The Way of Chinese Language

http://thevivekpandey.github.io/posts/2019-02-02-way-of-chinese-language.html

57 83 7 years ago

thevivekpandey.github.io

codevark• 7 years ago

In one part the author says "In English we write them identically, but we speak them differently: in different tones.". A few paragraphs later, he states that English speakers have trouble with the 4 tones of Chinese, which are so obvious to the Chinese, and that phonetic languages don't use tones. Which is it? I thing each language has tones, but they are different tones, and therefore unfamiliar and maybe difficult for speakers of the other language to grok.

(Funny but inappropriate comment self-censored.)

jumelles• 7 years ago

English doesn't have tones; it's what's known as a stress-timed language.

petecox• 7 years ago

For those unfamiliar with tones, Xidnaf's animated "Is English a Tonal Language?" may be of interest.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5RWzBRg6rU

girzel2• 7 years ago

I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.

schoen5• 7 years ago

Somewhat unusually for Indo-European, Swedish is literally a tonal language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_phonology#Stress_and_p...

(that is, there are word pairs that are distinguished only by tone)

schoen5• 7 years ago

English does use pitch in prosody, but it's not phonemic. (There aren't pairs of English words that are distinguished only by their pitches or pitch contours.) We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...

A more precise way that the author could have made this point might be something like this: "In English, we do sometimes use pitch to convey meaning, for example to show which word in a sentence is most important, to show whether a sentence is meant as a question or not, and to show certain kinds of emotion. But it doesn't cause one word to turn into another. In Chinese, it often does."

natch12• 7 years ago

There aren’t pairs...

That is quite a claim.

Off the top of my head:

digest, digest

regress, regress

contract, contract

implant, implant

etc.

thaumasiotes11• 7 years ago

We'll never get a full-scale English equivalent of [施氏食獅史]

To be fair, there is no equivalent of 施氏食獅史 in Chinese either. The text is written in classical Chinese and is not intelligible when read aloud. Obviously, the pronunciation of classical Chinese was different.

dougdonohoe• 7 years ago

Hey this was pretty interesting - the most in-depth introduction to Chinese characters I've seen.

KayL• 7 years ago

"Perhaps you can spot an elephant in 象"

The animals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script#/media/File...

thaumasiotes11• 7 years ago

Go to http://hanziyuan.net and put in 象. It's not hard to see the elephant.

I particularly like B14607.

theli0nheart• 7 years ago

This was interesting but a lot of the things are wrong. Mandarin does have words. They are just composed of characters instead of letters. And there is NO way you could read a Chinese newspaper by just knowing what the characters “mean”. Some characters don’t mean anything, and they’re just there for grammatical reasons. Other characters can get mixed with completely unrelated characters and get a totally unrelated meaning to either. So for those of you who don’t know Mandarin, please read a lot of this with a grain of salt.

Regarding the simple grammar, I’ll say that tenses and plurals are easy for an English speaker to pick up. But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words. Once you move beyond the “simple” grammar, things get complex fast.

schoen5• 7 years ago

I've heard the claim that Charles Bliss, the eccentric inventor of the Blissymbolics writing system, claimed to have learned to read Chinese semantically, but not speak it, during his time living in China. But it's possible that either the degree to which Bliss claimed to be able to read Chinese, or the degree to which he really could read it, has been exaggerated.

I imagine that someone could choose to make deliberate progress on this skill, even though it's not at all a common approach to teaching or learning Chinese. I can report that I know that San Francisco is called 旧金山, and that I know the meaning of each of the three characters as well as their meaning together, but I don't know the sound of any of them. If I heard someone refer to San Francisco in spoken Chinese, I would have no idea what was being referred to, but if I saw it written, I would!

I've also seen Chinese speakers who don't know any Japanese understand the basic meaning of signs in Japanese, and vice versa, because often individual hanzi and kanji continue to share their most basic or common meanings (though by no means always). I realize this is also a far cry from being able to read a newspaper fluently, but I find it very suggestive, since most likely the speakers in question wouldn't be able to read these signs aloud!

Edit: but in support of your intuition about this, Wiktionary, for example, lists 256 Chinese words that use (for example) 市, a huge number of which probably don't have a transparent meaning to a non-Chinese speaker who knows all the individual characters in a given word. And it's a similar situation with other characters, so at least it would require a lot of deliberate study to understand complex texts.

thaumasiotes11• 7 years ago

San Francisco is called 旧金山

Interestingly, this is only true among Chinese people. In its own official documents (which it has to issue in Chinese), San Francisco uses an entirely different name to refer to itself.

I've always been a little bemused by that choice.

_emacsomancer_14• 7 years ago

I'd also point out that English (and other European languages) also use logograms. If you look down at your computer keyboard, there are a bunch right above the qwerty row (and I don't mean the ones you need to hold SHIFT for).

(Additionally, modern English spelling is complicated in ways that (to use the author's other comparison) the Devanagari syllabary used by Hindi (Nepali, Marathi etc.) is not, and is only 'phonetic' in very complicated ways (e.g. often representing Middle English phonology) to the point that English orthography is not entirely dissimilar to Chinese orthography.)

thaumasiotes11• 7 years ago

But Mandarin introduces new grammatical requirements that English and most other languages don’t even have constructs for, like change of state (which serves as the past tense in many situations) or counting words.

This is overstated. Both of those concepts are present at a robust level in English. As such, English obviously does have constructs for them.

Measure words are the really obvious one. Any treatment of English grammar will mention the distinction between "count" nouns, which have plural forms, and "mass" nouns, which don't. Mass nouns require measure words in exactly the same manner that Chinese nouns do. They are common; some mass nouns that are almost always used to refer to discrete items, but which nevertheless require their appropriate measure words, are "pants" (you can have a pair of pants, but not a pants), scissors (ditto), and bread (which has its own specialized measure word, "loaf").

Change of state is often not marked syntactically in English, though it can be. But it is very commonly marked lexically -- see the distinction between "being married" and "getting married", or "being on fire" and "catching fire".

I think lexical marking of grammatical concepts is an under-studied phenomenon. There is a traditional division of verbs in linguistics into those that express "states", "activities", "accomplishments", and "achievements". You can read about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect (and just look at what they named the concept!).

It's called "lexical aspect" because the different categories are expressed, in English, by choosing different words. But they don't have to be; the difference between an activity and an accomplishment is expressed in Mandarin Chinese with a syntactic marker. Where English says "look" and "see", Mandarin has 看 and 看到. Where English has "listen" and "hear", Mandarin has 听 and 听到. Where English has "search" and "find", Mandarin has 找 and 找到. It's only a lexical distinction if you assume that English is more Platonically correct than Chinese is.

Similarly, Indo-European languages generally have a syntactic distinction between factual conditionals ("if I'm the king, why do I have to wait?") and counterfactual conditionals ("if I were the king, I wouldn't have to wait!"). (Fun side note: for hopefully obvious reasons, where this distinction exists for sentences set in the future, they're called "future more vivid" and "future less vivid" as opposed to "future factual" and "future counterfactual". We use a different word even though the grammatical distinction is identical.) English makes this distinction syntactically, as you'd expect. But it also makes it lexically -- "hope" and "wish" are the more-vivid and less-vivid equivalents of each other.

chao-3• 7 years ago

don't have constructs for... counting words

Having learned both Mandarin and Japanese, I go back and forth on this. While yes counters are more front-and-center in these languages, they are not completely absent in English. We do not explicitly call out (or teach) counters as a part of speech, yet while no one says "two dynamites", everyone will say "two sticks of dynamite". I see 'stick' effectively functioning as a counter there. And while venery terms are not counters, and many of them are unused in modern English, those that do persist occupy a niche that you would notice the absence of, while being decidedly absent in other languages (or in Japanese, I can think off-hand of mure as a catchall for a collective of animals, and it is less specific than English venery terms).

Overall I agree with your assessment of "interesting but a lot of the things are wrong". For instance the statements:

And some people have used less used English letters to denote specific chinese pronunciations: Eg. in Xi Jinping, "X" is pronounced as "sh", and in Qing, "Q" is pronounced as "ch".

I was always taught that English letter choices in pinyin were not just because "some people had used" them, but as a deliberate choice by Chiense to teach each other proper putonghua, especially speakers of other dialects. And additionally, to accomplish this it borrowed from a Russian perspective on Anglicized sounds, with Russia being both a geographic and political neighbor. I don't know any Russian, but it was taught to me that the "zh-", "q-" and "x-" in pinyin were Russian in origin, albeit in a filtered, haphazard way.

powerapple2• 7 years ago

'X' in Xi is not 'sh', and 'Q' in Qing is not 'ch'. Those sounds do not exist in English, hence English speaker cannot hear or pronounce it correctly. Similarly, it is very hard to Chinese speaker to distinguish some English phonemes.

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

Those aren't counters, they're measure words[0]. E.g. I saw two rolls of film or two films. sticks of dynamite, blades of grass, grains of sand. These function differently than counters in other languages.

Korean (and Chinese, I'm assuming) has actual counters/classifiers [1], that is, separate grammatical concepts. 저는 차 두 대를 봤어요 - Here, (대) is the counter for cars (차/차동차). I saw two [counter] cars. This concept doesn't exist in English, except for measure words which serve a different purpose.

For Korean there are around 30-35 or so [2] used in common speech I believe, with 개 being a general catch all for objects. Other examples include: One has to use 명 or 분 for people, and 달 or 개월 for months (duration).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measure_word

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)

[2] http://www.koreanwikiproject.com/wiki/Counting_items

namelosw2• 7 years ago

Yes, there are words in Chinese. A lot of them make sense while others do not.

Chinese use compound words a lot. For example, there is "午餐", which means "Lunch", where "午" means "noon" and "餐" means "meal". In this way, it is more like German "Mittagessen" where "Mittag" is "noon" and "Essen" is "eating".

There are also a lot of words do not make sense like "天真", which means "naive", while "天" means "sky" and "真" means "real(ly)". This does not make sense at all.

Still, most of the words are just between these two categories. For example "自然" means "nature", and "自" means "itself" and "然" means "happened". So "nature" means "it just happened itself". This is kind of make sense somehow but it is actually pretty blurred for most people.

powerapple2• 7 years ago

天真 = innocent, why 'sky' or better 'heaven'? 'Heavenly real'. It makes sense, but translation doesn't work. Concept is hard to be translated into another language.

prairiedogg• 7 years ago

Not a native Chinese speaker, but I am a proficient speaker of Chinese as a second language. No dog in this fight except to mention that "天真" does have a "sum of its parts" aspect for me. I sometimes think of it in relation to the Chinese word for "congenital" (天生, tiānshēng). In the case of congenital, the 天 (tiān) part is better translated as "heaven", "God", "fate" or "nature", and for me, carries aspects of all of those English words. 生 (shēng) in this context means "born" as in "was born with". Think "congenital defect", a defect that you had before birth, which you could only blame God, or nature for.

So 天真 (tiānzhēn), along the same lines, roughly translated, means "then sense of reality that you have when you are born or which you are gifted by nature", unsophisticated and naive. Don't know if that makes sense, but I've always thought about these two words together and felt like I understood them better through context.

yaowenjiaozi• 7 years ago

While 'naive' translates to 天真, 天真 doesn't just mean naive. Baidu Baike [1] lists three meanings. Going by the cited references, <<庄子·渔父>> is the oldest and my guess is "真者，故受於天也，自然不可易也。故圣人法天贵真，不拘於俗" is the etymology of 天真.

[1] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%A4%A9%E7%9C%9F/1419

gmb2k1• 7 years ago

Essen does not mean "eating" in this context.

You mixed up the word "Essen" (meal, food) with the word "Essen" (noun of the word "essen" [to eat]), which means eating.

So translated word for word, "Mittagessen" also means "noon meal".

Edit: You could go one step further and make it "mid day meal".

girzel2• 7 years ago

Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix.

义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning.

But all in all, pretty good!

ar7hur• 7 years ago

[Shameless plug] My own take on the birth, evolution and Mao's simplification of Chinese writing: https://al3x.svbtle.com/on-chinese-writing-1

chillacy• 7 years ago

In some cases, characters are composed of two parts: a radical element and a pronunciation hint

Actually something like 80% of characters are phonetic-semantic. More info: https://www.hackingchinese.com/phonetic-components-part-1-th...

forkLding• 7 years ago

Of note is that the current mainland govt wasn't the one to start the simplification of Chinese characters, it start with the original Republic of China but was abandoned by Taiwan because it was associated with the Leftist side of the Republic of China as left-leaning and liberal Chinese scholars saw traditional Chinese as inhibiting Chinese education for the masses and promoted simplification.

Singapore and Malaysian Chinese also uses Simplified Chinese.

bayesian_horse4• 7 years ago

One recommendation: When learning Characters, write them out physically (or in an app)

The characters are designed to be written with a brush dipped in ink. The shape, order and direction are arranged such that a right handed person has minimal chances of smudging prior strokes.

This kind of muscle memory seems to be very beneficial even to recognizing the characters (much like autoencoders or transfer learning in AI).

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

Stroke order is also important when writing fast or sloppy. Depending on the stroke order the slants/angles of the strokes will be different, obviously, which lets you deduce a character if someone has written it sloppily (but with the right order). I've had to do this many a time when deciphering quickly-written native korean handwriting.

Beginner learners often write ㅁ wrong, making it almost look like a ㅇ.

adrianN2• 7 years ago

In my experience, unless you want to be able to write characters without machine assistance, it's faster to just learn to recognize them without spending time on writing them out. Being able to recognize the rough stroke order is a little helpful, but not necessary unless you want to look up characters by stroke count. But since tools for character lookup are fairly sophisticated today, you don't really need paper dictionaries anymore. The only benefit I can see is in the ability to read handwritten characters. The "cursive" script is basically impossible to read unless you know the stroke order really well.

bayesian_horse4• 7 years ago

Are you able to read 2000 characters fluently?

I'd be interested because so far I mostly hear from people trying this approach, but not actually succeeding.

I would agree that the value of writing characters diminishes quickly after the first few hundred.

intertextuality6• 7 years ago

Mandarin does have words. Sometimes you can deduce a meaning of a compound word from the literal meanings of the characters it's made up of, but sometimes you cannot.

It also doesn't aid you in pronouncing it because it's not obvious which tone it is, unless you already know it.

franciscop• 7 years ago

As someone who learned English from Spanish, this strikes me as totally off:

In English, if you can speak something, you can write it too

Compared to Spanish, Italian or Japanese hiragana/katakana, this is not true at all in English. It is _more true_ than in Chinese/Japanese (Kanji), but still not much. It is in fact one of the things that English Learners struggle with the most!

chagel• 7 years ago

Happy Chinese New Year!

I cannot stop helping myself to share a Chinese quiz to you for celebrating our new year - please use 20 different Chinese words to express “I” or “me”.

The Way of Chinese Language

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