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Comment by akasakahakada | Hacker News Reader

Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation. Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch. If you don't specify the pitch in the phonetic transcript, the level of uniqueness in pronunciation of vocabulary is so much lower than other languages.

Same may say Japanese can express their language solely in pronunciation (Kana) but this is not true. There are easily 20+ meanings for the same pronunciation and are even hard to distinguish them with context provided. Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).

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For a simple example in practice, many Japanese names can be written multiple ways based on the kanji used, ending up with different meanings and different implications, while being pronounced exactly the same.

For example, the common name Michiko can be written in many different ways with many different meanings, such as:

    美智子 — "beautiful wise child"
    美千子 — "child of a thousand beauties"
    見知子 — "child of recognition"
    道子 — "child of the way"
    路子 — "child of the road"
    倫子 — "child of morals"
    皆子 — "child of all"
    通子 — "child of passage"

You should look at something like "sousou" or "koukou", the range of meaning spread from noun to verb to adjective to everything.

This is not that unusual for languages. For example,

> range

Can mean a wide open area, a set of things, a stovetop, a measure, to measure, to vary between extremes, to line up, or to pick an opposite side.

No, "range" do not share the same prounciation with other word.

https://www.homophone.com/search?type=begin&q=range

I think what you misinterpreted is that you think "sousou" and "koukou" is a word in Japanese, no, they are sound, the prounciation.

I think they were just making the more general point that most language are very context-sensitive.

“Dear” and “deer” if you want an explicit English homophone.

Please consider the amount. How many collision can happen in one prounciation in English? It is on average 2, maximum about 4. Chinese is like 6-10, Japanese is like 10-20.

If you don't do comparison, of course there is no difference.

Are you saying Japanese speech isn't fully comprehensible without seeing the written characters?

If not, what are you saying?

I mean, I'll believe you that there are more homonyms in Japanese, sure, but it must still operate as a spoken language somehow.

Just give more examples.

Look a doctor, consult a doctor, supervise a doctor, all sound the same, have same phonic transcript, in Japanese, only differ in the Kanji/Chinese character. Either you extend the sentence and write more words, or show that you are sick and have runny nose, otherwise it is hard to convey idea clear without Kanji/Chinese characters.

Often you will see people talk in Japanese will say "erh!?" then stop and both of them are confused. Half of the reason is that people are just guessing what their component trying to convey but as the conversation goes longer and having more context info, they found that they are not talking about the same thing.

With lesser context info e.g. situation, places, visual clues, emotion, intonation, harder you can comprehend.

What is a "word"? Whether a sequence of sounds/symbols is one word with two unrelated meanings or two different words that are coincidentally represented the same way is quintessentially a semantic argument.

You could add tones as numbers; a la "yi1 wan3 shui3 jiao4, duo1 shao3 qian2?". But that's really clunky to read. It's not that much to add tones as accents; that would work OK for spoken language, since you already have to make sure it's unambiguous. But it wouldn't work as well for texts primarily designed to be written, as there remain a lot of homophones.

And this create a practical/political problem that people speak a different dialect cannot recognize what this encoding is trying to express. Even though literally they share the same writing system.

I mean, yeah. You give up one thing and gain another. For instance, it would be much easier for people speaking those other "dialects" to learn to speak and understand putonghua, if they were seeing a phoenetic form of putonghua all around, rather than seeing characters which they read in their own words.

Alternately, we could all replace our spoken languages with Chinese characters. Then we could all read Chinese subtitles, and reach each others' languages to some extent.

But I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone not already using Chinese characters for their own language who would consider the benefits worth the cost. It seems to me (as an outsider who's been studying the language for a few years) a sort of linguistic "Stockholm syndrome".

How do they recognize that their own language when they speak it?

The case GP is talking about is (say) having subtitles in Chinese characters (in Mandarin), which can be read by people who speak Hokkien or Cantonese; or having street signs in Hong Kong written in "Written Cantonese", which can be read by people from Beijing.

The answer to the question, "How does someone from Beijing understand someone speaking Cantonese?" is generally, "They don't."

If someone from Beijing doesn't understand someone speaking Cantonese, having a phonetic/phonemic writing system per dialect will not be any worse.

I think GP‘s point is that right now they can read the same text even if they can’t understand it spoken. Moving to a phonetic script would mean they can no longer read the same text, ergo worse

A phonetic/phonemic script would be worse for mutual intelligibility for those privileged enough to know written Chinese, which is notoriously difficult to learn.

But it might be better for literacy in general because it would be much easier to learn. And, though it is a comparably much more trivial issue, better for creating something like a morse code.

That said, I know there are many other issues apart from simple ease of learning that figure in to what language people learn or want to use. Written Chinese has a rich history and culture, and it's tied to people's identity so of course jettisoning it for something arguably more practical with the added downside of loss of mutual intelligibility among those who know written Chinese would likely result in strong opposition.

If you see the counter-arguments are coming from historical and cultural stuff, then you are making wrong assumption here. At least not in this branch. Literally you are the first one to mention this argument.

Think of Chinese as one script but multiple languages. The spoken languages have about as much diversity as European languages, but they all share a mapping to characters which are meaning based, not pronunciation based.

So you can use Mandarin pinyin, (though there are a lot of homophones) to serialize to a pronunciation, it wouldn't be understandable by a Cantonese speaker.

Hmm... so would written chinese be one language, and all the spoken language different languages? They just developed a script based lingua franca.

"Language" vs "Dialect" is a matter of degree. If you have a tiny bit of exposure to, say, German or Icelandic, you can actually catch a fair amount of what's said in those languages given the context. The same is true for Mandarin and Cantonese. A lot of the words really are just different pronunciations of the same word; 我 (me) is wo3 in Mandarin, and ngo5 in Cantonese; 你 (you) is ni3 in Mandarin and nei2 in Cantonese. A lot of the grammar concepts are the same; you don't conjugate verbs, you instead have "markers" that indicate things like "completed action" or "experienced action"; measure words, and so on.

But a lot of the grammar and words are just different -- at least in the spoken language; and typically subtitles are all in Mandarin.

So my son watches Peppa Pig in Cantonese; I can read most of the subtitles in Mandarin. Peppa will say, "Da4 di, nei2 tai2 ha2!" (Look, Daddy!); but the subtitles will say 爸爸，你看一下！ (ba1 ba! ni3 kan4 yi2 xia4!) Note that only one of those four words is the same (你/ni3/nei2). "da di" (Cantonese) has been replaced with "baba" (Mandarin); "tai2" is replaced with "kan4" (a different character); and "ha2" has been replaced with "yi2 xia4" (an extra word).

"It's all Chinese" is a sort of fiction; and from my outsider's perspective, a fiction which heavily favors Beijing and the Han majority at the expense of the various minority groups. Written Mandarin is pretty close to spoken Mandarin; "official" written Cantonese is very different than spoken Cantonese -- to the extent that the verb "to be" is a completely separate word.

> Absolutely no since everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation.

This conflates so much. Hanzi (mostly) isn't pronunciation-based[1], but Hanzi is simply one, and a secondary one at that, representation of the language. The primary representation of the language is the spoken representation, and unless Mandarin speakers spend their time in silence, it's very much pronunciation based.

[1] But it make plenty use of rebuses, where you have a character made up of two characters mashed together into a single character, one part indicating the kind of thing (such as a tree), and another giving a word it sounds like.

> Even the meaning of a word change by the pitch.

No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. We wouldn't call "bat" and "pat" the same word in English, even though the only difference is that they different voicing, nor would we call "stoop" and "stop" the same word when they differ only in vowel length. The same goes for languages with contrasts in aspiration, ingressive vs egressive consonants, and so on. Tone is no different.

> Just open any Japanese dictionary then you will see that it is a completely broken language if without the expressive power of Kanji (or Chinese characters).

Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.

> No, these are distinct words that have different tone contours. "bat" and "pat" ... "stoop" and "stop" the same word

I don't want to repeat but your examples are not the situation in Chinese speaking system. When you write out the sound of different words, they are literally the same e.g. "stop". The distinction is whether you pronounce it in C major or E or G. Same goes for many southeast asia languages although not an expert on those.

> Japanese speakers must have awful trouble speaking with one another in that case.

In fact large chunk of jokes (either modern of traditional) from Japan is due to different vocabularies share the same prounciation.

Even not a small proportion of detective stories' twist comes from different interpretation of the same prounciation. Like someone say something on the phone but misunderstood by the others, or someone writen down a message before dead in Kana (prounciation) instead of Kanji (meaning). The whole story is just playing with those linguistic hash collisions.

Yeah, I don't speak chinese, but there are many european languages that use accents to change sounds of vowels. In portuguese, the difference between grandmother (avó) and grandfather (avô) is just in how you pronounce the o. I am extremely skeptical that any language that humans speak could be impossible to create a phonetical writing system for. It may need features that the latin alphabet lacks, but it should be possible.

no, this is not correct. you don't need perfect pitch to speak proper chinese, it's about the relative pitch contours. C vs E vs G has nothing to do with it. and native chinese speakers are not conceptualizing it as "pronunciation" + "pitch" as two separate things that exist alongside each other. the pitch is a fundamental part of the pronunciation, not external to it

i dont know japanese but it sounds like your example is just saying that japanese humor has a lot of puns

Vietnamese is a tone language, and it is written in a Latin script (with a number of accent marks). If it can be done with Vietnamese, it can be done with Chinese. For that matter, lots of tone languages are written in Latin scripts.

The problem with Chinese is not that it is a tone language (not absolute pitch, but relative pitch); the problem is that there are many regional dialects with different tone systems, and other pronunciation differences as well. Not that that's a real problem; English has lots of dialects with very different pronunciation systems, and it's written in a dialect-agnostic way.

> everything about Chinese is not based on pronunciation

Then how can Chinese speakers understand each other when they speak?

Historically, people from different regions would be able to read each other's writing (send letters to each other) even if their spoken dialects/languages were mutually incomprehensible. You get this in European history, too, just not to the same degree.

Usually from contexts. If datastream could be interpreted as "correct horse battery staple" or "add salt to taste" and the situational context is a cooking instruction, the latter interpretation has to be correct.

It would be a pretty rough deal for people relying on text-to-speech if that were the case.

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