Comment by thewayfarer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thewayfarer | Hacker News Reader

I have long thought that Pinyin is underestimated for its simplicity, conciseness, and its implicit description of regional phonetics in China. Its uses all 26 letters of English except for "v", but "v" on a keyboard is used to type "ü" instead, and so Pinyin input does not need a special keyboard layout. A basic QWERTY layout is all that's needed. This is an improvement over the Wade-Giles system which requires diacritics and curious apostrophes that the international community--which generally had no interest in learning Chinese or the peculiarities of the Wades-Giles system--learned to ignore when writing Chinese words with the Wade-Giles system (i.e. Taipei should be T'aipei. In Pinyin it's Taibei. Tai chi chuan should be T'ai chi ch'uan. In Pinyin it is Taiji quan).

When I was beginning to learn Mandarin while studying abroad in Chongqing, I was very frustrated with understanding the southern accent. Instead of pronouncing "zh", "ch", "sh" (retroflex consonants), the locals would pronounce "z", "c", "s" (dental/alveolar sibilant consonants). As you can see, Pinyin makes this pronunciation disparity easier to understand for learners and to anticipate the way that many southerners will (mis)pronounce Mandarin. Learning all of varieties of pronunciation in China is still a daunting task with or without Pinyin, but at least it describes this major one pretty well.

Pinyin actually also slightly changed how Chinese words are pronounced. There was once a exploratory idea of abandoning Chines written language as a whole, and adopt fully the latin-character-based language. The compromise is pinyin, a latin-based pronunciation system and simplified written language.

This absolutely modernize the nation. It's no small feat to educate 1BB+ people in a few decades. The nation's unity is once again at an unprecedented level.

This is not without its cost. Modern Chinese pronunciation is considered less appealing to ears, meaning that many sound disappears in the new system. The resultant language often sounds more dull compared to historical system.

The written language is less artful. The traditional written language is no doubt a more appropriate subject for Chinese Calligraphy.

I guess the global momentum to move to a more latin-based language is not going to be stopped. But it's nevertheless a saddening event to see a nation's historical root is altered significantly in a short period of time. This did not destroy the root, it's still there. But the changes are more artificial and more brutal.

I didn't know the pronunciation was simplified with the creation of pinyin. That is really interesting. Could you give an example (e.g. two words or sounds that used to be different and are now pronounced the same)?

If you look at cantonese, an older chinese dialect, you will find 9 tones:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#Tones

Particularly useful in that section is this graph:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology#/media/Fil...

And I think that's a great way to visualize it. Each word has it's own tone contour and it just so happens that a lot of them could be clustered and curve-fitted to match a small number of tones. But the number of curves you choose is arbitrary just like how choosing the number of clusters in k-means is not well defined.

So if you treat the pinyin as authoritative you will sound robotic compared to a native speaker who learns each word's actual tone curve naturally. Just like how if you believe english is a phonetic language you will pronounce lots of things wrong. (e.g., as an English learner once I learned how to spell "doubt" I kept trying to enunciate the "b" since I thought the pronunciation I learned from hearing, "dout", was wrong)

Disclaimer: I'm a native cantonese speaker so my knowledge about tones is bullshit. Just hypothesizing why text-to-speech and people learning to speak it always sound funny.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantonese_phonology explains the reason for the disagreement about the number of tones in Cantonese. If you still think there are nine tones, you should be able to provide some minimal pairs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair) to prove it.

I am a native speaker so I don't really care about the number of tones, I was just citing the link. You can speak to me in monotone and I will figure it out from context just like how you can learn to understand someone with a strong accent.

My theory above is that a fixed number of tones is a linguist madeup concept from data that happens to fit the clustering of the tone graphs. The real tone is a distribution on a per word basis that you learn from natural variations from the other speakers around you. Do the 6 or 9 or 4 tones sometimes fit these distributions? Yes, but it's still just an approximation of the real variations that natives use and shouldn't be treated as an authoritative pronunciation.

Well, even languages with no defined tones such as Japanese have some intonations to distinguish homophonic words in context. And English speech synth still sound robotic because it lacks the full tonal range of a human speaker.

The simplification of tones in Northern Mandarin predates Pinyin by hundreds of years, similar to how English developed a writing system that is often inconsistent with speech.

Doesn't pinyin just apply to standard mandarin? China has many different dialects with different pronunciations, pinyin wouldn't have simplified those at all.

According to what I read on Language Log (Victor Mair's posts), pinyin also made it massively easier to teach literacy. So the tradeoff could well have been totally worth it just for the literacy gains, and the historical roots might not matter as much.

One wonders what kind of future technological breakthrough it would take to make the traditional characters easier to enter in a computer system ( rather than going through pinyin first )- I've seen that handwriting in simplified characters is probably on par, in terms of speed and readability, with pinyin, so it doesn't seem that far fetched, given that many phones and computer can accept stylus input these days.

Smartphones have pretty good handwriting IMEs, but if you want to bypass Pinyin, Cangjie is also an interesting system - you can (could) even create new characters with it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cangjie_input_method#Early_Can...

> adopt fully the latin-character-based language

Ironically, everyone else is moving away from latin based characters towards icons, emoji and international symbols. (Really, why is O easier to learn than Off, and | easier to learn than On? At least the latter can be looked up in a dictionary. Anyone wonder what those washing instructions mean?)

Pinyin still requires curious apostrophes to distinguish between xian and xi'an, for example. I think a hyphen would have been the better choice.

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