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Comment by dwohnitmok | Hacker News Reader

Here's an example of a series of phono-semantic characters that's fairly easy to pronounce for English speakers.

成, 誠, 城 all are pronounced cheng, so we say that 成 is the phonetic compound that the other two characters use to denote their own pronunciation.

言 and 土 on the other two characters then are semantic compounds that hint at the meaning of the character.

言 indicates speech/language and 誠 can be interpreted as "true to one's word," i.e. honest/straightforward/earnest/sincere.

土 indicates earth and by extension that which is built and 城 is in fact a kind of structure, namely "city walls" (later also just "city").

There's some subtlety here where the pronunciation rule doesn't always hold exactly, e.g. 盛 is pronounced sheng, and sometimes not at all, e.g. 兌, 說, and 悅 are all pronounced very differently from one another. This is due to a variety of hysterical raisins.

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Thanks, though I had to zoom in like an old man to see all those details :)

If the spoken sound is the same, I assume the meaning comes from context. Are the written adornments therefore redundant? Is it much like English how we now have knight and night?

In spoken Mandarin Chinese you can normally derive the meaning from context but in Classical Chinese (or in fact anything written more formally) it's not necessarily so straightforward.

There is a poem that illustrates it, where each syllable is pronounced exactly the same, /shi/ just with different tones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_... (施氏食獅史). It goes like that:

    « Shī Shì shí shī shǐ »
    Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
    Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
    Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
    [...]

Good luck trying to figure out the meaning without the "written adornments."

Yes I've seen that poem before.

According to google translate though, the tones on the parent example are identical. So context would be all they have to go by unless there is an aspect I'm missing as a non-speaker.

It's probably the case that reading is just harder for us to process than listening in general which is why jokes like http://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm exist. We hold onto a lot of redundancy too in the English world.

Amusingly that link actually undersells how English orthography fails to capture English pronunciation and even its final sentence has many pronunciation "mistakes" by its own standard.

> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

The first "a" in "Fainali" is not pronounced the same as the second "a" in "Fainali" (e.g. finally does not rhyme with rally and rawly, the correspondence between the latter two depending on your own regional accent). The "x" in "xen" and "xe" is not the same sound as the "x" in "xrewawt" or in "orxogrefkl." The "o" in "lojikl" is not the same "o" as in "kohirnt." The "e" in "xe" is not the same "e" as in "xen" and is not the same "e" as in "orxogrefkl." And more.

And that's not even touching stuff that has heavy regional variation such as the "e" in "aafte" and the "i" in "kohirnt."

Formal written Chinese is very different from the spoken form, essentially to the point it could be considered another language altogether. This situation isn't really comparable to anything in English.

In spoken Mandarin, lexical units are generally formed of multiple-character compounds (typically 2 to 4 characters). In such a scenario, the character being used can be figured out just from the context. If such an utterance is transcribed phonetically and written down, the same still holds. So your conjecture is correct to the extent it pertains to the colloquial language.

However, the same cannot be said for the formal written language, which is based on Classical Chinese, and much more succint: here, each character is often an independent lexical unit. At the same time, numerous more obscure characters come into play and annoyingly many of them tend to be homophones. In particular, in Mandarin, as a result of the phonetic processes it underwent, there are a lot of characters pronounced either /yi/ or /shi/.

At this point, figuring out the meaning of what is being said tends to become cumbersome or downright impossible (as in the case of the poem), unless the actual written characters can be seen, which is usually not an issue as this form of the language is used predominantly in writing (with the exception of a huge number of idiomatic expressions that educated people are expected to know by heart and be accustomed to).

And it is this latter form of Chinese that is the language of history, culture, but also anything more sophisticated in general, such as any better news publications. So while a basic, dumbed-down version of Mandarin would survive even when simplified even further, perhaps to the point of being written only phonetically, I doubt any educated Chinese would willingly sign up for it (particularly as there are is no incentive to do so since everybody learned the language as a child anyway, and for those who did it well, it is a marker of status).

If you want the Chinese to ditch their "written adornments," you could just as well be telling them to switch to Esperanto.

I'm curious how the poem with proper pronunciation sounds like.

Here's one rendition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWFNhuDQ0Tc

I am sure there are tongue twisters in English can be used to explain the interpretability of the language /s

Yes it comes from "context," but that's always true right? How the spoken language is understood is in a sense completely orthogonal to the written language for any language. E.g. the English spoken language has no way of distinguishing between the word "night" having two meanings, one being the opposite of "day," the other being a warrior and two words "night" and "knight." That is there is no real distinction between a single word with multiple meanings and multiple words with the same pronunciation at the spoken language level. Think about all the various definitions of the word "get" which also all require context to disambiguate in the spoken language even though there is no "written adornment."

That is to a large extent the "meaning" of the orthography is irrelevant to the spoken language.

I could come up with an alternative highly differentiating orthography for e.g. French without considering its spoken language either. I could mandate that "suis" as in "être" is not spelled "suis" but rather "swi" and "suis" as in "suivre" is still spelled "suis," but that has absolutely no impact on the spoken language. There is no difference to a speaker between a world where we have "swi" and "suis" and a world where we have two meanings of "suis."

Separately, it's also important to realize that Chinese characters don't always correspond to words in the same way that happens in English. From an English perspective, it is easier to think of Chinese characters in modern Mandarin as individual morphemes [0], e.g. stuff like prefixes and suffixes, that are also sometimes standalone words, rather than always entire words themselves.

So for example 誠 is not a standalone word in the same way "hono-" (e.g. "honesty," "honor," etc.) is not a standalone word in English, even though it is a recognizable prefix that means something.

So when spoken, speakers rely on a combination of audio and context cues to disambiguate the meaning and how word segmentation is supposed to be done (in the same way that English speakers both are able to distinguish between "knight" and "night" as well as "prototype" and the non-existent words "pro totype"). Note that this is subtly different from "disambiguating among characters." A less literate Chinese speaker might think that in fact 成, 誠, 城 are all a single character 成 that can be used in different ways when used as prefixes/suffixes in different words and we would have no way of knowing that without testing the speaker's writing capabilities.

Classical Chinese, the written, formal Chinese language from ~2500 years ago to ~100 years ago, however, where individual characters can almost always be used as standalone words, does present an interesting challenge when pronounced with a modern Mandarin pronunciation due to the high number of homophones in modern Mandarin (among characters but not words!). It can be very difficult to understand long tracts of Classical Chinese if it's spoken aloud using modern Mandarin.

This makes Classical Chinese essentially a written-only language. And in fact other systems for pronouncing Classical Chinese exist in countries that used it for writing but did not use Chinese for speaking (e.g. Japan, Vietnam, and Korea). This led to an interesting situation where literate individuals from those countries could communicate in writing with one another but not verbally.

[0]: This is a simplification. Despite many articles to the contrary, it is not true that all Chinese characters are morphemes. There are some rare cases of multi-character words whose constituent characters have no individual meaning and cannot be used outside of that single word.

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