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Which Phonetic System Is Best


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Posted

So what system does not have severe limitations and can replace characters then?

Posted

Pinyin does what it's supposed to do, which is romanize Standard Mandarin. I think it does so quite well. Its limitations are there by design, just as screwdrivers weren't meant to flip hamburgers.

Posted

Is there even any real talk of replacing characters other than among foreign learners? That hasn't been one of China's goals in decades, so what makes you think there is a need or a desire to do so?

Posted
This thread has an extensive discussion on various types of romanization, and might be of some interest to you.
Posted

I personally like zhuyinfuhao, but I think that pinyin is the best Romanisation system by far. I think there's also an updated Taiwanese pinyin, but I cant remember it's name.

I dont really care about phonetic systems though, since Chinese is Chinese rather than a phonetic Romanised language.. just like Hoffman said, it's not built to flip hamburgers.

Posted

Logographic systems get replaced by phonetic systems which suggests phonetic systems are just better. It is not time to replace charaters as mandarin is not widely enough spoken but give it 50-100 years Charaters will become redundant (if pinyin2.0 is developed)

Posted

I'm not sure.. there are so many characters which have the same sound and even double zi words which have the same pronunciation, that it seems quite hard to make Chinese just a phonetic language using a phonetic system. I think there are certain nice systems like zhuyin, which I think works well, but only as a compliment to the characters.. a little like the Japanese system.

Posted

I've heard that argument before, that it is impossible to move away from characters, and it makes no sense.

You really think that if the Chinese government were to ban characters that Chinese would not find a new way to communicate?

Also, spoken Chinese is already "in pinyin" (or any other consistent / complete system), and they seem to communicate quite fine.

Whether it will happen is another question.

Posted

not being an expert but Pinyin seems very simple in comparison to say juytping or any other phonetic systems. Could it be that the rushed introduction of Pinyin has already changed the language to force the same pronunciation of words because of the over simplified romanised system that didn't capture the nuances of the actual spoken language.

Posted

Also, spoken Chinese is already "in pinyin" (or any other consistent / complete system), and they seem to communicate quite fine.

The spoken language and the written language are two different animals. You're making the assumption that writing is simply speech transcribed, which is not true. Also, the idea that phonetic systems are "better" simply because in many cases they derived from logographic systems is unsubstantiated.

Another thing to think about is that writing is not just sentences and paragraphs. Things like shop signs, book titles, ads, or any other thing that relies on just a few words or syllables, would lack context and not make any sense if they were written in pinyin. I encounter this problem at my local university's library, when the book has been rebound and the title written on the spine is in pinyin. I see just a bunch of syllables and often have trouble figuring out what the book is about until I see the characters.

Again, the only people I've seen recently suggesting that characters should be abolished in favor of pinyin are Western learners of Chinese. And that is a fairly imperialist attitude about it, don't you think?

Posted

Another thing to think about is that writing is not just sentences and paragraphs. Things like shop signs, book titles, ads, or any other thing that relies on just a few words or syllables, would lack context and not make any sense if they were written in pinyin.

You missed my point.

I agree that taking how things are written now in characters, and just changing things to pinyin, will not work. But that is not proof that eliminating characters is impossible. If characters were eliminated, what would happen is that such cases as your examples, the text would get longer to provide the needed context. [e.g. what might be 4 characters might get converted into 8-ish pinyin syllables.]

not being an expert but Pinyin seems very simple in comparison to say juytping or any other phonetic systems. Could it be that the rushed introduction of Pinyin has already changed the language to force the same pronunciation of words because of the over simplified romanised system that didn't capture the nuances of the actual spoken language.

Jyutping is for Cantonese, pinyin is for (standard) Mandarin. Since they are so different in sound, how can you compare the complexity and say pinyin is lacking?

How is pinyin any more simple than another other phonetic system for Mandarin?

Do you have any examples of how pinyin oversimplified Mandarin?

Posted

You missed my point.

I agree that taking how things are written now in characters, and just changing things to pinyin, will not work. But that is not proof that eliminating characters is impossible. If characters were eliminated, what would happen is that such cases as your examples, the text would get longer to provide the needed context. [e.g. what might be 4 characters might get converted into 8-ish pinyin syllables.]

You're talking about a huge change to the language, not just a change in writing system. You're talking about fundamentally altering the language in order to fit a different writing system, and I still haven't seen any reason for doing so. Can you give me even one real reason for such a dramatic change to a language that a billion people already get by just fine in?

Plus, you aren't just suggesting a change in writing. You're talking about changing the spoken language too, because educated speech will follow the written language. Formal written communication has a huge influence over the spoken language, because in literate societies the written language is our reference point for correct usage in speech. To use a familiar example, when China established Putonghua as the standard, they based correct usage on modern baihua writers such as Lu Xun.

I never said that eliminating characters is "impossible." Of course it is possible. However, it will require imposing a huge change on the language, and I see absolutely no valid reason for it.

Posted

At the risk of Roddy creating a "beating a dead horse" icon just for me.....

I think we agree on three things.

  1. Changing Chinese away from character-based is possible. [i thought you were giving those examples to show why it is not possible, sorry if I misunderstood you.]
  2. It would be a major major change to written Chinese
  3. There is probably not a real benefit to it.

However, I don't see why there would be that big a change to spoken Chinese? One could still write pinyin-based Chinese at different levels of formality. And I think Lu Xun is a bad example, as he based his writing style on the educated spoken style of the day (白话).

Posted

However, I don't see why there would be that big a change to spoken Chinese? One could still write pinyin-based Chinese at different levels of formality. And I think Lu Xun is a bad example, as he based his writing style on the educated spoken style of the day (白话).

You're right that Lu Xun was a bad example. However, we do use written language as the basis for what is correct in speech. So naturally the spoken language will follow the written language to a degree. I don't see how it's difficult to imagine that the written language influences the spoken; you need only think about the speech of an illiterate person versus the speech of a highly literate person to understand this fact. We think of the literate person's speech as being more refined and correct, and this is a result of being well-read. Change the writing, and you change the speech.

Posted

the romanised written style has already changed the way standard Mandarin is spoken. All the Mo Po Fo'ing has irrevocably modified the way mandarin is spoken. The argument I am trying to address is perhaps the simple Pinyin systems did not capture the subtle differences in pronunciation resulting in too many similar pronunciations of characters. Apoken language changes rapidly as I hope we all don't speak like our great grandparents. As you can tell I have no love affair for the romantic idea of an ancient logographic written language that has been used to centrally manage many different peoples who speak different languages.

Watching the World Cup it is quite clear the limitations of a logographic systems as it doesn't even allow a close pronunciation of players names a romanised system would. Also a logographic system must be centrally controlled rather than being a dynamic language of the people with new words being created and dying every day. The average common usage lifespan of a word in English is around 50 years (need to verify this) as new things happen all the time a centrally controlled language just can't keep up with this pace so that is probably why in business English words are so commonly interspersed in any Chinese conversation.

Posted

Not sure I can agree with that. The inability for Zhou Public to create new characters does not prevent him creating new words out of existing characters. The interspersion of English isn't because the words can't be created in Chinese, it's more likely to be an in-group / status thing (jargon, I guess) or just not knowing what the Chinese word is - perfectly possible in a bilingual environment. I've seen people drop words like chair and table into Chinese sentences, and have to ask what, eg, an 'end of quarter sales report' is in Chinese.

Major language reform is a bit like the Dvorak keyboard - yeah, might be a good idea if you were starting from scratch. But who's really going to make the effort now? But I agree it's possible, and any changes it might require to the language are unlikely to be all that significant when compared with the changes it's undergone in the last half-century anyway.

Posted

the romanised written style has already changed the way standard Mandarin is spoken. All the Mo Po Fo'ing has irrevocably modified the way mandarin is spoken. The argument I am trying to address is perhaps the simple Pinyin systems did not capture the subtle differences in pronunciation resulting in too many similar pronunciations of characters.

Do you have any sources for this whatsoever, or is it just pure conjecture? Please show me some references, because I've never heard anything about how pinyin has altered people's pronunciation. The point of pinyin was to establish a standard for pronunciation. The idea of needing a standard pronunciation goes back centuries, and was the reason for the creation of systems like 反切.

As you can tell I have no love affair for the romantic idea of an ancient logographic written language that has been used to centrally manage many different peoples who speak different languages.

So you think it is bad to have a lingua franca in a country of over a billion people who speak dozens of different languages, both related (the Sinitic group) and unrelated (many of the minority languages that don't even belong to Sino-Tibetan). If your problem is political, keep it political. But the political situation of the country makes a need for an official common language very apparent, IMO. You can't have everything translated into dozens of languages. It's impractical. Better to have a standard language that everyone at least learns to understand. And what better choice for a basis for this standard language than the language that the vast majority of the population already speaks natively (Mandarin)?

Watching the World Cup it is quite clear the limitations of a logographic systems as it doesn't even allow a close pronunciation of players names a romanised system would.

Not following your point here. The names are in pinyin. By your logic, we should also replace the Cyrillic alphabet, the Greek alphabet, Korean hangul, hiragana, katakana, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabets, and all other writing systems all over the world with the Roman alphabet. We should impose our way on them simply because we like it better. Again, this is very imperialist and narrow-minded.

Also a logographic system must be centrally controlled rather than being a dynamic language of the people with new words being created and dying every day.

Wrong, as roddy pointed out. And what's to keep people from creating new characters anyway? If a new character is adopted into common usage, then it has been established as a new character. The fact that China does regulate the writing system doesn't mean that they have to.

The average common usage lifespan of a word in English is around 50 years (need to verify this) as new things happen all the time a centrally controlled language just can't keep up with this pace so that is probably why in business English words are so commonly interspersed in any Chinese conversation.

Again, if you can show sources that demonstrate that such words just can't be created in Chinese (which is completely preposterous), please do. The reason English words are included in business conversation in any language is that English is the international language of business. There are usually equivalents in the local language, but people tend to borrow the English word because that's what they're accustomed to in that context.

You're an English speaker – you should be more familiar with that concept than most, since English has borrowed a huge per cent of its vocabulaire from other langues (those are all French). Usually English already had a word for the concept, but they borrowed another anyway: ghost is a native English word, from Old High German [/i]geist[/i], while spirit is derived from Latin, through French. Sure, they have slightly different connotations today, but they didn't originally. So why did we borrow "espirit" (now esprit) from French? Because French was the language of courtly business after the Norman conquest in 1066 (much the way English is the language of corporate business today). Same for "tongue" and "language." They both mean the same thing, and they both derive from Latin lingua, but tongue is native to English because it comes from Old High German, while language comes from French langue (meaning tongue, in both senses of the noun).

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Posted
Do you have any sources for this whatsoever, or is it just pure conjecture? Please show me some references, because I've never heard anything about how pinyin has altered people's pronunciation.

IMO, pure evidence can be found that, for example, Taiwan uses a different phonetic system and this is a representation of all the sounds in Mandarin, but it isn't pinyin.

Ask a lot of people in China if they are more familiar with reading or writing pinyin and if they are more familiar with it than Chinese Characters and I'm sure you'll find the latter.

It's like asking a Taiwanese person if they like zhuyin better than characters.. they'll tell you they bare no relation to one another.

Kids do not learn in Pinyin first, they learn in Chinese first when they're learning to speak, therefore how can it be that a phonetic writing system changes pronunciation?

That's like saying that Romanised systems (like in English for example) changed the way people spoke-- we still pronounce way more sounds than there are in the limited 26 letter alphabet.

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