenced by Luther's Saxon dialect--Luther wrote the most influential early German Bible, which was then used in schools.
Mandarin is standard in china. Not only does almost everyone know it, schools everywhere, with the exception of hong kong, are required to teach in it.
"so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email."
Yes, but the ones forgetting are the elites and the trendsetters. If enough of them decide to start using the phonetic alphabets, the rest of the country will follow. Even a country farmer can't sell his produce to a city dweller who can no longer produce the word "rice", except phonetically.
This doesn't even have to be centralized, in fact it almost can't be. It'll be something that just happens or doesn't, and from the sounds of it, the initial phases are indeed already happening. It strikes me as far more likely that the encroachment of phonetic alphabets previously discussed on HN is the vanguard of major change than a short-term anomaly; the trends and forces are clear and strong. Human brains are extraordinarily good at optimizing away useless data and skills, it has (for the most part) a brutally rational approach to the question of "what is useful" based on a simple metric of "is this ever used?", and while it is possible to appeal the decision it takes a lot of effort for an individual to do so.
10 years ago I would have put a lot of money on the farmers having difficulty selling to city dwellers because low literacy left them with no way to sell things except phonetically.
If the elites are hitting the literacy level of the lowest and least educated, it could be setting up a new par that more people can match. Why give a job to an elite when you can give it to some farm boy desperate for cash if they're both dependent solely on phonetic language.
Well, since no English speakers use an ideographic language for English and we're all spelling... sort of... phonetically, there is clearly no reason to prefer a college-educated journalism major to write or edit for the NYT, we can just grab any ol' dirt farmer, right?
There's more to "literacy" than having muscle memory for writing an enormous swathe of characters of dubious usefulness, something most languages manage to do entirely without.
By the amount of spelling errors I've seen in NYT articles, I think hiring a dozen high school-only farm boys would garner better results than paying the university schlubs they've already got doing their proof-reading.
Print Journalism courses have been increasingly irrelevant since Gonzo became increasingly mainstream. Music, sports, etc. all rely more on personal opinion than they ever did. Journalism courses don't teach personal opinion, it's innate.
Major editors in the UK have openly expressed that they aren't interested in journalism graduates, they care more about personal experiences handed to them with an example of good writing with personal experience. Pick up a british tabloid, it isn't Journalism courses teaching writing completely biased completely unobjective articles. I have friends in journalism, I know they're not, and I know they're going to struggle like all hell to get a job.
>so few Chinese are immersed in technology to the point they forget how to write, in fact the majority of Chinese are peasants and don't even have an email.
They do, however, have mobile phones, and use texting. And most of them use the "pinyin input method" to input the characters as spoken sounds, not the "wubi method" to input them as strokes. (I know this from casual inquiries.)
I've really got to look into learning Korean some time. It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language. But that's what linguists and historians are for, and are needed in every language).
> It seems like a near-ideal written language (albeit at a potential loss to historical documents, because it mirrors the spoken language.
Actually, it's not ideal anymore. Hangul perfectly mirrored the spoken Korean language when it was originally created in 1440s by King Sejong's Hall of Worthies (a group of scholars). But like any other phonetic writing system, it stayed constant as the spoken language changed (a problem we have much experience with in English). This is obvious in something as basic as the word "Korea" in Korean. It is romanized as "Hanguk", but written in Hangul as "한국". As you can tell, the 4th and 6th letters are the same (a "ㄱ") even though they are pronounced differently in modern Korean.
However, it is indeed probably the closest one can get to perfection with a phonetic writing system.
The fact that Hangul closely mirrors spoken Korean is also probably due to the fact that Hangul is a relatively new invention as writing systems go. Chinese characters and the Roman alphabet have been around for millennia. By contrast, Hangul is only 570 years old, and less than 100 years since it actually became popular. It hasn't had much time to diverge from the spoken language, yet. Judging from the intermittent stream of Korean "experts" complaining about how laypeople are bastardizing their spelling, the gap between proper writing and everyday pronunciation seems to be growing.
Having said that, Korean is probably one of the easiest languages to type into a computer or a mobile phone apart from the Roman alphabet and its relatives. It uses only 24 symbols which can be combined in various ways. Fits perfectly onto a keyboard/touchscreen. No stupid menus asking you to clarify what you're typing.
I've occasionally wished that we could all just write in IPA.
Then I come to my senses and realize that it's overly complicated, and would simply push the troubles of a spoken language into the written language verbatim, and that may not be what a writing system needs.
I've been learning Korean myself. Hangul is actually pretty cool and logical! I particularly like the regular way it has of denoting a 'y' version of a vowel - just adding a little perpendicular stroke to all the vowels. ㅏ (a) and ㅑ (ya), ㅜ (oo) and ㅠ (yoo), etc.
I should mention that one thing I don't like is how some of the jamo are multiple independent lines, which interacts badly with the 'squish the jamo together into a single block' - eg. ㅍ, ㅊ, ㅎ or ㅔ (the last 2 being particularly egregious).
I'm intrigued by the trichotomy of the Korean language's complete deprecation of its use of Chinese characters for a phonetic alphabet, Chinese continuing not to use phonetics outside loan words, and then Japanese having evolved to use both. I imagine it's complicated.
"Those of us who work with the Japanese are often amazed at how so much schooling leads to so little learning, but with the millstone that is kanji I am surprised that so much is achieved."
As an American, I'm just really hesitant to agree with this given how much better China and Japan seem to educate their students at math and the sciences.
Perhaps you come from a country that educates your people much better than Japan and China, which is why you can say such things.
I can only speak of Japan, I'm biased all to fuck and I'm making crass generalisations, but my essential objection to their education system is that I've never seen a truly creative solution from a Japanese worker. If you need a lab tech or an equation plugger, the Japanese are great. If you need to make something 12% lighter or 8% more aerodynamic, they should be top of your list. If you need anything more than steady, incremental improvement, give up.
The Japanese make great hardware but abysmal software. To use a martial metaphor, they make terrific soldiers but appalling generals. They have been taught that in order to excel, they simply need to memorise the 'correct' way of doing things and then follow that prescription with maximum effort. Young Japanese dearly want to be creative, but by and large they are simply unequipped to do so. Some manage it, but most end up as shachiku (literally "corporate livestock") clogging up the innards of some vast corporation.
There are myriad social and cultural factors at work of which the use of kanji is just a tiny part, but Japan is in a truly dire predicament. We all know the massive demographic problems facing Japan, but the shocking part is the complete inability of the Japanese to seriously address the issue. The current trend in Japan of using robotics in elder care is a good example - it seems innovative, but in my opinion is a symptom of a factory-bound mindset that has no problem-solving strategy other than "fix it with engineering". Japan desperately needs immigrants in vast numbers, but is simply unwilling to do anything at all in order to accommodate them. To return to kanji, it is currently practically impossible for foreign nurses to get residence in Japan due to a language test which only three out of 1,112 candidates have passed - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07...
Education in my native Britain has rather gone to pot recently, but in defence of my home country we do have something of a track record of, well, inventing and discovering nearly everything. My poxy little rainlashed island (population 62 million) has five times more nobel laureates than Japan (pop. 127 million) and China (pop. 1.3 billion) combined. We educated Jonathan Ive, Heston Blumenthal, Norman Foster, Tim Berners Lee, Chris Curry, Frederick Sanger, Turing, Crick, Watson, Darwin, Dawkins, Faraday, Babbage, all the Dysons, Watt, Joule, Newton, Kelvin and quite a lot of other properly clever boffins.
Unfortunately, I think test taking falls into the same trap -- drilling for memorized procedures, without necessarily really understanding the material in a meaningful way.
It'd be like measuring which country has better literature by seeing who does better in spelling bees.
As someone who only knows the Roman alphabet, I too think that learning thousands upon thousands of glyphs just to read a newspaper is insane. However, I do think that you underestimate the power of "we've always done it that way" and "it has done me no harm".
I certainly have caught myself defending aspects of my country's culture, which seem weird to others, for exactly that reason.
How can it be the end of, for instance, Kanji if the whole language relies on it?
You probably know that when a Kanji character is written in hiragana or katakana, you have no clue of the true meaning, it can be many different things. So how can it end without disrupting the whole language?
Japanese people don't need to see the kanji when, say, a news story is being read to them. They figure it out from context like everyone else. I'm pretty sure they could switch over to using hiragana and katakana or even romaji exclusively without much trouble if they wanted to. To some extent this is already happening as more foreign words for things are being adopted. They don't waste time trying to come up with Kanji for every new concept or device but instead they just create a Japanized pronunciation of it in katakana and be done with it.
Spoken Japanese has tone to disambiguate words, though. And "context" is overrated. It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.
___ ga? (Asking if they're talking about ___) is perhaps the most useful Japanese phrase I know, given that a Japanese sentence often contains neither subject nor topic.
> It's not uncommon to have reasonably long conversations where you think you're communicating, only to find out that your conversations were entirely parallel.
I suspect this is not unique to japanese. I bet this happens a lot in all languages. Especially during arguments.
I don't doubt you, but it's a lot easier when, grammatically, you don't have to include the thing you're talking about in the conversation.
Incidentally, the incident I was thinking about wasn't an argument at all. Kklein posted a funny one to Slashdot ages ago about his Japanese wife continuing a conversation from they day before (using the topic of their old conversation without stating it), but I can't seem to drag it out of Google right now.
Actually I disagree with the news story notion. News programs in Japanese are always subtitled with text, quoting and sometimes paraphrasing what the reporter is talking about. There are ten tons of homonyms in Japanese, and inflected regional dialects.
I don't think the bastardized Katakana-ization of foreign words helps. What is encouraging is that new sounds are making their way slowly into the language, particularly the distinction between "b" and "v" that's beginning to emerge, at least for loan words.
The subtitles thing is just a custom. I find it amazing that people believe the Japanese need subtitles in order to understand spoken Japanese. How the hell would the Japanese listen to news radio if they needed subtitles?
Well, once upon a time I started noticing people speaking regional dialects 'translated' into standard Japanese. I think they do serve the utility of making things a little easier to understand, at least in some cases.
News story was probably a bad example, but how about say blind people using Japanese braille which appears to be completely phonetic? Or how about the fact that furigana are often printed to aid people (e.g children) in determining how to read the Kanji, even for standard Kanji? Certainly Kanji can help after you know them but is it actually necessary?
I don't disagree with those examples, and I can't pretend to sympathize with a blind Japanese person reading Braille, for example.
I do think that Japanese is an extremely complex language, and ability to recognize characters and vocabulary are closely intertwined. Kanji is entrenched, but is it necessary? Probably not strictly speaking.
Perhaps those in charge of such decisions in China and Japan will ask not "How can we make literacy easier for our people?", but ask "How can we maximize the benefit of our people knowing the Kanji writing system?"
One benefit that's often mentioned is its near standard semantics throughout Northeast Asia; another benefit not usually mentioned is that very few Westerners learn it. Leaders in a place as competitive as modern China might be thinking about this.
I'm not at all surprised. Hopefully this is the beginning of the end for Hanzi and Kanji.
Actually I think it's the exact opposite for me. This is the beginning of where Hanzi and Kanji start to show their relative superiority (in some areas).
While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.
Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all. That native speakers often forget how to write words is testament to the effectiveness of 'spellcheck', and its reliability, reducing the need to memorize.
TL;DR The big downside to Kanji is the 'spelling', but with the advent of computers that probably will never be a problem ever again. Rather people who use these languages will be able to take advantage of their plus sides, including concision, visual meaning, and lack of phonetic dependence.
PS: The memorize ____ words to read a newspaper problem is way overblown, you'll still need to memorize ____ words in any alphabetical language too, and it's no easier than the asian languages.
> While Roman alphabets are phonetic, they have the trade-off that people with differing dialects cannot communicate. There is no 'Roman' language, there are dozens of European languages, learning all of them would be harder than learning one set of glyphs.
English seems on the way to be on the fast track to being universally understood.
> Similarly, because Hanzi and Kanji implies visual meaning, rather than being attached to sounds phonetically, they are more suited to communication methods like texting and email, where it's easier to discern meaning even if you don't know a word per se, and where phonetics don't matter at all.
In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese. What you lose in richness you more than make up in efficiency, especially in Japanese which doesn't have the same difficulties of Romanizing that Chinese does with tongues and inflections.
I'm not sure why the Japanese don't adopt romaji more - Romanized Japanese.
Japanese already has two syllabaries - katakana and hiragana - so if anything replaced kanji it would be these. However Kanji makes reading Japanese a lot easier (if you know the characters), as it helps with:
* parsing sentences - kanji make word barriers clear
* disambiguating similar sounding words - Japanese have many words that sound the same, but mean different things - these words have different kanji
* reducing text size - one kanji character corresponds roughly to two katakana or hiragana characters (for example, this means Japanese tweeters can say much more in the same number of characters http://twitter.com/kharaguchi/status/22214712818)
So for Japanese, using kanji appropriately is more efficient for the reader than the syllabaries, and certainly romanized Japanese.
> In theory - in practice, a lot of the characters require memorization instead of having any real connection to their visual imagery.
That's also a trade off. If a character has best match with visual imagery you can't write very fluent and fast. The stroke place and order has to be modified and best optimized for speed hand writing.
I agree, and I don't understand what jdietrich is complaining about.
The great thing about learning kanji is that you can usually figure out meanings of words or phrases you've never seen before b/c you know some of the characters or even just their radicals.
It was a huge advantage when I moved from Japan to Hong Kong: even though I couldn't speak Chinese, I could still read signs and other printed text.
I learnt both Chinese and English as a child and all the way through my formal education (up to 18), and I must say, that the phenomenon of forgetting easy characters is pretty common.
Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters are ridiculously complex. The resultant expressive power is obvious, and it's no wonder why these are the few languages in which calligraphy blossomed into a fully-fledged artform, which I personally practice as well.
As with everything, we're going to artificially and naturally select the best language. I personally think that 'best' here is defined by flexibility and beauty.
Flexibility - no way would you have come up with a word like "globalization" in Chinese, it lacks the prefix/suffix system to do that. It also doesn't have the phonetic flexibility to include foreign terms like Japanese does. Eg: "Basketball" in japanese can be pronounced "baskeboru" but it's "lan qiu" in Chinese.
I think one overlooked point is that Chinese isn't a beautiful language, at least not in the opinion of youth today. It's conciseness has spawned some of the best poetry (i think) on earth. But as much as the French complain about how it's hard to sound romantic in English, it's even harder in Chinese (not to mention some of the dialects like Cantonese and Hokkien).
Kinda reminds me of how people despise Lisp (of which I'm also a fan of). It's an obscure language, but it's the most expressive one that I've seen, and will continue to admire it for it's beauty forever. That's probably the reason why it's still around after all this time.
Will the Chinese language suffer a similar fate to Lisp over the long run? I doubt so, since natural languages are a whole different beast. But the problems are real, and with more than a billion people potentially using the same character set, this will be interesting to watch.
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TL;DR - Chinese is difficult to learn. It's not as flexible as English; you can add "ization" to "global" easily in English, not so in Chinese.
It's also not a beautiful language in the way that youth see it; Chinese makes for great poetry about the mountains and the ocean, but not for whispering sweet nothings into a partner's ear (at least compared to a language like French)
Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious)
In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."
That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.
Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to something"; ie - becoming international.
So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English, and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility.
Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing.
And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language.
Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with a different focus.
Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.
Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.
It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang, and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else could new ideas be expressed?
>Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.
Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.
> It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang
Except that you can't just "create" new characters on a computer, as opposed to alphabetic languages, where creating a new word on a computer is trivial.
I think he means the written language doesn't work well for acronyms and other shortening. Each character is already so much work. You could never get words like SNAFU.
Chinese shortens words by replacing two-character words with one-character ones, e.g. 北京天津高速铁路 (Beijing-Tianjin High-speed Railway) is abbreviated to 京津高铁 (lit. "Jing-Jin High-Rail).
Yes, but that is still 4 characters = lots of strokes. Also, not everything can be reliably shortened this way. You can't get the kind of shortening you can with things like "TNT", "DNA". And what about when there are no two character words to be shortenened? Like WTF.
Um, yeah. This has been happening since approximately 1980, when word processors became available. And it's also the reason why those were a lot more important in Japan than in the West: mechanical typewriters that would have allowed the use of 3000+ Kanji were simply impossible to construct, so digital word processors were a huge revolution.
This is fascinating because in the 1980s when there was nearly a trade war between the US & Japan, part of the rhetoric from Japan was that their symbol-based system was superior to Western alphabets in that it used a different part of the brain and therefore somehow enhanced intelligence.
My own testimony is that my English-based handwriting (my native and only language) has gotten progressively worse due to using a keyboard daily for years instead of using pen & paper. It's also frustrating, because it's slower. It feels like labor now.
While language does not limit or boost what is expressible, conceivable or knowable it does impose a default in how we structure the world and what details we take in as important. There was a fairly interesting article in the NYT recently that goes over this. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...
What I found interesting were the accounts on a particular tribe of Australian aborigines who had an amazing sense of cardinal direction - instantly knowing north from south regardless of orientation due to a language based on geographic instead of egocentric directions and the Matses people whose precision in relaying past events would make a Vulcan logician proud.
Intrigued I researched this concept to be evidentiality and epistemic modality. Enforcing such reporting precision into the grammar seems like it would combat sloppy thinking. I wonder if someone raised in such a language would have an easier time creating proofs, programming or studying subjects like bayesian probability or philosophy. I wonder how marketing would work in such a default. I bet statistics would not be a form of lying in that culture.
"Kana are read phonetically and kanji are read visually, with a dissociation between the processes involved, according to Morton & Sasanuma and popular Japanese belief. (This must be a little awkward in reading pages of mixed text, surely?) Nomura found that meaning was extracted faster from kanji than kana words, and thought that kana pronunciation was data-driven and that kanji pronunciation was conceptually-driven. Morton & Sasanuma (1982) also claimed that evidence supports the intuitive belief that kanji can give direct access to the meaning of words, but that kana always require translation into a phonological code when they are being read, and there is no development of automatic visual recognition of the kana symbols. One of the most intriguing ways of studying what differences there may really be in processing is in observing brain-damaged patients - following certain lesions some patients can still read kana but not kanji, while other insults to the brain leave the ability to read kanji but not kana."
This is a non-event when better tools come along. It's like people complaining they forgot how to carve writing on stone when paper and pen come along.
As an outside observer I find this a little funny. It's very much akin to how some segments of America constantly blame technological advancement for what they see as the deteriorating quality of youth.
I find myself forgetting how to write in cursive. To combat this problem, I force myself to write cursive periodically, just to stay in practice. It will never be as consistent and attractive as my grandmother's cursive, though.
I have this problem in English, and I'm not even young by tech standards. I should probably spend some time re-learning to write, because it's kind of frightening.
Not really much different from what has happened in the west, my handwriting (which was never easy to read) as flown of a cliff since I left grade school.
Which is mostly not a problem, except that I makes it more difficult to write on whiteboards.
But you can still hand-write any word you can spell, right? If you really try? Imagine trying to write on a whiteboard and just being completely unable to remember how to write "shoulder".
Even writing e.g. "frimaerke" is not unintelligible, though. One could also imagine that ø and æ were replaced by the more common ö and ä in the future.
I think the "there are so few letters and they are relatively simple" is the point here.
heck I think every written/human language but English should die out. If there are some words worth saving from those languages, let's figure out how to import them into English, then move on already.
Agreed. Some other things that should die out include: all operating systems but Mac OS X, all programming languages but C, all car companies but Toyota, all clothing retailers but Banana Republic, all coffee shops but Starbucks, all pizza chains but Domino's ...
I have seen highly literate Chinese people forget how to write certain characters in common words like "tin can", "knee", "screwdriver", "snap" (as in "to snap one's fingers"), "elbow", "ginger", "cushion", "firecracker", and so on. And when I say "forget", I mean that they often cannot even put the first stroke down on the paper. Can you imagine a well-educated native English speaker totally forgetting how to write a word like "knee" or "tin can"? Or even a rarely-seen word like "scabbard" or "ragamuffin"? I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"??
[1] http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html