How can i learn why Chinese language is as it is?

[sangajtam]

I know, that this is not something what tremendously help me in learning,

but just out of curiosity - where and how can i learn why Chinese language is constructed in this way?

Why exactly there are tones?

Why this is not European type alphabet?

Why exactly they came to conclusion that characters will do better for them?

Or maybe it was only idea, and they had not idea about other types of written language?

How it happened that that and not other sound is connected to that character?

For example lion eating poem, about shi.... - this shows how misleading can be using the same syllable to different characters, why did they stay with it anyway?

Why they choose something that complicated over something such simple as abcd?

Another example

慢慢吃  - bon apetit

why this way? why i have to have open mind and use thinking to figure it out?

Why there is not one meaning strictly connected to one word?

 

or maybe just look at this examples of chinee proverbs:

 

I would never in my life figure out this meaning of them.

How it can be such complicated?

[anonymoose]

Why this is not European type alphabet?

Why exactly they came to conclusion that characters will do better for them?

 

I don't think it was a conclusion as such. In the days when characters first made their appearance, there was no European type alphabet.

 

Perhaps a better question would be why no other (surviving) languages use characters (apart from those, obviously, that have adopted them from Chinese).

[li3wei1]

Languages evolve slowly, and are the result of many small, individual decisions by all of the users of that language. Some people start using a word slightly differently, other people copy them, and eventually everyone uses the word in a new way. Very rarely is a language 'designed', or a decision to use a certain type of script made conciously with foresight. Characters appeared long ago, and worked reasonably well, and still do.

 

I think coming to this question with the idea that European alphabets are simpler and more logical will not get you far. Look at English spelling. Why doesn't bear rhyme with ear? Why are there two ways to say tear? Or read? If this language was designed by someone, they should be shot.

 

Then look at all the other languages that use the same alphabet. Many of them have their own letters, that are not shared with the others, and often they use the same letter to represent a different sound. Why? Again, it wasn't a decision made by one or even several people, but something that evolved slowly through countless individual decisions made by all language users.

[耳耳语语]

In France, we say "bon appétit", don't you find it very strange ? Do we fear are not hungry enough and might not enjoy our meal for this reason ?

In China they say "eat slowly", maybe that's a better advice !

 

In short I could say : they invented such a good ideo-phonologic system that they never had to change it to latin alphabet.

I believe the tones are a later invention ("The main changes leading to the modern varieties have been a reduction in the number of consonants and vowels and a corresponding increase in the number of tones"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Chinese_phonology )

[Shelley]

Have you ever asked the same questions of your own language?

 

I suspect there are some very similar answers, one of which is that it is that way because it has always been like that. Sometimes there is no clear path to the answer, as it has been said above language develops slowly and in ways that defy logic.

 

Language is an ever changing, growing thing and sometimes cannot be explained.

 

Have a look at this Wikipedia article, its a start, there are many books,papers etc on the subject https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Chinese_language

[sangajtam]

But what are real, practical advantages of Chinese over abcd alphabet?

 

I dont see many.

Maybe only that chinese text will take less place on page because of characters size, word is in most cases longer in English than in Chinese.

Also if i have to use force to think of advantages - more rhymes.

But i see only cons:

big number of characters, combinations, more confusion when you use wrong tones than in for example English,

more probability of bad understanding when you say just one word, you have to add something to make it clear, you have to have context, yeah its sometimes also true in English but

obviously more possible in Chinese because of complexity and homonyms...

you have to think in open mind to understand it....

 

What was the reason to complicate it so much?

I know that this is point of view of non native Chinese,

but i dont see how it could happen to use this structure knowing that it can be such complicated....

or maybe one reason could be to create isolation from other cultures....

i dont know,  am just curious.....

[sangajtam]

And just another question what was first - sound or character?

[querido]

Sangajtam, I think you'll find that the total complexity of these languages is about the same. For example, I think English has over 100,000 different syllables. I guess a native Chinese speaker might think that we use over-elaborate contortion of sound (and therefore the writing that corresponds to that) to express what might have been represented by a single visual symbol.

 

Also, while I have not experienced learning English as a second language, I did study French and Russian, etc. I found the relative absence of grammar (the relative absence of morphological changes, etc) in Chinese a great relief, actually. And my long-term opinion about the written language - the original topic - is that it's the easy part of learning Mandarin or Cantonese. It's the easy part. 

 

Good luck with the original question. It is interesting.

[Zeppa]

There's a book that partly answers your question, but I haven't read it, only dipped in. It's 'Asia's Orthographic Dilemma' by Wm. C. Hannas, published in 1997. The author compares Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, which all originally had characters and have deal with the problem in different way. There's a foreword by John DeFrancis saying that Hannas may be the only person who has achieved command of all four languages. To quote the foreword:

 

 

'...the author cuts through a great deal of mythology about their commonality to reveal how difficult and ill-suited each one is in comparison to systems of writing founded on simple alphabetic principles. '

[querido]

[My reaction to DeFrancis on this subject has always been "don't let the screen door hit you...".]

[sangajtam]

Thanks, i will search for this book.

But as i am thinking now more about it another question came to my mind.

What was the reason in the very beginning, in the beginning of human existence, to go into this direction?

It requires completely different thoughts...to create grammars, writing and speaking system,

But humans are made to live in groups to help each other etc...but suddenly such isolation which makes things difficult...impossible to communicate with each others...

and creates language that is completely unlike other language.

even if we take group of Asian languages - jap, chin, kor, viet, all of them have NOTHING in common with eng, pol, rus, it, german. (yeah, russian also has different alphabet but has more in common with eng than with chin).

So what happened in the beginning of language that it went into that direction and not with others direction?

Why not to stay with something which can already be helpful to communicate?

Why to create something that makes things complicated?

[陳德聰]

I think you should consider an introductory linguistics or world languages course. There are so many language families that exist in the world that I think it would probably expand your capacity a bit. You may not be aware that there are other writing systems too, not just "European alphabet" and "Chinese writing". The first writing was not alphabetic. In reality, alphabetic writing is a lot younger than other writing systems. Ever hear of Egyptian hieroglyphs? Cuneiform writing? If you have a choice between no writing at all, and drawing a picture of something to represent it, which one do you think would make things more complicated?

[Shelley]

Why to create something that makes things complicated?

 

I don't think it was created deliberately to be complicated, it only seems complicated to you because it is completely new to you.

 

It made complete sense to the people who first started it. Over time some of the reason behind things have been lost and so it appears to have no basis in reason.

[Hofmann]

I recommend you start by reading these and following links to stuff you don't understand. Yes it's Wikipedia. Don't give me crap. It's a good place to start.

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Tibetan_languages
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinitic_languages
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Chinese
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_Chinese
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters

And also,

• https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/tua48/faq_i_want_to_learn_more_about_linguistics_where/

[Zeppa]

Querido, could you explain what you mean by 'Don't let the screen door hit you' please. Is it an American expression?

[Zeppa]

OK, I googled it. So you are just being rude about DeFrancis. But the book wasn't written by him. I do think it's interesting to consider why Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese have found other ways to handle the writing problem.

I suppose it is DeFrancis' ideas about the Chinese language that you think are stupid, but I can't see the point of writing that without going into detail.

[querido]

To Zeppa: He wrote the foreward. The quote was from the foreward. The expression I used does not mean "stupid". It means the equivalent of "Yankee go home". It was shorthand for what would have been a long post. I did not write the long post, which I'm not qualified to write anyway, because it's stuff that has already been covered very thoroughly, here I think, and was not exactly on topic. While it is true that he is recently departed, in books his thoughts continue and I may opine. I always thought it was... (searching for the right word)... unfortunate that someone who worked so hard and rightly earned such prominence in this sphere should be one who despises feels that way about this written language; if it had not been him it could have been someone else, maybe one who felt affection (or other positive word if you prefer) for it as most of us, here, do. Lastly, the quote is immodest; it could have said "the author puts forward the argument..." or "the author argues, convincingly I think, that...". But instead it says he "reveal(s)" (as though it were a matter of fact) "how difficult and ill-suited (these writing systems are)". It seems insulting to somebody.

[Zeppa]

I see your point and perhaps it was not helpful simply to quote the foreword, but I haven't read the book, only dipped into it, and it seems to deal with the problems caused by using characters alone, and the difficulty of replacing them with anything else.

I haven't read DeFrancis on language. We used his books to study Chinese - this was in 1969 when I started and my teacher had spent many years in Beijing and often corrected DeFrancis' choice of words.

 

It is true that the book was published by the University of Hawaii Press, which suggests a link to DeFrancis. I looked for a review online and I must say I am already going off the book after reading the beginning of a review by N. Gottlieb in The Journal of Asian Studies. I regret posting the reference to a book I don't really know in a thread which seems to be completely off the rails!

 

to sangajtam: I can't make anything of your assumption that people originally deliberately chose to use different languages. Languages grew up independently of one another, and there are related families, but no relationship between Indo-European languages and Sinitic languages, for example.

 

What I am thinking of is merely the writing system, since the four Asian languages did use Chinese characters for writing in earlier centuries, although their language were not related, so all four of them found the writing system problematic.

[querido]

I don't think the thread is off the rails. I agree that Hofmann's links, above, are where sangajtam should go.

[lips]

take the bait?  take the bait?  naaaaaaa.....