Characters vs Alphabets

[Anonymous No.21577984]

Bat soup Characters vs Alphabets (European, Arabic, Hebrew, Indian)
Which one is the superior way of writing language?

[Anonymous No.21577993]

>>21577984
>Has to keep being simplifying
>Each character has to be memorized even natives can't remember them all
>Has to type in Roman letters anyway because you can't have every character on a keyboard
I wonder.

[Anonymous No.21578012]

Logographs are just more aesthetically pleasing, undeniably

[Anonymous No.21578017]

>>21578012
no they're not

[Anonymous No.21578028]

>>21577984
alphabets are better for mass literacy but pictograms are better conceptual embodiments, i think there’s also been a few studies that suggest Mandarin is actually capable of communicating slightly more information per second than other languages, which could give it a strategic advantage in some situations.

[Anonymous No.21578035]

>>21577984
I can speak and read Mandarin and everyone I talk to about this agrees that Chinese characters are dumb. If you cant pronounce an unfamiliar word by looking at it then your language is dumb. The characters might look cool but I'd rather have an alphabet.

[Anonymous No.21578049]

Chinese is god tier for poetry and artistic expression in general because you can express an entire volume's worth of bullshit in like 3 characters but modern chinks are basically just anglos with slant eyes at this point so the pearls are uselessly cast before them. High context cultures in general are better for art, low context cultures are better for autistic bullshit like STEM and finance so the latter has dominated the world while the former languishes.

[Anonymous No.21578084]

>>21578049
Have you read Chinese poetry?

[Anonymous No.21578087]

>>21578028
Mandarin writing can have an economic density advantage in text space because each character has more information, but other languages beat it in information rate because of # of syllables.

[Anonymous No.21578089]

>>21578035
if you were fluent you’d know that many similar looking characters sound rather similar too, like 高 and 敲,or 球 and 求, 吗, 妈 and 马, 情 and 精 etc, honestly it’s rather common.

[Anonymous No.21578098]

>>21578049
agree with this anon when it comes to chinese and poetry, as well as linguistic puzzles, cryptography, word play, double entendre etc, it’s like.. unparalleled.

[Anonymous No.21578107]

>>21578089
Unless you are American or ignorant, those first three character don't sound similar at all. The ma's are a better example but yes tones are another reason the language is annoying. I like a challenge so I don't mind it but if someone was forced to learn it for their job or something I wouldn't be surprised if they were frustrated.

[Anonymous No.21578115]

They are dumb. Japanese writing system is garbage clusterfuck.
It's unfortunate that kanji kundokutai became de facto standard during the early meiji and then eventually a variant of it was used as a foundation for standardization efforts, when in fact many prominent Japanese elites actually wanted to do it away with chinese characters and adopt a phonetic alphabet.

[Anonymous No.21578136]

>>21578049
Sanskrit and other Indian languages did it fine without chinky characters and they wrote some really insane level gimmicky poetry that you can find in Chinese too
http://cup.columbia.edu/book/extreme-poetry/9780231151603
Not to mention how Chinese is morphologically basic af with convoluted world order and no declensions or conjugations.

[Anonymous No.21578139]

>>21577984
FUN FACT: virtually all people who claim Chinese characters to be so clearly inferior are not fluent readers of even a single language that uses Chinese characters.

Reading Kanji is faster than reading an alphabet. You will inevitably read far more text in your life than you write, thus it is superior in this regard.

Moreover, conveying meaning is more important than conveying sound. I cannot speak any Chinese at all, but just knowing the roughly 2,500 characters that I learned by studying Japanese, I have been able to follow the instructions in technical manuals for various computer programs.

[Anonymous No.21578153]

>>21578139
>Reading Kanji is faster than reading an alphabet
Fake and gay. When you read English, you don't parse letter by letter but rather take in entire words or sometimes even phrases as symbols, one at a time.

[Anonymous No.21578161]

>>21578107
gao and qiao are very similar in phonetic sound, as are qing and jing, the other characters all have the same pinyin only differing in tone, the point was that if you had never encountered 敲 but you knew 高 you could kind of intuit that 敲 is pronounced a little like 高,same story with 情 and 精,it’s not as if they’re as different in pronunciation as 湖 and 为, this was to demonstrate that your point about being unable to pronounce unfamiliar characters is false and unfounded, you can sometimes intuit their phonetic sound.

[Anonymous No.21578170]

>>21578161
This is something newbies usually parrot. Just because a character shares a radical with another character does not mean they sound alike. Yes there are situations where this is true but it is hardly true in every circumstances. Chinese also suffers from a lot of others problems anyways, such as locals literally forgetting how to write their own characters over time, partial texts being incomprehensible, difficultly expressing highly technical or detailed instructions etc. There's a reason all the universities in Taiwan teach the subjects in english.

[Anonymous No.21578174]

>>21578153
Kanji are more visually distinct and more dense than English words, hence the speed bonus.

It's often very difficult to translate the interfaces of Japanese computer programs and video games into English because English writing needs so much more space.

[Anonymous No.21578175]

>>21578087
fascinating, my first hand experience is that also, when i’m using mandarin to communicate in speech, i can often communicate much, much faster, if you switch from listening to mandarin to then listening to an english speaker the difference in speed is really jarring, it’s almost like english speakers have had an aneurism or something kek, they’re diction is extremely slow, the counter to this is that when using Mandarin to communicate it becomes extremely difficult to communicate about deeply technical matters that require high levels of conceptual granularity, with english it’s much much easier.

[Anonymous No.21578181]

>>21578170
i’ll just point out that i’m also this anon so you can read about my experiences>>21578175

i agree that chinese suffers from difficulty in articulating deeply technical matters, but i dont agree with anything else you’ve said, you’re obviously some chauvinist with an agenda.

[Anonymous No.21578183]

>>21578174
>Kanji are more visually distinct and more dense than English words
This shit literally doesn't matter if you're a fluent English reader. In the end you parse both in a similar fashion as I've already mentioned(that is if you're an experienced English reader). Whatever benefit you're detecting is so insignificant and gets buried under other factors.

[Anonymous No.21578196]

>>21578175
>they’re diction is extremely slow
Region based. Where I'm from we speak pretty fast paced with quirky ass phrases.

[Anonymous No.21578200]

>>21578196
nah it’s not, my mother tongue is english and i’ve lived all over the west kek

[Anonymous No.21578207]

>>21578183
>I can't even read Chinese characters but I have very strong opinions on them and you need to hear them!
yeah, sure kid

I'm going back to reading my Mishima novel, bye

[Anonymous No.21578210]

>>21578200
Maybe you only hang out with down syndrome retards

[Anonymous No.21578221]

>>21578210
>Maybe you only hang out with down syndrome retards

[Anonymous No.21578228]

>>21578207
I can read Japanese bruh
I've read mishima's 春の雪 and it was meh outside of pretty prose
In fact I can read 5 languages
This nonsense of Japanese or chinkanese being superior to English is bs rooted in weeb fanaticism.

[Anonymous No.21578249]

>>21578228
>"bruh"
>brags about being able to read
>proceeds to shrug off the book to show himself as cool and detached
It's almost like you are a one dimensional character written by a teenager

[Anonymous No.21578264]

>>21578249
I don't get why you're seething. I just cleared up a misunderstanding and it was you who was like "haha I can read mishima loser". You seem to have inferiority complex issues.

[Anonymous No.21578275]

>>21578175
English has a plethora of similes which can lead to extreme delays due to having to select from the dozens of words one has available for the one most appropriate to communicating whatever it is one wishes to express.
Languages with restricted vocabularies haven't this problem.

[Anonymous No.21578285]

>>21578275
Yeah, Japanese informal communication is extremely simple and dumbed down where they just repeat the same stock phrases reserved for a given situation.
English is more vibrant and colorful in this regard.

[Anonymous No.21578292]

>>21578275
yes, this exactly accords with my experience and i think you’re spot on in your assessment.

[Anonymous No.21578295]

>>21578285
Japanese and Mandarin are pathetic.

[Anonymous No.21578311]

>>21578295
does anybody else find it extremely weird that there’s this one Asian American on /lit/ that’s like the embodiment of chauvinism.

[Anonymous No.21578357]

>>21577984
>>21578017
>no they're not
Lol.

>>21578035
>If you cant pronounce an unfamiliar word by looking at it then your language is dumb.
Logosyllabic scripts like the maya script or japanese are the best of both worlds.

[Anonymous No.21578383]

>>21578295
I would argue from experience that Japanese has a wider spread of words in "common use" than English does. It's incredible to me that I still come across new words pretty frequently, despite having read over 200 Japanese light novels, 15 VNs, and consumed countless other non-written works.
If English has, say, 10000 words that are the "most often used" then I'd say Japanese probably has 15000 that are used as frequently as the equivalent 10000 in English.

[Anonymous No.21578459]

>>21577984
>Which one is the superior way of writing language?
Alphabets by far.

[Anonymous No.21578490]

>>21577984
Logographs are far superior because you can read their meaning if you don't know the language. That's what allows chinese people to be so connected to shit that was written 2500 years ago in what is basically an entirely different language

[Anonymous No.21578497]

>>21578490
>That's what allows chinese people to be so connected to shit that was written 2500 years ago in what is basically an entirely different language
Retard, they in fact can't read that shit. Meanings of pictures change too.

[Anonymous No.21578884]

>>21578311
no. east asians are just like that.

[Anonymous No.21578927]

I wonder if there's a way to get the best of both worlds, with a script that at once conveys meaning which anyone who knows it could understand, no matter their actual spoken language, while also conveying the sounds spoken.
So say I'm an English speaker, and I write in this script, and a German speaker reads it. He is able to get both the meaning of what I said out of the text, as well as the phonetics, although he wouldn't personally connect the phonetics to the meaning.

[Anonymous No.21578989]

>>21578927
Chaos magick sigils.

[Anonymous No.21579057]

>>21578927
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_character
you could create a logographic script from scratch, teach it to people (impossible), and use ruby characters to specify pronunciations
though since each language has a word order independent of that of others, there's only so far you could get with that without splintering

[Anonymous No.21579144]

>>21578087
This picture is bullshit. English is a fucking analytic language where the word ‘literally’ has no meaning anymore and native speakers can’t decide on whether the word ‘women’ implies having a penis or not.
English is not information dense because the language brings no information at all and no sourceless picture will ever change that.

[Anonymous No.21579160]

>>21578228
It is superior to English as is any language, your argument proves the other anon’s point by simply pointing you don’t read word by word, likewise you don’t read Japanese character by character but take the meaning of the whole phrase by once, not of a single word, of course you don’t realise that as you’re an anglx tranny.
Get replaced by Pakis and Spics, angloid subhuman, destroyer of culture and dog of the Jews

[Anonymous No.21579172]

>>21578927
not possible, the green language, or otherwise a language that’s interpretive dimension is self evident, has been chased after since society began, it’s just not possible, it sure would solve a lot of problems though.

[Anonymous No.21579259]

>>21579144
>>21579160
mad

[Anonymous No.21579269]

>>21577984
This is an aside, but it's interesting how slow English is. My accent is notoriously slow in speech, so it was difficult to hear Spanish or French.

[Anonymous No.21579336]

>>21579160
This. When you read, you naturally break sentences up into logical chunks as you move your eyes, exactly the same way as you do in any other language. Once you're not a complete dekinai, you view the Kanji/compounds as words rather than as just Kanji. That's a foreign concept to some, but the overall shape of the word sticks with you, just like when you see an English word and don't have to parse it letter by letter.

[Anonymous No.21579362]

>>21578087
I bet the only reason German is lower than English is because German needs the autistic zero logical article system and the useless changes of nouns and verbs without any meaningful logic.

The problem with Japanese is that (with exceptions) in Japanese you can't write a consonant without following it with a vocal. You can't say "k", only "ka ki ku ke ko".
That's why Japanese drops hard. Japanese has only very limited ways of combining "letters" together.

The reason is actually pretty simple. Japanese was build around talking "smoothly" without ever bothering about writing or discussing quantum physics.
English on the other hand was always autistically about all the regulatory semantical bullshit.
Where in Japan the language was only used for simple interactions and some minor poetry, the English language was built around finding a way to justify some bullshit ruling. Combine law autists and language, especially with the goal to justify the unjustifiable, and you have English.

[Anonymous No.21579364]

>>21578927
You take the IPA or an equivalent for the second component of precise phonetics. Then you devise a system of arranging letters of a word into a pictogram which is to be as uniform a process as possible across the related languages.

Now, the example would be "flower", which you can represent by making a stem with one letter and then petals with the rest. "ower" requires the usage of special phonetic characters. Anyway, you write "flor" in Spanish the same way: one letter is the stem, and three letters are petals.

The idea is to decide what shapes the letters must be in to form a rough pictogram with few letters. And then replace the alphabet with IPA or a similarly universal and unambiguous one.

[Anonymous No.21579373]

>>21579144
English isn't analytic. It's in-between.

[Anonymous No.21579388]

>>21579364
what about words that aren't nouns

[Anonymous No.21579390]

>>21579269
There's phonemes in English that Third World languages don't have, and are apparently difficult for them to pronounce such that they don't even attempt to do so, like "th"'s. Their languages get by on artificial expedience by doing away with essential sounds. It's rather sad.

[Anonymous No.21579392]

>>21579336
>younger sister inside cum dream saw stuff was
>my meat-rod hard erect was doing
japanese is fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.21579398]

>>21579336
Weebs believe these squiggles are the height of linguistic beauty,

[Anonymous No.21579404]

>>21579388
run = u as pelvis, r and n as legs

use your imagination

[Anonymous No.21579411]

>>21579404
looks like the word for legs to me
hmm
maybe use colors to distinguish between different word types

[Anonymous No.21579419]

>>21579362
Are you describing hebrew and jews but replacing them with english?

[Anonymous No.21579433]

>>21578170
>such as locals literally forgetting how to write their own characters over time
Victor Mair writes about character amnesia a lot
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473

[Anonymous No.21579454]

>>21579392
That's because you can't read it if you take everything at its literal value.
妹に中出しをする (cum inside my younger sister)
is describing 夢 (dream)
which is something that the MC 見たことがあった has "seen"/dreamed before (したことがある = a thing you've done before)
As for 勃起していた you have to understand that the ~ている verb form represents a continuous, state, and trying to force "is/was doing" onto it gives off the wrong sense. I'm more surprised you didn't complain about 硬い's adverbial usage here since that is often tough to draw parallels with in EN (see common phrases like 美味しく食べる、楽しく話している, etc).
I don't really know how to explain it since I'm not a linguist, but no one processes the thoughts written on the page in your oonga boonga meme post way.

[Anonymous No.21579512]

>>21578136
intredasting

>>21579144
look up the original meaning of "literally" and you might be surprised

:)

[Anonymous No.21579528]

>>21577984
Chinese characters aren't used exclusively for Mandarin so a phonetic system wouldn't work. Mandarin in particular relies heavily on diction.

I wonder to myself what an English logographic alphabet would look like but a painful image of emojis in between phrases came to mind. English takes advantage of its super inconsistent rules on certain homophones.

[Anonymous No.21579556]

>>21578161
By your logic, then 倩 should also be similarly pronounced. Yet, it's completely different. I get what you mean, but if you've started studying Chinese from a very young age, you would come to learn that intuition isn't very reliable. We have a saying called '有邊讀邊' which is precisely your logic here. Experience has taught us that it's very likely incorrect.

>>21579433
Yay it does happen a lot. Mostly because you have to write daily in order not to forget so easily. Most common characters can be written out of reflex, but the more complicated looking the character is, the more foggy looking it is in your mind. It's one reason why word-copying exercise is essential up to age 15, sometimes even older.

[Anonymous No.21579573]

>>21579411
legs are parallel while run is 90°angled

[Anonymous No.21579584]

>>21579362
Instictively wanted to argue this but no you may be onto something, there is evidence Japanese developed from some Proto-SEA language and the Japanese were living in primitive kingdom-tribes when the Chinese had writing and cities etc, this was the case for the Japanese until about 700 A.D. The 古今和歌集 is oral poems written down and there several by peasants and women etc. there was less class division which I would assume indicates a less structured/organized civilization. Lastly the 古事記 uses a lot of Korean place names within it so scholars have a hard time grappling with whether Japanese and Korean had a shared ancestral language or they just borrowed from each other a lot, as many modern Japs descended from Korean immigrants; there is even evidence Japanese was spoken in the south-west(?) of Korea. Not citing my sources I've read this in Japanese but I can probably find a few of the linguistic papers.

[Anonymous No.21579607]

>>21579584
Re-read the anon's post and thought I should add that the Japanese made hundreds upon hundreds of words when they got the Chinese script to make things quicker to describe so that plays into his theory, one they learn in school is 登山 coming from 山を登る but even better examples are the old royal titles, stuff like 右大臣 うだいじん being read as みぎのおおいもうちぎみ

[Anonymous No.21579640]

>>21578497
Chinks are aware of the changed meanings, they have to learn them in school but to imply it's impossible for them to ever understand Classical Chinese is retarded. The Japanese and Koreans and Vietnamese and Mongols (in diplomatic papers) all used Classical Chinese so they could understand each other, just the pronunciation varied depending on what you natively spoke. It was basically the Latin for the Asian world.

[Anonymous No.21579805]

>>21577984
>Alphabets (European, Arabic, Hebrew, Indian)
Arabic, Hebrew are abjads, Indian Devanagari etc are abugidas
>>21578357
This. Maya script was the most sovlful script humans ever developed, despite the language sounds like shit. Too sad it's all gone.

[Anonymous No.21580114]

>>21578087
>>21579362
The problem with Japanese that makes its information rate so low is that the average Japanese sentence will consist of one verb conjugated for every actual bit of information, and then everything else in the sentence is a useless formality or marker, and every other word that might actually provide information is also dropped from the sentence and must be inferred from context. If you want to refuse to get food with someone because you just ate your statement would literally translate to something like "probably not because eat[perfect indicative] think[present indicative]". And you better say you only think you've already eaten because stating the fact that you already ate as fact would be incredibly rude.
It's a retarded language.

[Anonymous No.21580124]

>>21580114
Why is it rude to say you had your meal? What kind of superstition is this

[Anonymous No.21580153]

>>21580114
>every other word that might actually provide information is also dropped from the sentence and must be inferred from context
Only absolute retards think this actually lowers information density. If your language works in a way where everything can be inferred from context, then not everything needs to be said. In effect, you've got an extremely information packed sentence said in much fewer words than most other languages can. The problem with people who try to compare highly context-based languages to languages like English is that they fail to realize that even if something isn't communicated verbally, the information can still be present.
>>21580124
He watched one pre-beginner meme video on Youtube about how Japanese is so weird and how 尊敬語 is how Japanese people speak 100% of the time, so he thinks he's equipped with the knowledge to discuss the language.

[Anonymous No.21580164]

>>21580124
Stating anything at all bluntly is considered rude in Japanese, you need to couch any direct statement in like 3 or 4 of the Japanese equivalents of 'um, ah, well ya know, I think' for every word that actually means something

[Anonymous No.21580177]

>>21580153
>The problem with people who try to compare highly context-based languages to languages like English is that they fail to realize that even if something isn't communicated verbally, the information can still be present.

Except that unlike say, an Indo-European language that still has the Indo-European case system, Japanese doesn't encode the dropped information at all. Whether a verb is first, second or third person is one of the only things the Japanese verb DOESN'T conjugate for. If a Japanese sentence is presented out of context you're basically just guessing at that info.

[Anonymous No.21580192]

>>21580177
>Whether a verb is first, second or third person is one of the only things the Japanese verb DOESN'T conjugate for.
Japanese doesn't conjugate at all. Nice job, anon. Now everyone knows you really don't know anything about Japanese.

[Anonymous No.21580206]

>>21580192
>noo all those affixes don't count because they're counted as separate words sometimes even though they're blatantly affixes and always come right after the verb in the same specific order
you're just trying to have an internet argument now.

[Anonymous No.21580215]

>>21577984
Alphabet

Character system has people forgetting words

[Anonymous No.21580274]

English vs Japanese vs Chinese

[Anonymous No.21580277]

>>21580274
that's Cantonese

[Anonymous No.21580287]

[Anonymous No.21580521]

>>21578175
This is the point that MUH CONTEXT arguers always miss: when the context is understood you don't actually need it. The gains in speed and density from not needing to specify person or tense or whatever when it's already understood outweigh the gains in clarity from making sure that the listener is aware that they are not in fact the subject of the sentence.

>it becomes extremely difficult to communicate about deeply technical matters that require high levels of conceptual granularity
The solution to this btw is to use different words, akin to how English has "sleep" vs "doze" vs "nap" vs "snooze" etc. Yes, this is why Confucius was always telling people to keep studying, because you do actually need an enormous vocabulary to make this work. I'm not a Chink, so whether the gains of this system outweigh the clear drawbacks aren't an argument that I have any say in.

>>21578927
>no matter their actual spoken language
How tightly you adhere to this is the question. English already describes what you're suggesting (there's like ten different ways to pronounce "water"), but they're all written the same. Another more extreme example is French, where twenty is "vingti" and pronounced "vo". An even more extreme example is Tibetan, where the literary language is based off of like the Tibetan of the 14th century.

All languages, if left along on a long enough time scale and not forced to do spelling reform, become logographies. Change is inevitable.

>>21578497
Oh no, you'll have to consult dictionaries which is literally what Confucius and friends were doing to write and is literally how Chinks write to this day! Who could have foreseen this!?

[Anonymous No.21581165]

>>21577984
Both have their pros and cons. The main strong point of Chinese characters is that the characters for the same/cognate words are recognizable across time and space, and they disambiguate homophones. But etymological spelling in an alphabet can pull off something similar with far less memorization just to learn to read. So I'd say overall alphabets are better.

[Anonymous No.21581174]

>>21577993
There do exist shape-based input methods, you know, like Cangjie or Wubi.
>>21578012
Chinese characters are undeniably very pretty, though I think there are some very pretty alphabets too, like Mongolian, Tibetan, Siddham, or Nastaliq-style Arabic.

[Anonymous No.21581180]

>>21578028
>alphabets are better for mass literacy but pictograms are better conceptual embodiments
What do you mean by 'conceptual embodiments'?
>i think there’s also been a few studies that suggest Mandarin is actually capable of communicating slightly more information per second than other languages, which could give it a strategic advantage in some situations.
If that's true, it has nothing to do with the writing system, since it's a fact about the spoken language. Mandarin would still be Mandarin if you wrote it in an alphabet; in fact, there's a dialect/close relative of Mandarin that is.
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html

[Anonymous No.21581187]

>>21578035
>If you cant pronounce an unfamiliar word by looking at it then your language is dumb.
Yes, English is quite dumb. (I realize most alphabetic languages are much better than English in that regard.)

[Anonymous No.21581196]

>>21578049
This was more the case for ancient Chinese, because a lot of characters that are now homophones were pronounced differently then, so an ancient poem might be ambiguous if read in modern pronunciation. To take an extreme example, Mandarin "yi4" could correspond to 20-odd different syllables in Tang-era Chinese.

[Anonymous No.21581210]

>>21578089
Those only represent the approximate pronunciation. If the phonetic component is 青 you know the pronunciation is probably one of qīng, qíng, qǐng, qìng, jīng, or jìng (or possibly zhēng or qiāng or liàng or qiàn or chēng or chèng on rare occasions) but you still have to remember which it is. This is less of a problem for a native speaker who already knows the spoken words, but it makes things difficult for learners.

[Anonymous No.21581217]

>>21578136
>Not to mention how Chinese is morphologically basic af with convoluted world order and no declensions or conjugations.
That's very nearly true of English (Old Chinese did have a little bit of inflection, roughly on the level of modern English.)

[Anonymous No.21581227]

why can't people appreciate the beauty in different written systems

[Anonymous No.21581242]

>>21578357
𒇻 𒋗𒌌𒈬𒌝
exactly, logosylabic scripts are the best, akkadianon here. I wish we could mix our script with 1k logograms, it would be way faster to communicate.
Just look at the logograms we use in Latin script - numerals. They help a lot when travelling.

[Anonymous No.21581245]

>>21578139
>FUN FACT: virtually all people who claim Chinese characters to be so clearly inferior are not fluent readers of even a single language that uses Chinese characters.
I know kanji at an N1 level or higher, at least by self-assessment. I still think kanji is a stupid writing system.
>Reading Kanji is faster than reading an alphabet.
Source for this claim? And no, Japanese people reading all-kana text slower is not evidence; they're used to reading text with kana, any reading in a writing system you're not used to will be slower regardless of objective merits. If someone grows up reading Serbian only in Latin letters they will read it slower in Cyrillic letters, and vice versa; this doesn't prove that Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are both inherently inferior to each other in reading speed.
>Moreover, conveying meaning is more important than conveying sound. I cannot speak any Chinese at all, but just knowing the roughly 2,500 characters that I learned by studying Japanese, I have been able to follow the instructions in technical manuals for various computer programs.
Granted that this is a positive point, though it could just as well be accomplished by using a phonetic spelling of Middle Chinese and letting people apply the sound changes of their own variety. This is in effect what Tibetan does: it's written in an alphabet spelling out Classical Tibetan, and everyone applies the sound changes of their own spoken variety to read it out loud. For that matter, English does it on a lesser scale.

[Anonymous No.21581251]

>>21578170
>difficultly expressing highly technical or detailed instructions
Source for this? Writing systems are one thing, but linguists agree that spoken languages are basically equal.

[Anonymous No.21581255]

>>21578174
>Kanji are more visually distinct and more dense than English words, hence the speed bonus.
I think you can also read Latin letters at smaller sizes/resolutions because less visual detail, though, so it's about a wash.

[Anonymous No.21581273]

>>21578490
No, not really. To read Classical Chinese you still have to learn it as a separate language, even if knowing a related language helps. Classical Chinese has different words than Mandarin for "what", "this", "you", "he", "eat", "drink", "walk", "dog", "say", "foot", "head" and a bunch of other very basic words. (什麼, 這, 你, 他, 吃, 喝, 走, 狗, 說, 腳, 頭 vs. 何, 此, 汝, 伊, 食, 飲, 行, 犬, 曰, 足, 首.)

[Anonymous No.21581278]

>>21578927
You'd have to pretty much write the meaning and sound separately, since the relation between them is arbitrary; the same meaning will correspond to a completely different sequence of sounds in a different language. So at that point, why not just write the meaning and ignore the sounds altogether? You might look into something like Blissymbols.

[Anonymous No.21581286]

>>21579144
What happened to "literally" is just the same thing that happened to "really" and "very" ("very" is related to "veracity" and "verify", it originally meant "truly"). Words for "truly, actually" becoming intensifiers is a very common path of semantic development; the same thing has happened to Mandarin 真.

[Anonymous No.21581291]

>>21579362
>because German needs the autistic zero logical article system
Doesn't it serve to signpost case and gender when it often isn't directly marked on nouns?

[Anonymous No.21581294]

>>21579390
Interdental fricatives are pretty uncommon sounds, not many languages have them anywhere, including in Europe. Anyway, every language has different sounds, there's nothing particularly special about English in that regard.

[Anonymous No.21581296]

>>21579392
Oh my god, a language with different word order than English, how very primitive and laughable!

[Anonymous No.21581299]

>>21579528
>Chinese characters aren't used exclusively for Mandarin so a phonetic system wouldn't work.
Why not just... spell the language you're writing in? If you're writing in Mandarin, spell the words as they're pronounced in Mandarin; if you're writing in Cantonese or Shanghainese or Hokkien, spell the words as they're pronounced in those languages.
>Mandarin in particular relies heavily on diction.
What do you mean?
>I wonder to myself what an English logographic alphabet would look like but a painful image of emojis in between phrases came to mind.
You might find this interesting:
http://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

[Anonymous No.21581303]

>>21579805
It's not all gone, there are still living Maya languages, though the script isn't used much anymore. I hear some people are trying to revive it too though.
>>21579640
Sure, they can learn to understand it... if they learn the language. You can't understand it merely by knowing Mandarin, is the point.
>>21579805
Technically speaking, that is true, but in practice people speak casually of e.g. the Hebrew alphabet.

[Anonymous No.21581313]

>>21581273
>Great Grandpa was almost a Scholar-Bureacrat so he wrote his autobiography in classical Chinese.
>Spent the entirety of the first half of it dunking on his wife using an ancient language from 2500 BC.

God I wish I could not only find the manuscript, but also be able to read it.

[Anonymous No.21581320]

>>21580277
No, Cantonese would use 唔 instead of 不 and 啦 instead of 吧. I'm not sure what language this is. Very highfalutin Mandarin, maybe?

[Anonymous No.21581326]

>>21580287
This seems like an artificial example, because in actual speech 私 and 上 would probably be left out. テーブルに本を置く is only about as many syllables as the Chinese sentence.

[Anonymous No.21581331]

>>21580521
French and Tibetan are not logographies. You can't tell how to spell a word in them by hearing it, but you can tell how to pronounce it by seeing it pretty reliably; they're many-to-one.

[Anonymous No.21581334]

>>21581320
But I thought written Chinese had a specific word for drink that's used a lot more often, ie: 喝.

[Anonymous No.21581335]

>>21581313
Wish you luck in finding the manuscript. I could recommend you the resources I started learning Classical Chinese from if you like.

[Anonymous No.21581341]

>>21581334
Yes, but I think they may use 飲 sometimes if they're trying to be very fancy.

[Anonymous No.21581518]

>>21577984
for me, its manchu

[Anonymous No.21581747]

>>21581518
Not a bad choice, though personally I like the look of it as used for Mongolian a little more.

[Anonymous No.21581927]

Egyptian hieroglyphics are my favorite. I used to be obsessed with them as a kid.

[Anonymous No.21582889]

>>21579528
emojis are unfairly hated

[Anonymous No.21582903]

>not writing in cuneiform

[Anonymous No.21582993]

>>21579362
It's basically a measure of how monosyllabic a language is and how quick people talk.

[Anonymous No.21583265]

>>21580521
>Another more extreme example is French, where twenty is "vingti" and pronounced "vo".
kek are you from Europe in a parallel universe?

[Anonymous No.21583284]

>>21581331
>You can't tell how to spell a word in them by hearing it
>totally arbitrary strokes
So they're not a logography by technicality, but they're exactly the same as Hanzi.

>>21583265
Okay, sure, fine, it's pronounced "/vɛ̃/", but if I'd said that you wouldn't know what that means.

[Anonymous No.21583296]

ITT: unbridled retardation.

[Anonymous No.21583532]

>>21583296
still better than much of this board thoughever

[Anonymous No.21583546]

>>21578049
Chinese borders on being caveman speech

[Anonymous No.21583559]

>>21578115
It's kinda hard for japs to adopt a fully phonetic system due to the large amount of homophones they use

[Anonymous No.21583605]

>>21583546
filtered

[Anonymous No.21583657]

>>21580274
How many strokes do you need to write each?

[Anonymous No.21583705]

>>21583657
a complete aneurism

[Anonymous No.21583721]

>>21580274
>>21580277

drink in mandarin (that fits the chart) is actually 喝
飲 means beverage or drink-related.
canteen or waterbottle is 水瓶or 水壺.

and when thinking of mandarin, I dont think in roman alphabets, but rather 並ㄅㄆㄇㄈs, pinyin is an inferior system that doesnt accurately represent the pronounciation.

[Anonymous No.21583745]

>>21577984
Hangul is by far the best writing system

[Anonymous No.21583766]

>>21583721
and to add to that, in Taiwan back in the early 90s, a popular toast for drinking was 乎乾啦 pronounced ほぅだらー (ho'daa la) meaning 讓(它)乾啦 or Let It (the cup) Be Dry.

[Anonymous No.21583795]

>>21581341
https://news . tvbs . com . tw / life / 534642

I suppose, observe: tag on this article

nonsequitor, for a country that loves drinking, it sure has an overly draconian drug policy and most people get offended when you liken alcohol to other narcotics, and point out that drinking a lot is like being a pothead, or that they actually love drugs. Same goes with Japan. Culture is weird man

[Anonymous No.21583800]

>>21581313
I think the name for a scholar-bureaucrat is "a mandarin"

[Anonymous No.21583831]

>>21583721
is for
>>21577993
Zhuyin or bopomofos are more like cyrillic vs roman letters. Roman letters with english or latin/romantic pronounciations dont come close to how chinese sound, so using Zhuyin for phonetics is better than pinyin.

[Anonymous No.21583863]

>>21583546
Yes, you literally don't need most of the linguistic "features" present in the popular languages of the west. Verb tenses? Just specify when something happens if it's necessary. Plurality? If it's actually important you'll declare it explicitly. Most of the time you already do this in English, and the result is lots of extra fluff for no reason.

[Anonymous No.21584030]

>>21582903
This is the superior handwriting language for it's ability to last magnitues longer than ink on paper.

[Anonymous No.21584408]

>>21582993
Didn't that study use fairly unnatural overly-literal translations from English, which skewed the results?
>>21583284
No, French and Tibetan go one way (you can tell how to pronounce a word by its spelling but not how to spell a word by its pronunciation) whereas Hanzi goes neither way (you can't tell how to pronounce a character by its shape and you can't tell how to write a word by its pronunciation.) And then something like Finnish goes both ways- you can tell how to pronounce a word by seeing it written and you can tell how to spell a word by hearing it spoken.

[Anonymous No.21584412]

>>21583559
Which is of course why no one in Japan can hold a verbal conversation on anything beyond quotidian banalities, or listen to the radio or books on tape.

[Anonymous No.21584423]

>>21583721
>pinyin is an inferior system that doesnt accurately represent the pronounciation
How so? It represents all the phonemic contrasts of Mandarin; there's no minimal pair it fails to distinguish.
>>21583766
Ah, so that's word she was using at the end of that song. Though Wiktionary gives the 漢字 spelling for it as 予焦啦. Anyway the writing of Taiwanese in 漢字 isn't totally standardized.
>>21583795
I think 飲酒 is just an established compound word. Anyway, I don't think East Asia is unique in being oblivious about their historical intoxicant of choice's comparability to others.

[Anonymous No.21584425]

Polyglots are weird masochists.

[Anonymous No.21584443]

>>21583831
>Roman letters with english or latin/romantic pronounciations dont come close to how chinese sound
So? Every language that uses the Roman alphabet uses it differently anyway. Even within languages that use the Roman alphabet natively, the letter J (for example) varies from its sound in English, to a "ZH" sound like the S in "treasure" (in French) to a "Y" sound (in German and the Slavic languages), to a "KH" sound like in "Bach" or "loch" (in Spanish), to a "SH" sound (in some dialects of Basque). (I guess Latin J is comparable to Middle Chinese 日母 in its instability.)

[Anonymous No.21584506]

>>21584408
>you can tell how to pronounce a word by its spelling
No you can't. The orthography is totally opaque. There's zero way to tell that "vingt" is pronounced "/vɛ̃/" except by being told, exactly as in Mandarin.

>but you can know several centuries of literary quirks which let you guess the pronunciation!
So just like Mandarin.

The only difference is that Hanzi are a single block whereas French/Tibetan letters are several blocks. You can be obnoxious and break hanzi up into radicals and do the same if you really want, like writing 好 as 女子.

[Anonymous No.21584517]

>>21577993
>>21578035
Cringe and 105 IQ Asian reddit midwits. Let me explain something so anons have context. 90% of chinks grew up learning the alphabet systems. Pinyin or the Zhyuyin. These are both MASSIVE smoothbrain copes. Literal ESL tier instruction for what should be native learners (they don't care because their submissive bugs and think it'd actually important to learn) . Now get this. They rely on this crap for keyboard input. They're basically typing the words out how they are spoken and then software gives some predictive texts. That's why most chinks have word amnesia and why NOT ONE (1) good Chinese novel has been written. It's like writing a novel by punching out the predictive text on the phone. Also it makes them not think in characters but an alphabet so they're undoing the benefit of characters as the brain translates the characters to the spoken word instead of interpreting it as a unique entity and speedily processing it. Want know who among the Chinese is a literal subhuman insect NPC? Ask how they write. If it's the phonetic to character, they basically have no understanding of their own written language. The only Chinese speakers that have any right to comment are those that use cangjie, wubi or written character input. They're the only ones that actually process logographs correctly in their brain. Kek, one Anglo who didn't speak a lick of Chinese, Arthur David Waley, literally knew the logographic language better than 99.9% of the pinyin and tawainyin dependant fraud native speakers and that's saying something. Kill yourselves.

[Anonymous No.21584530]

>>21584506
>No you can't. The orthography is totally opaque. There's zero way to tell that "vingt" is pronounced "/vɛ̃/" except by being told, exactly as in Mandarin.
<ng> after a vowel regularly nasalizes it. <i> plus a nasal regularly corresponds to /ɛ̃/. Final <t> without anything following it is regularly silent. /vɛ̃/ is exactly how you'd expect <vingt> to be pronounced by the same rules that apply to every other French word.
>So just like Mandarin.
Not really, in Mandarin you have to know several hundred phonetic components and even then that only gives you the approximate pronunciation; you can guess that a character with 青 as its phonetic component will probably be pronounced as one of qīng, qíng, qǐng, qìng, jīng, or jìng (or occasionally zhēng, qiāng, liàng, qiàn, chēng or chèng) but you have to memorize which. In French or Tibetan you just have to memorize a few dozen letters and digraphs and a handful of rules and you can get the right pronunciation exactly like 98% of the time. They're not the same.

[Anonymous No.21584537]

>>21583745
Korea has commited a cultural suicide by abandoning characters

YWNBWC (you will never be a western country)

[Anonymous No.21584550]

>>21584517
>and why NOT ONE (1) good Chinese novel has been written
LOL. LMAO even.
>It's like writing a novel by punching out the predictive text on the phone.
...you do know that word processors didn't exist until recently right? Most Chinese literary works up until the late 20th century were composed by hand.
>Also it makes them not think in characters but an alphabet so they're undoing the benefit of characters as the brain translates the characters to the spoken word instead of interpreting it as a unique entity and speedily processing it.
I'm pretty sure people process their written language by converting it to spoken sounds in general. For example, people will often gloss write over incorrect homophones if they're reading quickly, as you probably did just now.
>Kek, one Anglo who didn't speak a lick of Chinese, Arthur David Waley, literally knew the logographic language better than 99.9% of the pinyin and tawainyin dependant fraud native speakers and that's saying something. Kill yourselves.
Being logographic is a fact about the writing system, not the language. If Chinese were written in an alphabet, it would still be Chinese. Dungan remains clearly a Chinese dialect.
>>21584537
Weren't the characters not really their culture to begin with? They were imported from China.

[Anonymous No.21584558]

>>21584550
>and why NOT ONE (1) good Chinese novel has been written
>LOL. LMAO even.
You know what I meant, midwit. Written since the advent of widespread keyboard use with phonetic input.

[Anonymous No.21584571]

>>21584558
I've heard The Three-Body Problem is pretty good. Plus, by that logic, none of the stuff Milton wrote by dictation after he went blind could be any good.

[Anonymous No.21584585]

>>21584571
Non sequitur as Milton wasn't transcribed, translated to English pictographs, and then translated back. Concerning the three body problem, it's an interesting because of its concept not because of how it was written.

[Anonymous No.21584602]

>>21584585
What's that have to do with it? Being logographic is a fact about the Chinese writing system, not the Chinese language. If you transcribed Lu Xun in an alphabet, he would still be just as good and engaging.

[Anonymous No.21584665]

>>21584530
So, exactly what I said. The orthography only gives any indication of the pronunciation if you know centuries of literary and orthographical quirks, and then you have to guess from one of several options.

Mandarin just requires you to know 1,000 of these, whereas French just has 200, not that it matters because in both cases everyone except scholars just memorizes arbitrary shapes detached from pronunciation anyways.

[Anonymous No.21584766]

>>21584665
Not really, if you see a French word you've never seen before you can infer its pronunciation with much more confidence than you can that of a Chinese character. For instance, I'll take ten words from this generator:
https://www.generatormix.com/random-french-words-generator
The words it outputs are:
>eu, seul, ferait, arrivée, peuple, bonnes, crétin, direct, casser, fuir
With a little reference to the Wikipedia page on French orthography (I'm not fluent in French) but no dictionary lookups I infer these are pronounced:
>œ sœl fəʁɛ aʁive pœpl bɔn kʁetɛ̃ diʁɛ kase fɥiʁ
When I look them up in Wiktionary I find the only things I got wrong are <eu> (which is /y/, but Wiktionary notes this is irregular), and <ct> not being silent in <direct> (okay, that one's unpredictable). This despite not even speaking French. I'd like to see you repeat the same exercise with Chinese characters you don't already know the pronunciation of with anything like a comparable hit rate.

[Anonymous No.21585097]

>>21584602
Filtered. The reason Mesopotamia regressed in all of all their cultural mathematical and philosophical developments is directly attributable to the adoption of the alphabet in place of cuneiform.

[Anonymous No.21585109]

What are some good light novels or stories to read for someone who's intermediate in Chinese? I've read some mangas in Chinese and I'm pretty fluent verbally but I'm still struggling with reading news articles or technical stuff.
I've learned Russian Hebrew and english from watching TV, but I can't seem to find good things to watch in Chinese so I'm trying another method

[Anonymous No.21585128]

>>21578035
>If you cant pronounce an unfamiliar word by looking at it

If you can read Mandarin you would know that you can determine the likely pronuncation based on the most prominent radical

[Anonymous No.21585164]

I'm studying for my hsk4 exam

[Anonymous No.21585446]

>>21585164
Reminder to never use alphabetic input for typing. Learn cangjie.

[Anonymous No.21585458]

>>21585109
Chinese is mostly webnovels as far as I can tell. Look up some wuxia novels like jin yongs too.

[Anonymous No.21585462]

>>21585109
i play computer games and switch the language to simplified chinese, so far i’ve completed mother 3 and undertale, i tried witcher 3 too but the game is intolerable levels of cringe.

[Anonymous No.21585554]

>>21581180
>What do you mean by 'conceptual embodiments'?
NTA but seems he's referring to character-based writing systems' ability to convey a denser quantity of nuanced information in less time/symbols/page space.

[Anonymous No.21585605]

>>21584423
>How so? It represents all the phonemic contrasts of Mandarin; there's no minimal pair it fails to distinguish.

check this out
https://youtu.be/n0G-cKUkt3c
there are notable ones like
ㄜ uhh (tongue touching top molars and nothing in front nothing on bottom)
ㄛ uhh (tongue touching bottom molars and nothing in front nothing on top)個
ㄩ iuu
ㄕandㄙ
ㄔandㄘ
of course you have more tongue rolling or pronounced "rr"s (back of tongue action) in the beijing accent and more pronounced tip-of-tongue action with southern accents like from Fujian or Taiwan where it makes the speaker sound more "hillbilly" but it's kind of cool like the Kansai Accent or the "Southern American English" or AAVE.

here's an example of a Taiwanese conversation hopping between English, Mandarin, and Hokkien that I grew up around: https://youtu.be/KUn6Zlo3LjU

ㄋㄩˇ or 女 was really frustrating for me when I was learning pinyin in HS as a TA for a weekend chinese school in the US. so is qi for ㄑㄧ or chi.

I spent time in both continents as a toddler and learned both syllabary or alphabet system with minimal accent and had more practical immersion and less context with manuals and the written word until later in life. I still have no idea how to properly read ipa pronounciation keys in my 30s since I never really had to.

[Anonymous No.21585634]

>>21584443
>日母
Im pronouncing this ㄖˋㄇㄨˇ or rr'i mu in my head, am I correct? like sun mother? what a weird name for "middle chinese"

but I guess youre right, Roman letters are an excellent middle of the road solution to most the world's languages. And English with a shit ton of loan word/phrases is gonna be the lingua franca of the future as it has been so far as envisioned by boomer parents pushing millenial chinese, taiwanese, japanese, mexican, etc kids (now adults) to learn English in their native countries so they might be a cosmopolitan literati/intelligencia global citizen. (the real globalists werent the jews, but the immigrants who migrated to the Anglosphere with a university education and or money muahahaha)

[Anonymous No.21585651]

>>21584571
>The Three-Body Problem
this? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Three-Body_Problem_(novel)

[Anonymous No.21585654]

>>21585109
read red-tower dreams or 紅樓夢 or another one of the classic

[Anonymous No.21585681]

>>21578028
>meaning per second
And how could that possibly be quantified? All words practically carry an infinite array of connotations and implicatures. Maybe in some formal ideal version of the languages, sure. But that's not what we are dealing with.

[Anonymous No.21585739]

>>21578087
All languages have comparable information rates because the ones with more syllables are spoken faster

[Anonymous No.21585756]

>>21585097
Do you have any basis for this claim?
>>21585128
Likely pronunciation, yes, but there's still a good deal of uncertainty.
>>21585554
I'd say less visually detailed characters like Roman letters can be read at a smaller size/resolution so it's about a wash in terms of total space.
>>21585605
Of course the letters in pinyin make a different sound in Chinese than they do in English. But that's true of every language that uses the Latin alphabet; you have to learn different sound values for Spanish or Hungarian too.
>>21585634
No, 母 refers to the 字母 or initials, Middle Chinese has 36 of them, each of which is identified by a specific character beginning with it. 日母 basically means 'the sound that 日 begins with'. In Mandarin that came out to the sound written in Pinyin as R, but in Cantonese it came out to a Y sound, in Hokkien it came out to something close to an English J sound (hence 'Japan'- the English word originates from the Hokkien reading, borrowed via Malay), in Sino-Japanese it became N in go'on and Z in kan'on, in Sino-Korean it was dropped altogether, and in I think Wu and Sino-Vietnamese it was preserved.
>>21585651
Right.

[Anonymous No.21585798]

>>21585756
>Of course the letters in pinyin make a different sound in Chinese than they do in English. But that's true of every language that uses the Latin alphabet; you have to learn different sound values for Spanish or Hungarian too.
the point I was making is that romanji has the same issues representing mandarin pronounciations as you would have representing english with Japanese (this case would be Rs and Ls have a singular pronounciation between the two alphabets, being らリるれろ being neither la li lu le lo NOR ra ri ru re ro)

[Anonymous No.21585825]

>>21585798
The thing is, though, there's nothing inherent about the shape of the Roman letters that means they make one specific sound. They already make different sounds depending on the language, Mandarin in pinyin is just another language.

[Anonymous No.21585872]

>>21585825
making the same letters sound different in the same sentence is confusing.

[Anonymous No.21585884]

>>21585872
I suppose, but it'll happen wherever you mix two different languages written in the same script. It happens if you mix English and Spanish in a written sentence, for instance.

[Anonymous No.21585919]

>>21585884
sounds like youre emphasizing the utility of roman letters to use words from Chinese, Russian, and Arabic with English being the cake that the bits are embedded in as a creole lingua franca.

Which I agree should be the case (as a westerner who has cultural exposure to other languages). For typing out and maintaining my neutral-native accent in Mandarin, I find it best to type and converse in Mandarin by spelling it in zhuyin to preserve the distinct mouth motions involved. Currently teaching my kids that way too. There may be more mandarin speakers who use pinyin in the world, but I believe Taiwan still uses it, and as long as they still lead in semiconductors, zhuyin is still culturally relevant on top of my insistance on the technical merits of the alphabet.

I think Taiwan may have more pedigree-connection to pre-civil war China as well, so that's kind of important like being able to more easily analyze European literature from antiquity if you spoke greek.

[Anonymous No.21585927]

>>21585919
Honestly, I think that some phonetic system, any phonetic system, would be a better writing system than characters but at this point it would be pretty hard to switch over.
>For typing out and maintaining my neutral-native accent in Mandarin, I find it best to type and converse in Mandarin by spelling it in zhuyin to preserve the distinct mouth motions involved.
Why can't you understand that pinyin does too? You have to learn the correspondences, but you do for zhuyin too.

[Anonymous No.21585930]

>>21583721
Tongyong pinyin and MPS2 both have useful features to improve pinyin with imo. For foreign use there probably isn't any real need to distinguish between pinyin x and sh or ch and q, and past Chinese learners that used other romanization systems also got by without such.

>>21584423
I don't know about minimal pairs but the fact that it has to differentiate between things like the "special seven" finals indicates its deficiency in properly distinguishing them from other finals ending in [i]. I believe that it can be improved and made to approximate the ease or convenience of romaji.

[Anonymous No.21585936]

>>21585930
What do you mean by 'special seven' finals?

[Anonymous No.21585957]

>>21585936
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if9UTOvQkJo

Another example is how ju/qu/xu are pronounced differently from other syllables ending in -u.

[Anonymous No.21585959]

>>21585930
>Tongyong pinyin and MPS2 both have useful features to improve pinyin with imo. For foreign use there probably isn't any real need to distinguish between pinyin x and sh or ch and q, and past Chinese learners that used other romanization systems also got by without such.
good thing the human brain is flexible enough to distinguish info from context through accents.

[Anonymous No.21585962]

>>21585957
Sure, it's slightly complicated, but from a distributional perspective it makes sense. If JQX can only occur before the i or ü sounds and SZC SHZHCHR all can't, it makes sense to take some shortcuts reflecting this.

[Anonymous No.21585972]

>>21585957
巨區需?

these are ji qi xi (ㄐㄑㄒ) with the euu (ㄩ)alphabet at the end.

[Anonymous No.21585988]

>>21585962
A good solution would be to transcribe zi, ci, si, zhi, chi, shi, ri with [u] instead of [i] and to add another [u] to -u finals. Tongyong, Yale, and MPS2 had useful ideas for distinguishing ju/qu/xu.

>>21585972
In this chart they're in the bottom right.
https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-pinyin-chart.php

[Anonymous No.21586000]

>>21585988
You could just spell them as syllabic consonants like Zhuyin does I suppose. I think there's also some system that adds an -r.

[Anonymous No.21586012]

>>21586000
Right something like jyū/chyū/shyū, nyū/lyū. Pinyin adds -r for erhua.

[Anonymous No.21586014]

>>21586000
>>21585988
seems like the pinyin camp has introduced more 字母/alphabets. Because I can't see any bopomofos that carry the same ju qu xu pronounciations in a single letter, but I can totally type the same sound.

[Anonymous No.21586019]

>>21586012
>>21586000
>>21585988

also, a more personal note, that pinyin was invented by the PRC in the 50s after the civil war and after the cultural revolution (massacre). It seems like a trash product of a trash culture, not saying Nazi China was any better morally, but Commie China essentially commited the Burning of The Library of Alexandria.

no offense to the mainland chinese people reading this, just criticizing the leadership at that time in history.

[Anonymous No.21586027]

>>21586014
Not sure if this is what you meant but they areㄐㄩ, ㄑㄩ, and ㄒㄩ.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Standard_Mandarin_transcription_systems

[Anonymous No.21586030]

>>21586027
oh okay we're still on the same page, I thought there was an invention of new alphabet letters to represent ㄐㄩ ㄑㄩ ㄒㄩ

to which concept I would have wanted to exclaim: see, this is why pinyin is unable to function and needs to be patched.

(I guess it has played an important role in enabling more people from the west to learn Mandarin)

[Anonymous No.21586032]

>>21586019
Well one good thing it is known to have accomplished was eliminating the problem of distinguishing fangwan and fanguan and the different initial consonants. But it also introduced its own complications.

[Anonymous No.21586044]

>>21577984
As someone who's learning japanese(just passed N4) and speaks english, french and spanish, character is just infinetely much more soulful, and the more I learn japanese, the more I hate the spaniards for burning down almost all maya books, their script is probably the most beautiful script ever designed by men, and it's kinda ironic that we only know how to partially translate because of some spanish priest fuckhead who burned most books in the first place and asked for a rosetta stone

[Anonymous No.21586054]

>>21586032
I would say despite my anti chicomm and technical criticisms of pinyin(from personal frustrations learning it in HS), it has enabled the sinosphere to more easily learn roman alphabet languages on top of have westerners learn chinese.

[Anonymous No.21586061]

>>21586019
i think it’s probably fair to also mention the catholic connection to the German Nazi regime, not saying the present pope is a nazi, but actually if you do look closely the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism, it’s teleological imperative and the resulting ethical theory, it is..well, it’s quite like something the third reich would espouse on the reg

[Anonymous No.21586064]

>>21586012
I mean spelling pinyin <zhi> as just <zh> or <si> as just <s>. Or spelling them as <zhr> and <sr> (even when not erhua'd I mean.
>>21586014
What do you mean?
>>21586019
I mean yeah they had serious issues, doesn't mean the Romanization they promoted isn't good.

[Anonymous No.21586074]

>>21586061
I dont think ROC had any actual connections with Nazi Germany aside from being both right wing facist regimes. But are you saying right wing facism tend to value preservation of historical literatures and databases?

[Anonymous No.21586077]

>>21586074
i’m just trying to trigger you, idk why, kinda bored.

[Anonymous No.21586085]

>>21586064
>What do you mean?
we cleared that up a few posts up, I was thinking that the focus on ju qu xu was implying something it wasnt.

and sure, even the KMT had issues like continued the reign of terror that the Japanese held over Taiwan. Which is why I started a family with a jewess who weebs about my heritage so I can escape the sinosphere somewhat but want to pass along my multi language skills to my kids.

[Anonymous No.21586090]

>>21586077
it's all good, I was digging to see if there was anything of merit in right wing facism if you were bringing it up in a discussion about writing systems and literature archives.

I try to find good in interactions past toxicity.

[Anonymous No.21586106]

>>21586064
>I mean spelling pinyin <zhi> as just <zh> or <si> as just <s>. Or spelling them as <zhr> and <sr> (even when not erhua'd I mean.
Yeah that's what MPS2 and the Yale romanization do, e.g. tz/dz, tsz, sz, jr, chr, shr, r.

[Anonymous No.21586109]

>>21586106
Yale is probably the best system for getting an English speaker close to the Mandarin pronunciation.

[Anonymous No.21586113]

>>21586090
i think that’s a really admirable thing to do anon, i’m actually much the same, but i also believe it’s important to hone an assertive capacity, hence the triggering, it’s just about learning to temper it’s edge a little i guess, but that’s a lifelong pursuit, isn't it ?

[Anonymous No.21586115]

>>21585739
That's how information rate is calculated...

[Anonymous No.21586133]

DZHYONGHVA

[Anonymous No.21586189]

>>21586133
I don't think I've heard the term 司民, what's it from?

[Anonymous No.21586214]

>>21586189
https://www.reddit.com/r/vexillology/comments/bdn6j3/flag_of_imperium_succaelorum_rome_plus_china_mega/

[Anonymous No.21586243]

>>21586113
>but i also believe it’s important to hone an assertive capacity, hence the triggering, it’s just about learning to temper it’s edge a little i guess, but that’s a lifelong pursuit, isn't it ?

Expressing malice because you feel others owe you one, as a manifestation of megalothymia isnt exactly the same as being assertive to defend your position, which would (be expressing isothymia, these terms were coined by David R. Lykken in the 70s).

I believe if I don't try to assert myself over others, I'll attract less harm towards myself (A concept from one of Thich Nhat Hanh's talk about if buddhists can kill) There is undue harm that befalls others, and it's up to ourselves to become and maintain our ability to be the most physically dangerous thing possible (while striving to rid ourselves of toxic actions). Kind of carrying over usmc culture (of best friend, worst enemy) into buddhist philosophy.

[Anonymous No.21586266]

>>21586133
>>21586189
>>21586214
Is there a need for the sinos to posture like the anglos (British imperialism, American Exceptionalism, White Supremacy) do?

There seems to be this angst that both cultures have to "really show those other races that we are a force to be recogned with, we had a stranglehold on the world in history, we will rise again". And not to mention people who are PRC loyalists who disparage and actively try to meddle in the lives of the sinos overseas.
I am wondering if having kids with someone with primarily anglo heritage will make little Hitlers if they notice both sides of their bloodline are race realists with a chip on their shoulder.

just an interesting cultural point since we've been comparing the English and Chinese writing systems

[Anonymous No.21586296]

Anglos want to dominate the world, and since it 's the only thing they dream of, the think the chinese want this too, but it's completely false.

[Anonymous No.21586337]

>>21586296
my wife just wants to go hard core cottage core and bug out to our own homested hermitage

[Anonymous No.21586679]

>>21586296
chinks literally think they are mandated by heaven to rule the entire earth what are you smoking

[Anonymous No.21586867]

>>21586266
Anglia was a bog during the time of ancient Rome and China.

[Anonymous No.21586975]

>>21584766
This was already addressed, see
>>21584665

[Anonymous No.21587088]

>>21586975
French is an alphabet, Chinese is a logography. How are you not getting this?

[Anonymous No.21587115]

>>21587088
Firstly, Written French uses an alphabetic character system, and Written Mandarin uses a logographic character system. The spoken languages do not.

Secondly, the problem that you are running into is one of typography. You are viewing "alphabets" and "logographies" as these firm meaningful categories, but they aren't, they're just classification systems that we humans assigned to them to make reference easy. Here, try this: stop viewing them as "alphabets" or "logographies" and instead just say that they're both the same kind of thing: "writing". See how the difference goes away?

You yourself have demonstrated this. You familiarized yourself with several centuries of historical developments, and that let you guess the pronunciation. You chose randomly from 3-4 options, and got some right, and some wrong. This is exactly how Mandarin works, except you'd have 8-10 options instead of 3-4. You don't even read the actual Hanzi vs Letters differently, either. Even in the most phonetic languages, but ESPECIALLY in languages like French, you don't break a word up into characters, you view it as a discrete packet. "Foot" and "脚" aren't broken up into component parts, they're taken as a single discrete thing. The way that we train children to read is not to take "foot" and break it up into three parts (two consonants and a digraph representing a vowel), it's to repeat the sound "foot" in your head upon seeing an arbitrary symbol ("foot"). This is EXACTLY how Mandarin works.

Remember the subvocalization meme? You can't read without subvocalizing. When you read, your throat makes micromovements, and you say the words in your head. Reading is repeating words when you see symbols, to yourself, in your head. That's how reading works. You do not read French and Mandarin any differently.

SOME languages have orthographies that DO let you pick apart a given arbitrary symbol and arrive at the correct pronunciation, but that is absolutely not necessary for reading, and actually requires more brain power to do (lower IQ native speakers of languages with phonetic orthographies tend to fail when forced to derive a word from phonetics because there's a higher sound-symbol load which requires more brain power). The fact that people can read in Mandarin at all is a demonstration of this.

[Anonymous No.21587777]

>>21578087
I cant believe that English is the language that is the most efficiant, and that that chart rates a language like French and Chinese as more inefficiant. Just the analyitic nature and use of particles adds a whole layer of superflous words which romance languages avoid. Besides, ive translated Chinese into english before and an 8 page document in chinese ends up being like 15 pages in english.

[Anonymous No.21587799]

>>21579364
Basicallly Arabic calligraphy then.

[Anonymous No.21587805]

>>21587777
See>>21582993
I think the tonal nature of mandarin sets a limit to how fast you can talk.

[Anonymous No.21587815]

>>21580114
As a Canadian, this resonates with me

[Anonymous No.21588007]

>>21587777
English is right at the peak of having just enough particles to add clarity while also being analytic enough to reduce down superfluous information. Romance languages just add superfluous things, turning "he gave her the object" into "he to it gave her the them of theirs that which was the given the object".

[Anonymous No.21588229]

>>21587777
Hey smoothbrain, that chart is for the spoken language you retard. Characters are more information dense and are read faster too. Written nothing holds a candle to Chinese. The only thing lacking now is most chinks don't write it often and lazily use autosuggest which has lead to idiots using words like horse for mother.

[Anonymous No.21588243]

>>21588229
Whoops. I shouldn't say they write hanzi period because they don't and in many cases can't. I mean they use pinheadyin alphabet soup.

[Anonymous No.21588395]

>>21588229
Why did you post a chart about spoken language in a thread about written alphabets?

[Anonymous No.21588605]

>>21588395
I didn't post it, I just recognize it from seeing it before.

[Anonymous No.21588648]

>>21588007
Il lui donna l'objet.
Not a single syllable more, and pronunciated faster as there's no need to overexAAAAggerate stress accents.

[Anonymous No.21588669]

How do people rate French when it has, objectively, the most illogical pronunciation known to man

>every h is silent
>every third letter is silent

It’s so redundant and dumb

[Anonymous No.21588705]

[Anonymous No.21588783]

>>21588705
Yeah, all of those English words, like rendezvous, charadre, nouveau, gouache, souffle, lieutenant (British pronunciation), and demesne.

[Anonymous No.21588799]

>>21588783
That's some nice cope ghoti man.

[Anonymous No.21588914]

>>21588705
>count french words forced into english
>surprised when english's orthography is whacky
Ghoti doesn't spell fish if you throw out the frogs.

[Anonymous No.21588936]

>>21588914
>conveniently ignores the great vowel shift since when no english vowel has been pronounced as it's written

[Anonymous No.21588986]

>>21588936
Yeah, I agree, English's orthography should be reformed.

[Anonymous No.21588995]

>>21588936
the reason that there were no updates made due to the great vowel shift was because francophiles wanted english to look more french though

[Anonymous No.21589128]

I keep my diary desu written in phonetic Duployan shorthand, with gratuitous use of alchemical symbols at occult sigils to represent proper nouns.

Its maintains the English language, but shorthand introduces the stylistic fluidity of Arabic while also using the Western equivilants of Chinese logographs to shorthand complex ideas and relations that can only be symbolically gestured at but not fully captured by language.

Ive also dropped most particles and replaced them with first order logic, for added clarity and precision.

There is not a language on earth that rivals the English laguage expressed in such a way

[Anonymous No.21589143]

>>21589128
Pictures needed.

[Anonymous No.21589744]

>>21587115
I agree there's no categorical difference between phonetic and 'logographic' writing systems; Chinese writing is still essentially phonetic in nature, just in a much more complicated, irregular way. But if you arranged writing systems along a scale, French would still be significantly closer to Czech or Malay than it is to Chinese. I'd say you'd have most writing systems in a cluster way over on the left, then English maybe a tenth of the way to the right, then Chinese way over on the right.
>The way that we train children to read is not to take "foot" and break it up into three parts (two consonants and a digraph representing a vowel), it's to repeat the sound "foot" in your head upon seeing an arbitrary symbol ("foot").
Phonics is still the best method for learning to read English and decently commonly taught. Teaching English orthography as if it were Chinese is incredibly stupid.
>SOME languages have orthographies that DO let you pick apart a given arbitrary symbol and arrive at the correct pronunciation
And French is like 95% of the way to being that.

[Anonymous No.21589750]

>>21587777
To my understanding, the results were skewed because the texts used were translations from English and not always very natural in the target language. How a native speaker would express the same information is not the same as what you get by translating directly.

[Anonymous No.21589763]

>>21588229
>The only thing lacking now is most chinks don't write it often and lazily use autosuggest which has lead to idiots using words like horse for mother.
As Y. R. Chao put it:
>The situation is that when the ancients wrote a character by sound regardless of meaning, it was a 'loan character', whereas if a modern schoolboy writes one, he is punished for writing the wrong character!

[Anonymous No.21589774]

>>21588669
French is many-to-one. You can't tell how to spell a word if you hear it, but you can tell how to pronounce a word if you see it the vast majority of the time.
>>21588783
https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html
Most of these are perfectly English words.
>>21588799
English spelling is ridiculous, but "ghoti" is a strawman. <gh> is only ever /f/ after <ou>, and <ti> is only ever /ʃ/ in between two vowels.

[Anonymous No.21589779]

>>21589128
incredibly based

[Anonymous No.21589782]

>>21589128
>There is not a language on earth that rivals the English laguage expressed in such a way
Not even Ithkuil?

[Anonymous No.21589791]

>>21588705
>However, because of their relatively recent modernizations compared to English, the Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/Montenegrin, Romanian, Italian, Turkish, Spanish, Finnish, Czech, Latvian, Esperanto, Korean and Swahili orthographic systems come much closer to being consistent phonemic representations.
Finnish uses the Latin alphabet, retard. It's literally just a matter of when the orthography was modernized. As time goes on the languages will become less regular unless you keep changing the orthography. This property means nothing.

[Anonymous No.21589970]

>>21589128
>laguage

damn sweetie your post about language was so close to being based but you fucked the landing

[Anonymous No.21590006]

>>21589128
Post pics.
>>21589782
Ithkuil isn't usable.

[Anonymous No.21590285]

>>21589143
>>21590006
Kudos to the first person to recognize the book.

[Anonymous No.21590311]

phonetic alphabets > everything else

Imagine a language comprised entirely of emojis. That's essentially what Chinese is.

[Anonymous No.21590316]

>>21590006
It's not? How do you know?

[Anonymous No.21590323]

>>21590311
Chinese is essentially phonetic, though, it's just a defective syllabary (defective in the technical sense of not representing all phonemic distinctions) with classifiers for disambiguation. If you want a better idea of how Chinese characters actually work, read this:
http://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

[Anonymous No.21590365]

[Anonymous No.21590390]

>>21589128
Cope. This is just an alphabet. Phoenetic alphabetical text is inferior to logographs for reading. You might have writing speed advantage but it ends their. You ought to have learned Hanzi and applied English to it instead. Instead you have worthless chicken scratch.

[Anonymous No.21590404]

>>21590311
70k emojis that express complex ideas and are processed by the brain entirely differently. The end result is denser text and faster reading.
>>21590323
It's essentially phonetic for retards operating with a knowledge like the average phoneposter input user with an average knowledge of 5000 characters (this is inflated because of context clue shit like you posted, average Chinese that grew up in the computer eta that used, Taiwanyin or Pissheadyin actually only knows 2000 characters max).

[Anonymous No.21590419]

>>21590390
>Phoenetic alphabetical text is inferior to logographs for reading.
It is?
>>21590404
Maybe they're unrepresentative but the Chinese speakers I've known have tested as knowing significantly more characters than that. But I'm talking about the nature of the writing system itself, even before computers. The thing that actually makes it tick as a script is phonetic borrowings and phono-semantic compounds.

[Anonymous No.21590456]

>>21590390
Its a mixed system, similar to japanese. Only instead of kanji using symbols more directly relevant to the english language.

[Anonymous No.21590471]

>>21590404
>denser text and faster reading.
you're not wrong. But also higher illiteracy rates

[Anonymous No.21590480]

>>21590365
What the fuck is this?

[Anonymous No.21590491]

>>21590471
>But also higher illiteracy rates
That's not how it works, anon.

[Anonymous No.21590498]

>>21590471
Good. Mass literacy was a mistake. Children should be tested for IQ at birth and only those above 140 should be permitted to learn the written word.

[Anonymous No.21590500]

>>21590480
English orthography reform #252523523

[Anonymous No.21590505]

>>21590498
Why not just invent a stupidly hard writing system so that only the intelligent can learn it in the first place? Make reading your morning paper a challenge on par with solving the crossword. That way there's no way to game the system.

[Anonymous No.21590506]

>>21590500
well it's shit

[Anonymous No.21590513]

>>21590500
No Im curious who’s writing to who

[Anonymous No.21590526]

>>21590505
Yes. That was Chinese until pinheadyin and zhizhangyin were universally taught and widely adopted as input methods for characters with the advent of computing.

[Anonymous No.21590529]

>>21590526
I'm pretty sure the literacy rate was already growing relative to what it had been in ancient times, even before that. And why would being able to INPUT characters phonetically make READING any easier?

[Anonymous No.21590532]

>>21590513
Supposedly, it's one Miss Mary Stevenson, communicating to Benjamin Franklin that his new orthography (the one she's writing the letter in) is shit.

[Anonymous No.21590533]

>>21590529
They don't know the word, write the pinyin for the character, then forget it. This limits their lexicon to predictive text tier writing.

[Anonymous No.21590547]

>>21590365
"Dear Sir,
I have transcribed your alphabet, &c, which I think might be of service to those, who wish to acquire an accurate pronunciation, if that could be fixed; but I see many inconveniences, as well as difficulties, that would attend the bringing your letters and orthography into common use. all our etymologies would be lost, consequently we could not ascertain the meaning of many words; the distinction would be useless, unless we living writers publish new editions. I short, I believe we must let people spell on in their old way, and (as we find it easiest) do the same ourselves."

[Anonymous No.21590550]

>>21590533
Words are sounds, not written symbols. Mandarin would still be Mandarin if it were written in an alphabet, and English would still be English if it were written in a logography.

[Anonymous No.21590552]

>>21590547
>all our etymologies would be lost
Holy fuck. Someone who understands.

[Anonymous No.21590558]

>>21590552
You could still look up words in etymological dictionaries, and it's not like English doesn't have some unetymological spellings like it is, like "island" and "ache".

[Anonymous No.21590561]

Where’s the Maya anon

[Anonymous No.21590767]

>>21590498
>>21590526
>>21590533
>>21588229
ㄩㄚㄦㄖㄚㄏㄏㄋㄋㄝㄍㄦㄈㄚㄍㄍㄜㄊ

[Anonymous No.21590776]

廿口山 凡仍口凹十 山巨 凹与巨 亡廿工以巨与巨 亡廿凡尺凡亡十巨尺与 十廿凡十 尺巨与巨爪仍乙巨 乙凡十工以 亡廿凡尺凡亡十巨尺与 斤口尺 山尺工十工以也 工以 巨以也乙工与廿?

[Anonymous No.21590924]

>>21590776
ㄩ ㄦ ㄚㄋㄛㄊㄏㄦ ㄨㄢ ㄊㄨ

[Anonymous No.21591434]

>>21590776
Why? It literally serves no purpose. Might as well write in L33T

[Anonymous No.21591739]

>>21591434
what does it say?

[Anonymous No.21591760]

>>21587777
>ive translated Chinese into english before and an 8 page document in chinese ends up being like 15 pages in english.
uh, that's because most words are one character apiece in Chinese, it has nothing to do with the information rate of spoken Chinese vs English

[Anonymous No.21591784]

>>21579640
>Chinks are aware of the changed meanings, they have to learn them in school but to imply it's impossible for them to ever understand Classical Chinese is retarded.
ok, but isnt the contrast kinda moot then? since that level of understanding is also pretty common in english in terms of words and meaning ls changing over time, and is even moreso in romance languages with a greater connection to latin.

[Anonymous No.21591798]

>>21577984
Bat soup carries superior semantic meaning, while jew letters carry syntactic meaning. Letters fool you into thinking you understand the original meaning with precision when in actuality you lose 80% of what was trying to be conveyed.

The flip side of that is in order to understand the semantic meaning of bat soup logograms you have to have a civilizational shared culture, which may even be connected to genes to a certain extent. Unfortunately this is nazi so bad.

[Anonymous No.21591803]

>>21591760
He obviously thought that guy was referring to text not speech and expressed his point weakly. Hanzi is read much faster and is twice as dense.

[Anonymous No.21591853]

>>21591798
The logograph brings back ancestral PTSD memories of the Chad Egyptians and Chud Sumerians whose logographic systems caused unrivaled advances in philosophical, mathematical and intellectual development probably causing much butthurt and BTFOing back then. Imagine seeing some gigachads writing neat symbols on clay tablets and papyrus and being left out.

[Anonymous No.21592025]

>>21591739
>"How about we use Chinese characters that resemble Latin characters for writing in English"

[Anonymous No.21592116]

>>21592025
holyshit, I was trying to figure out meaning behind the pronounciation or if it forms some kinda poem that I didnt even look at it visually and see it resembles latin letters.

[Anonymous No.21592166]

>>21577984
>Arabic, Hebrew
Not an alphabet.

[Anonymous No.21592246]

>>21581227
the eternal console war faggotry

[Anonymous No.21592558]

>>21578087
Surprised at Mandarin being that low. Chinese is really terse, even more so in casual speech.

[Anonymous No.21592633]

>>21592558
that probably has more to do with overall chinese culture than specifically language. the average chink could probably be less terse if they wanted to, but they live in a cutthroat darwinian hellscape so in many ways they will just say what they mean, or stare at foreigners without a thought about it being rude, etc.

but on the other hand you have the overly formal and obtuse aspects of chinese culture like the fact that some doctors won't even openly discuss sexo with patients. whereas in the west a cute female doctor asked me when i was 13 years old if i'm sexually active as part their standard questions. i said yes to try to impress her kek.

[Anonymous No.21592673]

>>21578012
>Logographs
The fuck is that?

[Anonymous No.21592685]

>>21592673
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=Logograph

[Anonymous No.21592693]

We're on the homepage gents

[Anonymous No.21592745]

>>21592633
>a cute female doctor asked me when i was 13 years old if i'm sexually active as part their standard questions. i said yes to try to impress her kek.
>Gets CPS called on your parents
>Welcome to foster care
Nothing personnell, kid

[Anonymous No.21592816]

>>21592745
luckily she could tell i was bullshitting lol. the inmates truly are running the asylum these days though so i wouldn't be surprised if this has happened.

[Anonymous No.21592855]

>>21592745
Many teens have an active sex life with other teens and will admit to a doctor because of confidentiality, so a doctor would most likely think you're talking about having sex with a peer if there's no indication of family abuse.

[Anonymous No.21592928]

>>21592745
Parents who let their offspring copulate are negligent and derilict and should lose custody of them to the state. Same with drug and alcohol use.

[Anonymous No.21592947]

>>21592855
If you're a amerimutt pig dog or Eurotrash you just justify your actions because "everyone else" does it. In China the practice is shameful, abbarant, and indicative of having bad parents and a doctor would be right to report the incident.

[Anonymous No.21593269]

>>21592928
>>21592947
calm down torontofags there's no need to be upset, get yourself some nice pancakes with maple syrup or something and enjoy yourselves for once.

[Anonymous No.21594387]

>>21591760
Not really, Mandarin is pretty heavy on disyllabic compounds.

[Anonymous No.21594399]

>>21591853
But Egyptian hieroglyphs are basically an abjad with some multiliterals and a few determiners.

[Anonymous No.21594404]

>>21590767
Behold, an assblasted smooth brain seething with his inferior alphabetic scribbles.

[Anonymous No.21594406]

>>21592166
In the narrow sense of 'alphabet', they are not alphabets but abjads, but 'alphabet' is sometimes also used in a broader sense; people regularly speak of 'the Hebrew alphabet'.
>>21592558
I think I mentioned this before but the study was skewed because it uses translations which don't always resemble how a native speaker would communicate the same information.

[Anonymous No.21594435]

>>21577984
>both

[Anonymous No.21594652]

>>21581299
>Why not just... spell the language you're writing in? If you're writing in Mandarin, spell the words as they're pronounced in Mandarin; if you're writing in Cantonese or Shanghainese or Hokkien, spell the words as they're pronounced in those languages.
China is a big country. There were many wars fought to unify the country even Japan had that problem and they were significantly smaller. Only a small percentage of the population read and write so unifying the country via writing is significantly easier. Both the Japanese and Koreans used the Chinese writing system before making their own. Chinese has a Chinese Phoenician characters called Zhuyin or Bopomofo but it is exclusively used as Ruby characters.

>What do you mean?
https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/stonelion.php
The language is really dependent on the tone. The Japanese also have a problem of homonyms thus they use Kanji to supplement.

>http://zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm
There is also this.
https://omniglot.com/conscripts/latinlogographic.htm

[Anonymous No.21594917]

>>21594652
>https://www.yellowbridge.com/onlinelit/stonelion.php
This is a stupid example because it's written in Classical Chinese and pronounced in Mandarin. If you read it in the pronunciation of the time when Classical Chinese was alive, it's not ambiguous (because the words weren't homophones then), and if you translate it into actual Mandarin it's also not ambiguous. It's a poem written in one language and relying for effect on its pronunciation in another, of course you can do shenanigans that way that would never occur in ordinary language use.
>The language is really dependent on the tone.
Yes, which is why the standard Romanization marks the tones.
>The Japanese also have a problem of homonyms thus they use Kanji to supplement.
Which is why no one in Japan can hold a verbal conversation on anything beyond quotidian banalities or listen to the radio or a book on tape.

[Anonymous No.21594971]

>>21594917
>Yes, which is why the standard Romanization marks the tones.
>Which is why no one in Japan can hold a verbal conversation on anything beyond quotidian banalities or listen to the radio or a book on tape.
Reading and listening are two different things.

[Anonymous No.21594978]

>>21594971
How so?

[Anonymous No.21594998]

>>21594978
Do I really have to explain?
>Reading
>visual

>Listening
>audio
Humans visual perception is designed for pattern recognition not precision..

[Anonymous No.21595013]

>>21594998
What do you mean?

[Anonymous No.21596481]

>>21594435
bassed

[Anonymous No.21596551]

>>21594387
and if it wasnt two syllables, they cram it into two syllable format in colloquial slang.

[Anonymous No.21596773]

>>21592947
that's reason #1842680975468842 why chinese birth rates are extinction tier.

[Anonymous No.21596796]

>Still using hieroglyphs to communicate
ngmi

[Anonymous No.21596851]

I don't know why we still haven't got a universal written language based on emojis, like this one.

[Anonymous No.21596989]

>>21596851
blissymbolics

[Anonymous No.21597601]

>>21583800
"mandarin" is not a chinese word at all and was never used in china (kinda like the name 'China'). It comes from the term used throughout Southeast Asia for ministers: "montri"

[Anonymous No.21597751]

>>21579362
This is what makes Japanese sound cool though.

[Anonymous No.21598214]

>>21596551
What do you mean?
>>21597601
Yes, "mandarin" is the customary English translation of 官, hence why 官話 is rendered as "the Mandarin language" i.e. "the language of the mandarins", because it was the spoken lingua franca for officials.

[Anonymous No.21598786]

>>21598214
"Officialist Chinese" would work well or "common Chinese" for Putonghua. Really it's other northern Chinese varieties that shouldn't be called "Mandarin" with "Standard Mandarin" being a redundance.

[Anonymous No.21599244]

>>21598786
At least in Chinese I feel like I've seen 官話 being used for 'Mandarin' in the broad sense.

[Anonymous No.21599454]

>>21596796
>hieroglyphs
Outdated even within its own time.

[Anonymous No.21600430]

>>21599244
The division between dialect and language can be fuzzy. Other times a variety may be referred as 話 (huà) as in Dōngběihuà. Restricting huà and guānhuà to specific meanings would probably help reduce confusion.