Characters are objectively harder, even for Chinese

[ala]

姓回的回民每回都回到回纥国.

It's very easy to be understood and I don't think there's any confusion in this sentence. What's your point? Or instead of elaborating how Hanzi has ruined your youth, you're trying to tell us Hanzi can be as confusing as Pinyin to express an idea too? Don't you have any other better examples?

Of course it was not confusing. My point was that homophones need not automatically be associated with "unintelligible confusion," there are plenty of homographs involving characters. You missed the point.

[pazu]

Then your intention was poorly illustrated in your example because you're using Hanzi. Think about your example in Pinyin, I don't think they could be guessed as easy as the Hanzi version.

Xing4hui2 de hui2min2 mei3hui2 dou1 hui2dao4 Hui2heguo2

[ala]

No, my example was very well illustrated.

姓回的回民每回都回到回纥国.

xìng Huí de Huímín měi huí dōu huí dào Huíhéguó.

This sentence is equally comprehensible to me in pinyin. No less so than the Chinese characters. And this is under little adjustment to pinyin.

[sm_sung]

This sentence is equally comprehensible to me in pinyin.

Hmm... the sentence wasn't that difficult but ala, you wrote the sentence. Doesn't that give you a significant advantage in trying to understand it?

How about this?:

zuobian lai le yi ge banyan e gou de tongxue，

youbian lai le yi ge banyan er ge de tongxue。

banyan e gou de tongxue dai zhe liang zhi da er，

banyan er ge de tongxue dai zhe liang zhi da e。

e gou kanjian er ge de da e，jue de du er hen e。

e gou e qi lai jiu yao yao er ge de da e，

er ge qi qi lai ye yao yao e gou de da er，

jieguo e gou mei yao dao er ge de da e ban kou，

faner shi er ge yao le e gou de da er yi kou。

It's just a kid's poem with no difficult words, but I think most people will have some difficulties understanding it written in this form.(I omitted tone numbers because it's said the Dungans can do without them)

The following is the same poem with tone numbers added:

zuo3bian1 lai2 le5 yi1 ge4 ban4yan3 e4 gou3 de5 tong2xue2，

you4bian1 lai2 le5 yi1 ge4 ban4yan3 er4 ge1 de5 tong2xue2。

ban4yan3 e4 gou3 de5 tong2xue2 dai4 zhe5 liang3 zhi1 da4 er3，

ban4yan3 er4 ge1 de5 tong2xue2 dai4 zhe5 liang3 zhi1 da4 e2。

e4 gou3 kan4jian4 er4 ge1 de5 da4 e2，jue2 de5 du4 er5 hen3 e4。

e4 gou3 e4 qi3 lai2 jiu4 yao4 yao3 er4 ge1 de5 da4 e2，

er4 ge1 qi4 qi3 lai2 ye3 yao4 yao3 e4 gou3 de5 da4 er3，

jie2 guo3 e4 gou3 mei2 yao3 dao4 er4 ge1 de5 da4 e2 ban4 kou3，

fan3er2 shi4 er4 ge1 yao3 le5 e4 gou3 de5 da4 er3 yi1 kou3。

[pazu]

I've met a Shanghainese friend (who was brought up in Harbin) on ICQ today and I asked her if she could tell me something about "Huíhéguó", she just said she didn't understand the word, then I told her it was 回紇國, she understood then and asked me why I was interested in knowing it. Why do people have difficulties understand it? Because Pinyin needs some hints provided by the content, situation, etc to give you a better understanding of the word in many situations. Hanzi can have some similar problems too, but obviously Pinyin is worse, or worst.

[dmoser]

Pazu,

I've met a Shanghainese friend (who was brought up in Harbin) on ICQ today and I asked her if she could tell me something about "Huíhéguó", she just said she didn't understand the word, then I told her it was 回紇國, she understood then and asked me why I was interested in knowing it. Why do people have difficulties understand it? Because Pinyin needs some hints provided by the content, situation, etc to give you a better understanding of the word in many situations. Hanzi can have some similar problems too, but obviously Pinyin is worse, or worst.

I find this reasoning strange. The problem here has nothing to do with pinyin. Your friend couldn't understand the *spoken* word in Chinese! I assume you had to write it out for her, or clue her in to the characters before she could understand it. This is not an argument against pinyin, it's an argument against Chinese retaining all these words that are incomprehensible when spoken.

Let me paraphrase your position, in a way you will surely not like:

"The characters allow us to coin words that are opaque and un-understandable when spoken out loud. There are already a huge number of examples in Chinese. So we should keep the characters, because only by keeping them can we continue to retain a vast amount of vocabulary like "Huiheguo" that is gibberish to most speakers when spoken out loud."

The Chinese characters only solve a problem that they themselves helped to create.

I repeat my earlier question: What is the advantage of having a large number of vocabulary items that are incomprehensible in everyday speech?

In this day and age, it's hard to see any advantage to maintaining a gulf between the spoken and written language. In English and virtually every other language I have any knowledge of, written texts, though different in style from natural speech, are virtually 100% comprehensible when spoken. Chinese could be this way, too -- and since the May 4th movement has been rapidly becoming so. And a good thing, too.

If pinyin were adopted, Chinese would have to stop allowing so many ambiguous or meaningless lexical items to creep into the language. As far as I can see, only a certain economy of means would be lost (i.e., it would occasionally take a few more syllables to clearly express a concept that could be expressed in truncated form on the written page with the characters).

Having said all this, Huiheguo may not be a good example, since it was just a word your friend was not familiar with. It would be like using the word "Cathay" to denote China; many English speakers would draw a blank with this one, too. Or another example: When I first heard the word "Mass Ave" in Boston, I couldn't understand it, but when I saw it written out, I could easily see it must mean "Massachusetts Avenue".

So this phenomenon exists to some extent in English, too.

[Quest]

When I first heard the word "Mass Ave" in Boston, I couldn't understand it, but when I saw it written out, I could easily see it must mean "Massachusetts Avenue".

So this phenomenon exists to some extent in English, too.

Oh my... I drive up and down Mass Ave every single day.

[pazu]

To some extent, the large number of homophones are problems created by Chinese, why don't they create more phonemes like the Indian as I'm sure Chinese genes must have some ways to make more sounds by their tongues (as in Cantonese). But this is language, there's no explanation.

Sometimes I just wonder if the sounds can be so easily added to a language with an introduction of another set of alphabets, as some here have suggested.

In Vietnamese most Westerners' names are written in the "international" way (well I mean the latinized version, like "Abu Khan"), sometimes I asked my friend to read out some newspaper cuttings for me (to record for study), most of the time, they just stopped in front of some tricky words, some are not really tricky indeed (e.g. Wardley) but the "dley" sound doesn't exist in Vietnamese, so it can be difficult to find a way to solve the problem. It may be okay for those who have studied English (but indeed the guy who helped me a lot for recording newspaper cuttings was graduated from a university in Saigon too, speak good English), but you can't expect a guy to learn English before being able to read out the newspaper of his country.

Also some people have suggested a pinyin could ease the import of foreign words (most are related to technology), I just don't know if it's true.

In Vietnamese, webpage is translated as "trang web" (page-web), and "software" is "phầm mềm" (lit. ware-soft), sometimes I think if it's so easy to "import" words using latin alphabets, as some may have claimed, then why shouldn't Vietnamese just use

the word "software"? Why not "New Zealand" but "Tân Tây Lan"?

Indeed the only country (in this Hanzi Cultural Circle) that imports words so "fierously" like this, was Japan (maybe Korea too? I don't know Korean.) Sometimes it's quite a strange idea to me, browse through a manual of Japanese product, just decode the Katakana and you can get a brief idea of what's written. It's easy only because I know English.

[39degN]

Seven original sins of Hanyu pinyin

--why say no to Hanyupinyinization

1.Hypogenesis: the hanyupinyin system has a certain amount of problems itself. The most serious problem is having lots of homophone, as every other contributive poster's mentioned it will simply cause confusion, not for expressing ancient Chinese or uncommon usage, just simple live conversations, see:

二百五十亿元人民币

二百五十一元人民币

just imagine your bank cheque simply writing in pinyin like this, don't your think that's stupid and ridiculous? I hope this tragedy wont happen to you.

他在河边转了半天，然后一头扎到水里。

它在河边转了半天，然后一头扎到水里。

她在河边转了半天，然后一头扎到水里。

yes, we can no longer identify if that was human being or an animal if hanyupinyinization came true.

Since the他、她、它 are same thing in pinyin, we cant figure out if that was a girl, a boy, or an animal. We can just read more contexts to find it, after 1000 paragraphs, we find it out after all:"oh, that was a dog."

and

再见到那孙子时我给你电话

在见到那孙子时我给你电话

你我目光的交点

你我目光的焦点

And some ppl suggest not to point the tunes to improve typing speed, that's more horrible:

关于试行汉字拼音化的通知

关于实行汉字拼音化的通知

关于施行汉字拼音化的通知

拼音真的实用吗？

拼音真的适用吗？

一个汉字又能代表什么呢？

一个汉子又能代表什么呢？

一个憨子又能代表什么呢？

一个蚶子又能代表什么呢？

And we can find out more hypogenes symptom of hanyupinyin there.

2.ugly- the pathetic Dong shi: if you used to write English, don't you think the hanyupinyin's spelling is awkward and ugly? Meanwhile they are not hand writing-friendly, because of its weird spelling. And tune marks make it even worse! And the worst is without tunes some words couldn't be recognized.

3.literature beauty lost in translation: lots of modern and classical ancient Chinese literature works based their beauty on characters, I do really cant imagine what will be a pinyin version of red mansion dreams.

4.Destroying of culture tradition: with hanyupinization we'll no longer have the ability to read ancient masterpieces and history and traditional culture, and the gap between ancient Chinese and modern Chinese will be widening. Relatively the traditional arts such as Chinese painting, calligraphy, seal cutting and so on will became endangered arts.

5.Increasing input efficiency? No! Aside hand writing, will the typing speed be raised up? Maybe, but what about the tunes? If you want to type words with tunes, it will certainly slow down your typing speed, but if not, how to solve those meaning confusion? (examples will be added later if somebody wanted it)

6.Useless to increase literacy rate: literacy rate will be increasing? No! With pinyinization, ppl may able to write something they know, but it doesn't mean they are not illiteracy at all, with pininnization will they know all the knowledge of every field? no, they still cant. judging If you are an illiteracy not depends on whether you can write down something you know, but depends on what the amount of things you know, pls don't confuse us this two concepts. With pinyin common ppl still cant understand relativity theory. You are very good at one thing, not only because you know the character which describes the thing. When a whole nation became more superficial, what sense does the literacy rate make?

7.Not learning (new knowledge) friendly: the character whole hanyupinyinization will increase the difficulties to study new things(actually the new things for students I mean), e.g. just think about the complex molecular formula's Chinese name and you can figure out what I mean, don't tell me we'll borrow the English names or change ways to say it, that's not a language way. Not to mention the English names are more difficult to remember. those thought pinyin will ease learning difficulties they basically mastered both pinyin and characters, but for those were taught in pinyin from childhood, there're certain new difficulties will be generated.

[dmoser]

Dear 39degN,

You need to think more carefully about this. Your examples are not convincing to any linguist. Chinese got along fine without the 他/她/它 distinction for thousands of years; these are recent additions to the character set. (When my American friends find out that there is no he/she distinction in speech, just one morpheme, "ta", they are amazed, and say things like "Surely there must be constant confusion and misunderstanding in Chinese speech because of this." Are they right?)

Your homonym examples are by and large invalid because they are not homonyms. 汉字/汉子/憨子 have different tones, and it goes without saying pinyin must be written with the tones (though actually in more than 90% of cases you don't need them).

As for homonyms like 焦点/交点 etc., this is not very convincing for linguists, either. Your English is good enough to know that there are a multitude of homophonic morphemes in English like "light" (轻,光) "bank" (银行,岸,浅滩) "ball" (球,舞会), and "plain", and "pen", "bat" and on and on, an enormous number of words/morphemes with two or more completely distinct meanings, and spelled exactly the same. Surely your excellent knowledge of English must tell you that homophonic spellings do not result in constant semantic disasters; people are excellent at figuring out the right meaning from context -- so much so that they do it effortlessly and unconsciously. If Chinese people used pinyin, they would do this, too.

There is nothing objectively ugly about pinyin. I think it could be improved, myself, but as a system it is merely a representation of the sounds of Chinese. As far as regularity goes, it is more beautiful than English, which is very much a chaotic mongrel of a writing system.

As for your other points about the link to the classical language and the loss of some aesthetic beauty, I agree completely that there would be some sacrifices in these areas. The characters are beautiful. I love them. But everything is a tradeoff, my friend.

I suggest you do some more reading on language and writing systems.

Read some introductions to Saussure and the basics of language and speech representation. And for clear explanations of how Chinese and phonetic scripts work, nothing beats John DeFrancis' two marvelous books "Visible Speech" and "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy".

I recommend these highly to anyone posting to this subject. If you want readings in Chinese, there are also great books on this subject by Zhou Youguang 周有光, Wang Li 王力, etc. And the great linguist Zhao Yuanren 赵元任 (who for a time advocated writing Chinese with the alphabet).

I notice you didn't mention the loss of the uniqueness of personal names. To me this would be the biggest problem with pinyin. If you really want to convince people, I would start with that example. Your other examples are less convincing.

David

[39degN]

thank you David, and i will read the books you have recommended.

Your homonym examples are by and large invalid because they are not homonyms. 汉字/汉子/憨子 have different tones, and it goes without saying pinyin must be written with the tones (though actually in more than 90% of cases you don't need them).

i did, man! see:

And some ppl suggest not to point the tunes to improve typing speed, that's more horrible:

but any way, i would find more evidences supporting this if i have time. and now i can only provide this one:

很显然用拼音不是必须的

很显然用拼音不是必需的

as for others, i have to say im not a linguist, nor relative major, if i made any other elementary mistakes, pls feel free to point out directly.

39degN

[39degN]

I notice you didn't mention the loss of the uniqueness of personal names. To me this would be the biggest problem with pinyin. If you really want to convince people, I would start with that example. Your other examples are less convincing.

sure, today on streets i also toticed the diversified tablets and signs of all kind of shops, i cant imagine one day how could them be forced to change to pinyin.

[sunyata]

so, dmoser, what's your point? Do you think that pinyin should and will be implemented as the status quo writing system or do you think the present writing system should remain?

Personally, I don't see why it should be the foreigners' business to even discuss it. However many arguments you can find against using characters, that still does not justify the idea of switching to pinyin or another alphabetical system, because Chinese people have to decide by themselves and for themselves. It's their language, their culture, and their business.

I agree with 39degN an all 7 points. I really don't see how switching to an alphabetic system would simplify or resolve any problems. Even if it did, it would create plenty more to make up for them.

[skylee]

Personally, I don't see why it should be the foreigners' business to even discuss it. However many arguments you can find against using characters, that still does not justify the idea of switching to pinyin or another alphabetical system, because Chinese people have to decide by themselves and for themselves. It's their language, their culture, and their business.

I agree.

I find the response TO 39's post of "7 original sins" patronising ... " Your English is good enough to know that ...", "I suggest you do some more reading ..."

[ala]

Personally, I don't see why it should be the foreigners' business to even discuss it. However many arguments you can find against using characters, that still does not justify the idea of switching to pinyin or another alphabetical system, because Chinese people have to decide by themselves and for themselves. It's their language, their culture, and their business.

I do not agree. This ours vs. theirs dichotomy has absolutely no relevance in this discussion. Many Chinese have concerns regarding the writing script as well, but the lack of open discussion and resources concerning this is deafening. One does not make a decision when given a single choice, differing views must be allowed to exchange regardless of their immediate viability.

[pazu]

You need to think more carefully about this. Your examples are not convincing to any linguist. Chinese got along fine without the 他/她/它 distinction for thousands of years; these are recent additions to the character set. (When my American friends find out that there is no he/she distinction in speech, just one morpheme, "ta", they are amazed, and say things like "Surely there must be constant confusion and misunderstanding in Chinese speech because of this." Are they right?)

It's easier to use "ta" in daily conversation without making much confusion because "ta" is implied by many other ways, but it may not be the same for written form.

Some writers have the habit of writing like below, sometimes it's interesting to read, though this is more about the writing style, playing about the ambiguity of sound but the accuracy of its written form. ta ta ta~~~~~~~

她忽然問他是否愛她。

他問她還用問他。

她說她只想聽他說一遍。

他說他從來就不懂得表達自己的情感。

她突然哭出來。

他問她為甚麼哭。

她說她心裡只是覺得難受。

他說他只是一個笨人, 從來就不懂得感情是甚麼。

Indeed the novel that I've just read these days use some structures like this, it was 《一個人的聖經》 by 高行健。

[Quest]

As for your other points about the link to the classical language and the loss of some aesthetic beauty, I agree completely that there would be some sacrifices in these areas. The characters are beautiful. I love them. But everything is a tradeoff, my friend.

The trade off is not compelling.

[dmoser]

sunyata wrote:

Personally, I don't see why it should be the foreigners' business to even discuss it. ...Chinese people have to decide by themselves and for themselves. It's their language, their culture, and their business.

I'm sure if you were to stop and think about it, you would realize the world is more complicated than your comment warrants.

My wife is Chinese, and we have a 7-year-old daughter. We are currently wondering whether to educate her here in China or in the U.S. Whether or not she can learn and maintain the characters while going back and forth between the two countries is a real issue. Surely as a parent I have some vested interest in this issue, despite being a foreigner. And what about my daughter? Is she foreign or Chinese? What about children of Chinese immigrants in the U.S.? Should they be encouraged to learn Chinese characters? What about the increasing number of foreign kids being raised in China? Does race matter in any of this? The world is vastly more interconnected and complicated now. This kind of "Great Wall" thinking doesn't make much sense any more.

[sm_sung]

Has anyone(esp. the pinyin and digraphia advocates) tried reading the above poem in pinyin I posted quite recently? Can anyone understand it without too much guessing and with little difficulty?

[pazu]

Has anyone(esp. the pinyin and digraphia advocates) tried reading the above poem in pinyin I posted quite recently? Can anyone understand it without too much guessing and with little difficulty?

Well... you didn't follow up this thread closely enough, because a well-educated Pinyinist are not supposed to be able to read poem, as discussed above. Poems are for scholars only.