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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday December 17 2015, @12:09AM   Printer-friendly
from the soylentils-are-characters-too dept.

It may be obvious to some, less to others, but the Chinese writing system is not based on an alphabet.
An alphabet consists of a small number of letters. Letters represent sounds.
They spell out how words should be pronounced. Letters don't have any meaning by themselves.

A Chinese character on the other hand is a more complex unit. It contains an indication of pronunciation as well as an indication of meaning. There are more than 100,000 different Chinese characters. It is actually impossible to count them precisely! There are infinite variants. The number of useful characters, for a literate person however, is “only” between 3,000 and 6,000. That is still a huge number compared to the 26 letters of our alphabet. But you can't compare apples and oranges!

For those who are curious, who are language geeks, or who are updating their skill set to learn how to say, "Yes, boss," in Mandarin...it's a bit too cursory on the subject of radicals, which are the heart of Chinese characters and how you look stuff up in the dictionary, but a reasonable introduction into the writing system.


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  • (Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:53AM

    by aristarchus (2645) on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:53AM (#277552) Journal

    Well, yes, of course. Part of what I was suggesting is that the preference for phonetic writing systems may be coming to an end. Of course, for us, this means replacement by machine readable language, and only machine readable. The advantage in phonetic systems is two-fold, one side is that any member who has acquired language in the normal way can become literate based on the spoken language. Becoming literate in ideographic systems can take a bit more time and investment. Of course, that may itself be an advantage! Second, and the reason for the Phoenicians developing a phonetic writing system in the first place, is something like the IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet, used by linguists to transcribe any spoken speech in any language, and so very useful for a foreigner trying to find a bathroom. Or a trader trying to read "The Art of the Deal".

    The "Greek to me" comment hit home, however, because at one point in the ancient world, all educated people could speak, read and write in Greek. It was, to use the Ugly Roman phrase, a Lingua Franca. But at some point Europe lost contact, what with Barbarian incursions and the Republicans in the Roman Senate voting for tax relief over infrastructure, with the rest of the world. And my language became lost. Except in Ireland, but that is another story. We may be in a similar situation as far as human readable language is concerned. But that sounds like sci-fiction. On the other hand, consider how many Chinese cannot now read classical texts, because of the simplification of the characters. And consider how many young westerners can no longer read the letters of their near ancestors, since they are no longer taught to write, or read! cursive!

    It always struck me, about computer languages: they call it "code", what are they hiding?

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  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:29PM

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:29PM (#277744) Journal

    On the other hand, consider how many Chinese cannot now read classical texts, because of the simplification of the characters.

    The Chinese Communist Party has a lot to answer for. A lot. But character simplification has worked to boost literacy levels. Can the average Chinese peasant read the original court documents in the Tang Dynasty? No, but they can read the newspaper, and that's a lot more than the peasants during the Tang Dynasty could have said. Likewise opium addiction and foot-binding have been stamped out by the CCP. Those are both very good things. The first was of course encouraged by the British to suck all the silver out of China, the second was an awful misogynist practice that had become "tradition." I once saw an elderly, foot-bound woman trying to climb the path on Taishan, the holiest mountain in Daoism, and it broke my heart.

    Jiantizi (simplified characters) give hundreds of millions of Chinese access to knowledge that would have remained shut off to them. It's a good thing.

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 17 2015, @04:35PM (#277746)

    It always struck me, about computer languages: they call it "code", what are they hiding?

    As a programmer, the answer is simple: Bugs. They're hiding the bugs.