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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say this, but I don't see the point in maintaining complicated old writing systems. (I mean, of course I see the historical and cultural value, but I don't see why should people keep using it)

You write a "new" Chinese character and then there is: a) no way to represent it on a computer unless you draw it b) no way of knowing how it's pronounced

Latin, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew (ok, they have some common roots), Korean are much more maintainable and "portable".

No, Chinese won't be the new English. You get to write and conversate in English in a short time frame (1 yr). Not Chinese. And certainly the learning curve gets steeper the further you go.

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That argument can extend to any complicated system developed over hundreds and thousands of years. Off the top of my head, English Common Law is an example as well as English spelling and grammar. English is a horrible language with massive numbers of grammatical exceptions. I thank the many gods that I was born in an English speaking country.

Speaking of not knowing how to pronounce a Chinese character, that is not entirely true. Many of the characters you see in Chinese have a radical in the construct that indicates a sound. Unfortunately tone is not indicated.

Chinese won't be the new English, I agree. But emoji, which function exactly the same way Chinese characters do (image representing a meaning) are already an English augment.

Sort of an additional aside, there is a way to type a Chinese character by radical assemblage. So even if you don't know how to pronounce it by pinyin, you can still retype it into an e-dictionary. Similar method is used to look it up in a traditional dictionary. I never bothered to learn as it requires a touch typist skill to be fast enough to abandon the pinyin entry.

> That argument can extend to any complicated system developed over hundreds and thousands of years. Off the top of my head, English Common Law is an example as well as English spelling and grammar.

True, and my point apply to those as well. However, even English pronunciation is not that bad and grammar is much easier than German or Latin or most Romance languages.

> Many of the characters you see in Chinese have a radical in the construct that indicates a sound. Unfortunately tone is not indicated.

Many, but not all (I think Japanese uses some of those hints as well). But if you have "character from some ancient text" that doesn't have that radical you're SOL.

> there is a way to type a Chinese character by radical assemblage. So even if you don't know how to pronounce it by pinyin, you can still retype it into an e-dictionary

Good to know

> Many, but not all (I think Japanese uses some of those hints as well). But if you have "character from some ancient text" that doesn't have that radical you're SOL.

The Japanese pronunciation hints are way less reliable than the Chinese. First, Japan inherited Chinese sounds and characters in drips and drabs. Because Chinese has so many dialects, and a dialect may pronounce a certain character a vastly different way, the onyomi today may be a presentation of old Fujian pronunciation or old Cantonese, not the Mandarin. Second, because the characters were introduced to different parts of Japan at different times, those characters were used for different purposes in the different regions in Japan. Today this means a single character can be used in different words with different meanings, with more than one onyomi. Nevermind what happens in kanji compounds.

If a Chinese character was suddenly introduced with a new radical, that would be akin to suddenly finding a new letter in the alphabet. Highly unlikely. When is the last time a letter was added or removed from the standard English alphabet? A quick google says the last letter added to the English language was J, added 1524. Currently there are 214 radicals in Chinese. A new character would almost certainly be a combination of those existing radicals. Furthermore, the character could still be systematically written in computer language with brush stroke entry. That character would simply have to be added at a unicode level for image rending, same as having to define Alien Emoji as U+1F47D so that it does not render as a ?

> When is the last time a letter was added or removed from the standard English alphabet?

To be a bit pedantic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s you can still find newspaper articles in Google's archive that use back in the mid 1800s.

True, I only looked up "added". Thanks for that detail. I know there are a couple of other letters that used to be common-ish but are no longer.

>even English pronunciation is not that bad

As a nonnative speaker, it sometimes feels like you just have to know the words individually in order to pronounce them correctly: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ruize-rijmen/De_Chaos.

Amen to that stupid poem. I'm a USA born white girl, and that poem broke me. I tried to read it aloud and got part way through before my tongue / brain made me give up. It's evil.

Can you say squirrel? My trick with this word is to use different words. Start with the word "whirl". Repeat this word a couple of times to get your mouth around it. Then say the "sch" from the word "school". "Sch"... + ..."Whirl", "Sch".. + .."Whirl", "Sch". + ."Whirl", "Sch" + "Whirl", "Sch" "Whirl", "Sch-Whirl", ""SchWhirl". Looks horrible typed but it works on the tongue. Just need to get that sound glide exiting "sch" into "whirl". If you end the "sch" with your lips pursed in anticipation for the "oo" sounds in school, it sets you up for the "wh".

I would say it "skwir-rul," but that might be a northeastern regional pronunciation?

So almost a combination of school's "sch" plus "rural".

From Wiktionary[1]:

>(Received Pronunciation, General Australian, UK) IPA(key): /ˈskwɪɹl̩/, /ˈskwɪɹəl/

>(Canada, US) IPA(key): /ˈskwɝl/, /ˈskwɝl̩/, /ˈskwɝəl/

I haven't really thought about this word before, I think I use the UK pronunciation /ˈskwɪɹəl/, and this word didn't come across as hard to pronounce.

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=squirrel&oldid=4...

English is a horrible language with massive numbers of grammatical exceptions.

A former colleague remarked that spelling bees are interesting only because English is such a horrible language. A German spelling bee, in comparison, might go on for weeks!

Fun fact, english spelling kind of made sense before a bunch of scholars wanted to put the Latin back into the language, and now spelling is divorced from writing. As an example, why don't these words rhyme?

* Enough

* Through

* Though

Perhaps we should've gone through with one of these reforms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...

And there's also:

* Bough

* Thorough

Five separate words - with five different ways to pronounce "ough"! Spelling in English is a complete disaster. I pity those people who have to learn it as a second language.

I think you mean:

aɪ heɪt tu seɪ ðɪs, bʌt aɪ doʊnt si ðə pɔɪnt ɪn meɪnˈteɪnɪŋ ˈkɑmpləˌkeɪtəd oʊld ˈraɪtɪŋ ˈsɪstəmz. (aɪ min, ʌv kɔrs aɪ si ðə hɪˈstɔrɪkəl ænd ˈkʌlʧərəl ˈvælju, bʌt aɪ doʊnt si waɪ ʃʊd ˈpipəl kip ˈjuzɪŋ ɪt) ju raɪt eɪ "nu" ʧaɪˈniz ˈkɛrɪktər ænd ðɛn ðɛr ɪz: eɪ) noʊ weɪ tu ˌrɛprəˈzɛnt ɪt ɑn ə kəmˈpjutər ənˈlɛs ju drɔ ɪt bi) noʊ weɪ ʌv ˈnoʊɪŋ haʊ ɪts prəˈnaʊnst

ˈlætən, səˈrɪlɪk, ˈærəbɪk, ˈhibru (ˈoʊˈkeɪ, ðeɪ hæv sʌm ˈkɑmən ruts), kɔˈriən ɑr mʌʧ mɔr meɪnˈteɪnəbl ænd "ˈpɔrtəbəl".

noʊ, ʧaɪˈniz woʊnt bi ðə nu ˈɪŋglɪʃ. ju gɛt tu raɪt ænd kənˈvɜrs ɪn ˈɪŋglɪʃ ɪn ə ʃɔrt taɪm freɪm (1 jɪr). nɑt ʧaɪˈniz. ænd ˈsɜrtənli ðə ˈlɜrnɪŋ kɜrv gɛts ˈstipər ðə ˈfɜrðər ju goʊ.

Haha! The IPA is great because it has support for many languages, and is a recommended tool for students learning English in Taiwan. If computer keyboards used IPA instead of ASCII, I think we'd all be using it by now. But typing is pushing everything towards ASCII (not even Latin because of the lack of diacritics on US/UK/ZH-TW keyboards).

I made a Pingtype English for language exchange the other way, and that uses IPA instead of Pinyin. I often find that users prefer ㄅㄆㄇㄈ though (which I derive from IPA).

https://pingtype.github.io/english.html

>If computer keyboards used IPA instead of ASCII, I think we'd all be using it by now

Not at all! English has really strong historical roots for its spelling, but these could be eliminated even without IPA. Spelling could be standardized instead of staying historical. ("Speling kud bee stenderdized insted uv staying historikel".) Even within ASCII.

I was pointing out that the parent poster fails to realize that English itself has a "complicated old writing system" with "historical and cultural value". Just as having different characters allows for homophones to be recognized easily, English does the same thing with many words that sound the same (sea/see/C, or to/two/too, etc.) There is a lot of history or culture in English spelling, for example all the silent -e endings.

I recommend familiarizing yourself with the languages that these Chinese characters encode to better answer that question. Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.

Chinese is not the only language that uses these characters. Japanese and Korean do too. For these groups, the learning curve is much less; that something does not come easy to English speakers is not evidence of its inherent deficiency.

> Japanese and Korean do too.

Japanese yes. Korean historically but not really these days. If you try browsing Korean Wikipedia or Korean top newspaper sites, it's Hangul and some Latin characters and no Hanja in sight.

It's true that homophones are much more common in Mandarin than say, English. It's not, IMHO, a very compelling argument against moving the common language to a more phonetic system like Korean did with Hangul. Something like 施氏食獅史 is already incomprehensible to a native speaker (who isn't familiar with the text) when read aloud.

But spoken Chinese is quite different from written Chinese, which allows for more economy. Often a single character will be used in writing where a two-character word would be used in speech. And people's names usually can't be determined by the pronunciation; they are defined by the actual characters. If Chinese moved to a strictly phonetic writing system, a lot of culture would have to adapt: conventions around signage, poetry, proverbs, names (this is a big one!) of people and organizations, formal writing, wordplay, etc.

So what you're saying is Chinese speakers generally use two languages/registers: one for spoken language and another for written. Which is another way of saying the writing system is not actually a good match for the spoken language in the first place and mostly exists for ceremonial reasons.

I would suggest someone figure out a sane way to capture spoken Chinese in a modern (i.e. easy to digitise) writing system but I doubt it would gain any traction because of the cultural implications of the script. Most Westerners see their writing system as a simple fact of life, the Chinese seem to see it as a sacred traditional craft in the same vein as forging steel.

> Homophony is extremely common in Mandarin; eliminating characters would make reading very very difficult.

Well, it would be as difficult as understanding a spoken phrase that uses such homophones. (NLP people would probably hate that though :) )

Yes, it is difficult to understand a spoken phrase. That's why speakers rely on shared context: physical place, relationship between speaker and listener, previous interaction/s between speaker and listener.... none of which is present in a book or newspaper article that's being plucked out of the context-ether.

> No, Chinese won't be the new English. You get to write and conversate in English in a short time frame (1 yr).

This merely means that you were (very likely) born in a society speaking English or some closely related west European language. You know, the "normal, easy" languages.

> born in a society speaking English or some closely related west European language

No, not really. Though Romance languages are related to English via PIE. So, it might have been easier than if my mother tongue was Finnish or Turkish or a non PIE Asian language.

To add to that, the level of ability you can achieve in 1 year learning English is also doable in Chinese. That's how long I had learned the language before I went for an exchange semester in Shanghai, and from leaving the airport onwards I spent a week speaking Chinese with everyone (taxi driver, checking in at the hotel, finding an apartment, registering my residence with the police ...). Things got funny when I didn't understand at first that my landlord wanted me to pay a deposit, but when someone wants your money, they can usually find a way to communicate, so in the end it worked out fine.

The difficulty of Chinese is more in the "long tail" of rare characters. If you memorize 5 characters a day (it gets easier once you know all the basic components), after a year you'll be able to read 90% of most texts and get by without much difficulty, but the remaining 10% require double or triple the amount of memorization and after that there'll still be rare characters that even native speakers don't recognize immediately.

Where does the writer, who claims to be a graduate student in Chinese studies, of the excerpt[0] below go wrong?

This fairy tale is promulgated because of the fact that, when you look at the character frequencies, over 95% of the characters in any newspaper are easily among the first 2,000 most common ones. But what such accounts don't tell you is that there will still be plenty of unfamiliar words made up of those familiar characters. (To illustrate this problem, note that in English, knowing the words "up" and "tight" doesn't mean you know the word "uptight".) Plus, as anyone who has studied any language knows, you can often be familiar with every single word in a text and still not be able to grasp the meaning. Reading comprehension is not simply a matter of knowing a lot of words; one has to get a feeling for how those words combine with other words in a multitude of different contexts. In addition, there is the obvious fact that even though you may know 95% of the characters in a given text, the remaining 5% are often the very characters that are crucial for understanding the main point of the text. A non-native speaker of English reading an article with the headline "JACUZZIS FOUND EFFECTIVE IN TREATING PHLEBITIS" is not going to get very far if they don't know the words "jacuzzi" or "phlebitis".

[0]: http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Yup, this is a demonstration of Zipf's Law, which affects all human languages: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law

Moser has been discussed to death in the past, his article is pretty exaggerated to say the least.

I think it's worth keeping in mind that for most of history, Chinese referred to a writing system that was shared between many different languages, each with different pronunciations, coming from different places (what is now modern China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan), so the writing system was a script designed around semantic meaning, not sound. This also lets it get used in Kanji where words may have multiple readings (let's not even get into how crazy that is).

Now that mandarin is de-facto "Chinese", the writing system no longer serves its purpose, and in fact a lot of the character simplifications made in the 20th century make radical substitutions based on sound, further complicating things.

Seems like he's trying to make a point just for the sake of it. For a start yeah as a German I don't understand the example headline he's giving there even though I started learning English some 20 years ago. So what does that tell us? Apparently English is even harder than Chinese.. Or maybe that you'll eventually stumble upon an unknown word every now and then and can quickly look it up.

Reading a Chinese newspaper knowing 2000 characters is absolutely possible. You can either just rely on good old guessing from context since, you know, the headline is usually followed by an article, or you just look that word up. It's really not like you will stumble at ever other character since like that guy even admits 95% are already covered by the 2000 you know. Imagine reading the sports section for the first time. You might find a dozen characters or words you don't know, but after a week or two you'll eventually know enough Chinese terms regarding soccer. Same for any specific topic in any foreign language. As for the character combos, first of all while learning it's not like you memorize each character separately, you're usually given some examples of such combinations using characters you already learned, phrases to go along with it etc. For many combinations its even pretty easy to guess what they mean.

When reading, we consume whole words at a time, even in syllabic / phonetic alphabet languages.

English is a poor comparison, because it - having consumed vocabulary from many other latin alphabet languages and preserved their spelling, among other historical accidents - does not have a consistent pronunciation rule: you have to know the word to know the pronunciation or otherwise only guess at it, which is similar performance of an ideographic language with pronunciation hints like Chinese.

Latin languages with consistent pronunciation are better examples.

Hangul though, is a superb example: truly designed system, syllabic and compositional. (other readers: look it up, it's really cool how it works).

It's unfortunate you were downvoted over the details here. The big picture - many languages have a large process of rote memorization as a barrier to literacy and such a process is entirely optional - is a great observation.

I always found the Korean Hangul to be quite fascinating.

Although, I must admit, I continue to find the Chinese writing system to be quite beautiful. It's like I'm looking at a strange advanced alien script every time I see it. So, I hope that it never dies. This writing style is a treasure. It is a gift to humanity, to human history, and to human culture. We need to preserve it any way that we can.

I hope that one day, an advanced brain-computer-interface technology will allow us to just download a language package into our brains, and we can get instant Chinese comprehension in just 60 seconds. You can get zapped, and go: "I know Chinese." Or rather: "Wo dong zhongwen."

[1] Here is some background on written Korean.

http://www.businessinsider.com/a-linguist-explains-why-korea...

[2] Here is an interesting comic to teach Korean in 15 minutes.

https://9gag.com/gag/3968335

At the turn of the 20th century, many Chinese literati shared the same sentiment. This was when Western ideas were in vogue, when China was getting humiliated by Western power, and when Communist ideas had currency. In fact, at one point the CCP had plans to eventually transition Chinese characters to phonetic symbols.

How it went was a classic tale of standardization without implementation. The first round of simplifications incorporated simplifications that were already in common use in informal settings, in calligraphy, and in ancient forms. This led it to be readily adopted. (fun fact; "traditional Chinese characters" are in some cases newer than simplified characters, where the character in question acquired a popular different meaning due to its use for phonetically similar words, and the old sense started to be used with a modified character to distinguish it from the borrowed meaning!)

The next round of simplification was too radical for the people, and so it was eventually rolled back.

> You write a "new" Chinese character

Why would you write a new character? How would others know what it means? Unless they figure it out from the radicals? (Which sounds like lossy as hell.)

"New" in the sense it's something not present in the dictionaries/fonts (see the other comment about the Bible characters). I'm not suggesting you invent a new character.

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