Hacker News Reader

Comment by j7ake | Hacker News Reader

My analogy is that 1,2,3,4,5 is a unified script that allows anybody to understand writing.

However, saying the words 1,2,3,4,5 will depend on your local language.

The analogy to numerals is great to get a western-language speaker to grok the basic mechanism by which a symbol can be unrelated to a sound, reused across completely different languages, and even have different ‘readings’ in different contexts (2, 2nd, 12, 1/2…)

The use of 2nd is a better example of the limitations of this system. The reality of written Standard Chinese is that you'd use "2nd" to write both "second", but also "deuxieme", instead of writing "2eme".

Right, that case is a little more useful to analogize the way Japanese uses kanji (Han characters) with local Japanese inflections (okurigana) to adapt the Chinese writing system to their local inflected language. We write the word ‘second’ using the Arabic symbol that connotes the concept of ‘two’, followed by an irregular English inflection to make it ordinal. Is ‘seco’ a ‘reading’ of the 2 symbol? Kinda sorta?

Also helps you appreciate that Japan is not completely insane for having seemingly completely unrelated number words for different contexts, even though they write them with the same numeral. Turns out, so do many western languages (although generally only for ordinal/cardinal, not for the endless range of counters Japanese has)

The fact that as a native English speaker this seems like not how you actually read or write numerals at all - no, of course 3 doesn’t ’read’ as ‘thi(r)’ - also suggests that there is a less mechanistic way to understand the relationships between hanzi and words than learners often try to apply (we want to find the ‘rules’ that must underpin these things), and that the way native speakers of Mandarin, Cantonese or Japanese think of the relationship between these symbols and the words they are writing is much more organic - and that’s okay.

> seemingly completely unrelated number words for different context

I don't know much Japanese but I don't see it as that weird. I see it as something like "murder of crows" or "pile of sand". Something cultural that was there for a reason (or a monk somewhere) and now we have to memorize it.

I think the GP is referring to a different part of the Japanese numbering system: the two different numerals used with different counting words for 1-10; e.g. the fact that you say "muttsu no koto" [6つのこと] for "six things" but "rokko no retasu" [6個のレタス] for "six heads of lettuce".

This is what they are comparing to the difference between "first" and "one" in English, which are obviously two different origin words for the number 1 (unlike sixth and six, where sixth is clearly just derived from six).

Ah so it's about onyomi and kunyomi (Chinese and Japanese reading)? It screws me up sometimes too but there's only two choices. What I heard lots of people cries about sometimes is the counter words, that's indeed so many, so I'm referring to that instead.

Yeah, measure words aren't really that strange a concept in English, it's just that we don't normally consider them. But we have e.g. "a pinch of salt", "a lashing of ginger beer" [1], "a lump of coal", "a slice of cake", "a piece of music", "a spit of rain", "a drop of water", "a bucket of water", "a sheet of paper", "a ream of paper", "a glass of beer", "a bottle of beer", "a sip/mouthful of beer", etc. The last few sets of words were to show an even more useful correspondence with Chinese - as they would be 一杯酒，一瓶酒，一口酒 respectively, and suddenly they seem a lot more reasonable.

We also have a LOT of these for plurals and take great pride in knowing all the stupid ones - "a gaggle of geese", "a murder of crows", "a herd of cows", "a fleet of ships". These are all really just the same as the measure words in Chinese with many specialisations for large groups of specific things.

We also have plenty of measure words in English when we take something from the realm of uncountable to countable, as I showed in the examples above, and in many ways Chinese tends to have less weird single-use ones like "gaggle of geese", just a larger variety of the common ones. So there's a special word for "long thin things", "vertical long thing things", "flat things on a (mathematical) plane", "a lump", "a slice", "a vehicle", "a machine" as well as the fallback 个/個 when none of the more specific ones are appropriate. I think it's only because we generally don't use any measure word for small groups of countable nouns in English that we think it's somehow strange that other languages do.

There's also not so many counter words to be a problem. Sure, the absolute number is high (some say very precise numbers like 214, 232, etc, some people low ball it at 100, some say over 900 words if you count all the old obscure words), but in practice, about a dozen of them will cover almost all the cases you think are hard for English speakers. So, 个，条，只，支，本，件，张, 家，座，部，辆，头 are probably the most common ones that don't usually have an English translation, almost every other measure word would also require a measure word in English, e.g. 条=strip, 张=sheet, 些=few, 双=pair, 样=kind, 种=type, 头=head, 片=slice, 分/份=piece, 点=bit, 块=lump, etc.

As with most things about learning a new language, it's also important to embrace the differences - they give you a new insight into how other people think about things, and seeing when someone else's internal model for something differs to yours can help you better understand your own model as well as the new one you're learning.

[1] You'll understand this if you ever read The Famous Five!

Those are language-specific, the common way to write an ordinal (outside of English) is with a dot - 2. = 2nd.

I don't think any "common way" of this kind really exists. In my country, the common way to write "second" ("a doua") is either II or II-a (so using roman numerals). In French, either 2eme or 2e are the common ways. I've never even seen this "2." spelling for ordinals.

Regardless, my point was that Chinese spelling is not as universal as it is made out to be, that different Chinese dialects/languages just use the Standard Chinese spelling, even when it doesn't match their own spoken language, just like a French person using "2nd" to spell "deuxieme".

But it also shows that you don't need logograms.

We don't have a distinct symbol for 35 just because English and French pronounce it differently.

Unlike with numbers, day to day language needs to convey a larger variety of concepts hence why logograms are still needed. Much like how more advanced math requires different symbols and operators that are akin to mathematical logograms to convey additional concepts beyond the fundamental quantities of 0 to 9.

Alphabets are often linked to sound, and it would be a tremendous challenge to create an "alphabet" analogue that links to a set of fundamental concepts that you can somehow rearrange to form higher level concepts and can still be universally understood without it linking to sound.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com