(Mis)informative videos?

[Gharial]

Came across the following the other day, while looking to see what YouTube had on the film Ironclad (which I love!):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiVs05yq9-o

 

The guy seems to know a fair bit about swords and scabbards and the like (apparently he was mooted as historical advisor for the aforementioned film), but I'm not sure he really knows that much about Chinese (which he compares to English in the course of establishing just how good he thinks certainly the English writing system is overall), and I found myself thinking 'Hang on just a minute there!' several times during the clip.

 

Anyone fancy having a go at clarifying or indeed debunking some of the points he makes? I have some thoughts of my own but thought it would be more fun if others here on the forums added their tuppenies first.

 

There is a response video from a linguist that's over 17 minutes long, but I only watched a few minutes of that and haven't read much of the comments below either clip.

[陳德聰]

Some of the comparisons he makes between English and Chinese are interesting, like when he says that some derivational remnants remain in English words, generally in the silent letters. I never thought of this as similar to Chinese characters, but I guess there is an analogy there that while not perfect is kind of nifty.

However, you don't have to look far to figure out he's full of crap. In fact, he just says "English's spelling system is the best" and he basically says it's because it has some sound-out-able-ness, and also has somewhat less opaque etymology than other languages, and presumably he has other reasons. But you can stop right there and assess whether that's even a measurable claim.

What exactly is English's spelling system "the best" for? For conveying meaning? For leaving traces of history? For saving time looking up words in a dictionary? What are the measures he is using?

I honestly wasn't willing to watch more than the first few minutes so if someone could let me know what measures he's using maybe we can have a chat about it.

[Gharial]

Well, once spellings became reasonably standardized (with the advent of printing, and thus more easily-available dictionaries etc), and education and the media started inculcating those spellings and disapproving of further changes, then obviously features from at least the time the spellings were thus set would be preserved. FWIW and in terms of linguistics, I recall that one of the works that picked up on this advantage of the fixed spelling was Chomsky & Halle's The Sound Pattern of English (but I've only read about this second-hand).

 

The things that got me in the clip were

 

1) he essentially subscribes to the Universality myth (see DeFrancis, Unger, probably Mair, etc?), and (inevitably) the Ideographic myth, in that he asserts that a person dictating a letter in one part of China will be magically and completely understood by a person reading the letter in another part of China, as if there were no (or no need for?!) schooling in a nationally-promulgated standard language (Mandarin), and only trivial differences between it and whatever regional vernacular writings. I don't know enough about e.g. Cantonese to be too dogmatic about this, but I'd've thought that the only way such a letter could really be said to have been read in Cantonese say were if it were actually first written in (or at least explicitly translated into) Cantonese, and that the Cantonese speaker would, however poorly, otherwise be reading Mandarin if the letter had hailed from Beijing say and more importantly been written in Mandarin, and

 

2) he seems to be unaware that most Chinese dictionaries nowadays are arranged in whole Pinyin syllable order rather than by radicals (though almost all dictionaries have radical indexes just in case, read on LOL), unless by "So you go to look up big and is it b - i - g, no, it doesn't really start with anything" he means that you=a beginning foreign student of Chinese or Chinese kid with no clue how to pronounce a given character, rather than an educated and reasonably literate Chinese adult. So anyone who knows at least a bit of Chinese will be in the ballpark alphabetically already, unless they insist on using something like the Kangxi to look things up. He also seems unaware of Pinyin IMEs.

 

I don't recall that much else of interest (besides him skipping over the phonic processes and practice likely necessary to arrive at whole-word reading ability in English), but maybe I need to re-watch the clip again LOL.

[Shelley]

Well I listened to the complete thing, I would just ignore it.

 

These are the classic misconceptions about chinese that I have heard before. Unless the person I am speaking to really seems interested and open to learning I usually just say that once you have been learning chinese for as long as I have it all becomes more understandable and easier.

 

i also watch the first bit of the next video, about extra r's, I think that's just him. I don't do it.

 

If you noticed he has lots of videos about a wide range of stuff, he obviously likes to expound on his ideas to any one who will listen.

[roddy]

The chief rival to the English spelling system isn't Chinese, it's an improved English system. I really wanted to give the guy a listen, but if he's going to say wrong things I just can't. Sorry. 

 

Also, this guy makes over $400 per video? This new economy confuses me. 

[Gharial]

@Roddy: Yeah but if we "improved" English spelling (made it more phonetic, right?), we'd lose the lovely visual bonus features mentioned. Ever tried reading long stretches of English transcribed into IPA say (to take things to their logical conclusion)? It's a bit tiring, and you start to yearn for the usual spellings. So I don't think he was too far off with his comments about English, it was just when he started talking about Chinese that he looked like he was making things up somewhat and on the basis of insufficient knowledge. At least English spelling is a better guide to its pronuciations than Chinese characters are to theirs, and there aren't suprasegmentals like tones to worry about. Anyway, by rival I guess he is going not just by subjective arguments regarding writing system but by sheer number of speakers, which if we factor in L2 speakers definitely puts English just behind Mandarin as the world's top 2 systems: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

 

There was a story in the Guardian a few months ago about a...Swedish? guy who does little more than act stupidly while recording footage of his computer gameplay sessions. Apparently he's earned something like $7 million dollars from all the advertising-related or what-have-you revenue his huge number of views has generated. Nothing against the guy, who seems a nice enough bloke (going by his "Draw my Life" clip), but W - T - H lol. Anyway, I'll see if I can remember his YouTube name and thereby dig out the Guardian link. Edit: Ah, got it: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/oct/22/pewdiepie-youtube-felix-kjellberg-this-book-loves-you

[Demonic_Duck]

Seems like he's just repeating every myth you've ever heard about Chinese writing as fact. Struggling to find anything that's factually correct  (about English or Chinese) without significant caveats.

 

He even gets the concept of "nation" confused with "nationality" as in 民族 (for which "nationality" is already a bad translation, should be "ethnic group").

[Gharial]

'Ethnic group' is admittedly pretty clear, but I think his use of 'nation' in '54 nations' is fine, see sense 2 here: http://www.chambers.co.uk/search.php?query=nation&title=21st

[Demonic_Duck]

Hmm, fair enough. I guess I'm showing my own ignorance here, as I wasn't even aware of that meaning.

That said, the point that he's making is essentially that containing different ethnic groups makes a country an empire, which is a pretty damn loose definition of "empire" (and also means that almost all countries are "empires").

[Gharial]

The question then would be how the various ethnic groups came to be thus presently "contained" within the "one nation". Presumably some sort of conquest was involved at least some of the time?

[mouse]

He conflates it with the idea of a nation state. There are 56 — not 54, another thing he got wrong to add to the list — nations (ie Chambers dictionary meaning 2: nation as ethnic, cultural, linguistic, etc group) and empires are made up of lots of nations (ie Chambers dictionary meaning 1: a nation state), so therefore China is an empire.

 

There may well be a coherent argument for China being an empire, but you won't get it from this bloke. He's a pub bore with added reaction shots. To be fair though, most of the comments on his video are pointing out how wrong he is, so I don't think it can be said that he's even succeeded in misleading people.

[Gharial]

One thing that probably helps make things seem less empire-like is when annexed territories are more neighbouring/"influenced" than too far-flung eh. But hey, let's not dwell too much on a mere aside in what was otherwise 9 minutes of unparalleled linguistic analysis!

 

I wonder how one says 'pub bore' in Chinese?

[mouse]

 

 

I wonder how one says 'pub bore' in Chinese? 

 

孔乙己?

[Gharial]

孔乙己? That's fighting talk where I come from!