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

[dtcamero]

so coming from a background in japanese, I can relate a story about general macarthur arriving in tokyo after the japanese surrender thinking that his country has to be able to do something about all the ghastly squiggles the locals wrote with. the americans saw the originally chinese characters as inefficient, overly complicated etc., and thought the japanese couldn't possible be able to read their own language... and so they set about gathering evidence to back up that conclusion.

 

they did literacy tests all over japan, and in the end found that not only could the japanese read, but their literacy rate was well over 95%, much higher than in america. to this day japan has one of the highest literacy rates in the world and 4 of the 5 highest globally circulated newspapers... this for a country the size of california.

 

i think the sentiment that 'our writing system is so much easier to understand than theirs is' is probably felt by everyone towards foreign languages. attempts to rationalize it like that defrancis guy start to get creepy and sound a little racist.

[li3wei1]

This is starting to remind me of the story, which has been told in many versions, of the ignorant American redneck/pastor/governor of Texas, who said, "If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me".

http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/texas/entry/if_english_was_good_enough_for_jesus_its_good_enough_for_texas

 

 

Asking why a language is the way it is is like asking why we have ten fingers, and not twelve. There probably is an answer, and it might be very interesting, but it won't be 'logical', the way the answers to "why did you name your son Frank" and "why did you move to Chicago" are.

[sangajtam]

I am only speculating about it, just out of curiosity...its very interesting to me, why something go into this way.....maybe it does not have to be helpful in learning, but definitely this is something my mind would like to know, need of knowledge....maybe its vain i dont know but didnt want to be racist or appear as someone who think that would do this better or that they make stupid choices in choosing this form of language.

[querido]

Sangajtam, I thought your question was good and interesting. Did you go to the links provided by Hofmann in post #14, above?

[li3wei1]

make stupid choices in choosing this form of language

 

No one chooses their language, at least not their mother tongue. You speak it because everyone around you speaks it, and you learn to write it the way everyone else does. There have been a very few occasions when people in power have convinced everyone to change the way they write (Turkey, I think, and to some extent the Chinese simplification), but it's difficult. So there will have been no point in history when people sat down in China and said, 'okay, we need a written language. How should we go about this? I hear they have things called alphabets in distant lands, or we could use pictures, or maybe some meaningless squiggles. Shall we have a vote?'

[Shelley]

There is no simple answer to the questions you are asking. To fully understand you will have to get a degree or some qualification in linguistics. Its not a small subject.

[陳德聰]

Lol yeah my degree in linguistics didn't really delve that far into it though because... It's not really that outstanding...

[roddy]

"it only seems complicated to you because it is completely new to you."

No, it seems complicated because it's objectively more complicated.

 

1) A couple of dozen letters representing sounds. Instantly know the pronunciation of new written words you see. Be able to write down new spoken words you hear. Learn the entire alphabet in an afternoon.

2) Chinese. 

 

Anyone who wants to argue the Chinese written language is simple and efficient can go ahead, but it's plainly less simple and efficient than others. However...

It also doesn't matter that much. It's not complex to the point of being unworkable. It's intimately tied up with the culture. It has beauty.

 

It's although worth noting that The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy came out in 1984, literacy was much much lower than it is today.

[renzhe]

Hi, here is a quick reply to your questions.

Why exactly there are tones?

Some languages have tones, some don't. Even in Europe, some languages (Serbian, Croatian, some dialects of Swedish) use tones, as do many African languages. This is not unique to Chinese.

Why this is not European type alphabet?

All writing was pictorial in the beginning.

For example, Egyptian hieroglyphs were first pictorial, then later syllable-based phonetic. This developed into Phoenician writing (syllable-based phonetic).

Phoenician writing turned into Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, but also into Greek alphabet (which was phoneme-based instead of syllable-based).

The Greek alphabet then developed into the Latin alphabet we use for many European languages. It is esentially a form of writing descended from the Egyptian hieroglyphs.

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

They didn't. They simply found that they worked well enough for them, and decided to stick with them.

Vietnamese and Koreans, who used Chinese writing in the past, decided that it would be better to go completely phonetic and replaced Chinese characters. The Japanese went a middle way (as did Koreans until recently) and use a combination of characters and phonetic writing.

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

There was no other type of written language when Chinese characters were first used. Or rather, all writing was like this back in those days (see Egypt).

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

Spoken language is older than written language. People spoke a certain way, then assigned pictures to certain words. That is why they carry the sound. Later, these same images/pictographs/characters were used to represent other words with the same sound. Just like in Egyptian.

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?

The lion poem is an artificial tongue twister and not a reflection of real language. All languages have similar poems.

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

They didn't choose it, they simply started the way all writing starts -- with pictures -- and did not simplify it as much as Europeans did.

Two things should be said here. First is that modern Chinese writing is largely phonetic, as most characters have elements in their whose role is purely to represent sound.

Second, there were numerous attempts to replace Chinese characters with some kind of alphabet -- the latest being Hanyu Pinyin -- but they never stuck because people overwhelmingly preferred characters.

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

Every word in every language carries more than one meaning. Chinese is no different here.

or maybe just look at this examples of chinee proverbs:

Chinese proverbs make sense if you know the story behind them. Many languages have proverbs which don't make sense until somebody explains them. This is not unique to Chinese.

[Shelley]

"it only seems complicated to you because it is completely new to you."

No, it seems complicated because it's objectively more complicated.

 

Yes, I can't disagree with your logic on this, but I think I should explain what I meant.

 

If you are born into a chinese speaking world, you will have all the cultural references and total immersion that brings an understanding all of its own,

 

I was perplexed with the radical for boat 舟 till I saw a picture of a chinese boat, then it all became clear.

 

I think some of the things that may seem complicated to a learner is not to a native speaker because of these type of things.

[dtcamero]

"it only seems complicated to you because it is completely new to you."

No, it seems complicated because it's objectively more complicated.

I think that for a chinese person english is harder to learn than visa-versa...

knowing that there are far more english speaking chinese than chinese speaking westerners.

will address that in a minute.

if i am reading chinese and I encounter a word I don't know, because I have already studied

over 3,500 chinese characters I will be able to read and 95% of the time correctly

pronounce that word.

as a native english speaker I could say the same for english based on pronounciation

patterns and an understanding of etymology, but that is flat out impossible for

ESL students.

the incorporation of meaning and a phonetic component (sometimes more useful than others)

make hanzi incredibly user-friendly for a student. assuming we have a good systematic

approach to learn a few thousand characters, reading chinese is not very difficult.

it is really an incredibly efficient language in that way... very regular, with

few exceptions to memorize.

not so with english... verb conjugations that are hard to predict. grammar rules

that make little sense. and to top it off, yes the 26 letters of the alphabet.

simple to a fault. as someone said earlier there are many tens of thousands of phonetic

combinations possible... the vowel A can have any number of readings, hard/soft/and others...

words like choir, rural and squirrel are high frequency words

and yet nearly impossible for an ESL student to pronounce correctly on the first try.

much less understand their meaning. an ESL student without a dictionary is powerless

in the face of most new english words.

so then why do chinese often speak english while westerners don't speak chinese?

-part is definitely desire... english is used worldwide, chinese only in china.

-part is the intimidation factor of conversations like this on people who don't know any

better. (chinese children don't have the option to be afraid and just do it)

-english-speaking television shows and movies are popular worldwide... I know that

is a big factor, much like how k-pop has inspired many japanese to study korean.

-biggest probably is that chinese study habits plus some experience living overseas

seem to get people speaking. whereas what is the impetus for most westerners to go live in a

chinese-speaking country?

sure chinese looks different and complicated, but from a chinese point of view...

compared with the obvious ideographical helpfulness of hanzi the same 26 characers

repeated over and over again in english must looks something like braille or morse

code.

I think that the body of rules and information that make a language is frankly not

reducable in simplicity. if you squeeze a balloon in one area, air flows into the

other side of the balloon. similarly english letters are visually simpler than

chinese, but this is actually misleading because they give you much less information

and are therefore less helpful. is braille or morse code simpler than english?

I would argue not but it's up to your definition of simple perhaps.

[li3wei1]

Spanish uses the same letters, pretty much, maybe slightly different ones, and yet it's phonetically transparent. A non-speaker, with an afternoon's training, could read a text out loud correctly without understanding any of it. So it's not a simple inverse relationship between simplicity of letters and complexity. I can't speak for the grammar, etymology, etc. of Spanish.

 

Also, if you know 3500 characters, are you not essentially at the same level as the average native speaker, so this is not a legitimate comparison? I know considerably fewer, and while I can often guess a word, sometimes I'm absolutely flummoxed, and in the same position as an ESL-learner looking at 'diphtheria' or 'psyche'.

 

I agree that English is hellishly complicated, and it would be a difficult task to measure the total complexity and difficulty of the two languages so that they could be compared.

[roddy]

Why choose English as your point of comparison? Why not Esperanto or Spanish or Hebrew? You're setting this up as a Chinese vs English thing, which is pointless. 

 

"because I have already studied over 3,500 chinese characters I will be able to read and 95% of the time correctly pronounce that word."

Yeah, and 100% of the time you're going to need to check to make sure this isn't one of the 5% of times it's not correct.

 

"from a chinese point of view...

compared with the obvious ideographical helpfulness of hanzi the same 26 characers
repeated over and over again in english must looks something like braille or morse
code."

said nobody ever.

[Flickserve]

This question seems to be a non-issue.

 

It's like asking why some animals have no legs, some have two, some have wings instead of legs, some have six, some have hundred...and all coexist together in this world after millions of years.......well you get my drift.

[Guest realmayo]

if i am reading chinese and I encounter a word I don't know, because I have already studied over 3,500 chinese characters I will be able to read and 95% of the time correctly pronounce that word.

 

A student of Chinese who has fully learned over 3500 characters will have spent a certain amount of time studying; a student of English who spends the same time studying English will be able to read well enough that the following bolded statement is untrue:

 

as a native english speaker I could say the same for english based on pronounciation patterns and an understanding of etymology, but that is flat out impossible for ESL students

[geraldc]

I was told that the Chinese script started on oracle bones, characters were carved on bones, and then thrown in the fire so you could tell the future by the way the bones cracked and interacted with the characters. Perhaps you could try writing on bones in an alphabetical script and seeing how effective that is at predicting the future for you.

[geraldc]

Modern written Chinese is remarkably young. The written language previously was different from spoken language. 

 

The difference in grammar between written and spoken allowed different languages/dialects to thrive, while various dynasties were able to govern and communicate using a common written language.

 

In 2000 years, UK has used, Norman French, old English etc. The alphabetical system doesn't help you with the meaning of the text below. At least with classical Chinese, you have a fair idea of the meaning.

 

Oft Scyld Scéfing – sceaþena þréatum
monegum maégþum – meodosetla oftéah•
egsode Eorle – syððan aérest wearð
féasceaft funde – hé þæs frófre gebád•
wéox under wolcnum – weorðmyndum þáh
oð þæt him aéghwylc – þára ymbsittendra
ofer hronráde – hýran scolde,
gomban gyldan – þæt wæs gód cyning

[sangajtam]

Ok, thanks all for those answers.

Many insightful thoughts.

[Gharial]

There's a good chapter-length survey of writing systems by Peter Daniels in the Blackwell Handbook of Linguistics that may be of interest. I've screencapped and organized into 3 attached jpegs what seemed to me to be the most relevant points for this thread, especially as what's previewable on Google Books at any one time may change. "Enjoy" LOL

 

 

Edit: I'm not sure why the pages aren't showing as upright (they are in my PC), so here's a pdf version, might be more convenient.

 

Daniels.pdf