

Implications of the Soviet Dungan Script for Chinese Language Reform - ivank
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/dungan.html

======
quant18
Basically Victor Mair's papers always come down to "I don't like Chinese
characters", and "I don't like calques". I'm not so fond of characters either,
but I also think calques are a damn sight better than loanwords --- and as
Mair notes, a character-based writing system has the side-effect of forcing
you to make calques, rather than just stealing foreign words wholesale without
understanding them.

Among Аnglophones, the French have given calques a bad name. We hear the story
all the time in the media: some French people start using an English word to
talk about a new concept from the US/UK. Years later, a Language Academy
bureaucrat belatedly notices. He wrinkles his nose. He comes up with a
cumbersome, incorrect translation of the English word for that concept. Then,
for his _pièce de résistance_ , he forces everyone in France to use his new
translation.

But in Chinese, the process of coming up with calques is decentralised,
immediate, and competitive. The first guy to publish a Chinese academic paper
or newspaper article on a foreign concept puts together some Chinese word
roots and comes up with a calque. The next guy to cite him might accept his
translation, or abbreviate it, or reject it entirely. And so on. After a
period of confusion, the best word wins. And the Chinese language has a new
word whose meaning can reasonably be guessed at, even by someone who's never
seen it before.

~~~
delackner
I'm not familiar with his other papers, but is there an assertion in that very
long article that you take issue with? I'm no scholar in the field, but my on
the ground experience clicks with what he is saying.

The impenetrability of chinese character-based written languages is a huge
difficulty even for native speakers. As just one example, Japan supposedly has
a 99% literacy rate. This is only possible by redefining literacy to mean
"capable of reading at a childish level". A staggering number of the japanese
people I encounter readily admit that they cannot read the newspaper, as just
one example. For another, I received a notice at work a few weeks ago and
asked a co-worker who had received an identical notice what it was about.

He looked at it very intently for about 15 seconds, pronounced it to be about
retirement funding or some such, and then the co-worker who actually handed
the paper out explained that it was a government notice on some completely
unrelated topic. We're talking about a piece of paper containing fewer words
than your entire comment, and he completely misread even the _topic_ of it.
This is a university-educated Japanese person who is indeed "literate".

~~~
quant18
Oh no, don't get me wrong --- I agree: Chinese characters are hard. People
can't read them. An alphabet would be much easier.

On the other hand, Mair seems to think that slaughtering your native lexicon
and replacing it with a bunch of English/Russian loanwords would be a good
thing, while I disagree. (This has been the exact consequence of
alphabetisation in Dungan and Korean). And I also think that devoting a career
to trying to get China to switch to the Roman alphabet is an irrational waste
of brainpower --- it's never going to happen, for reasons totally unrelated to
efficiency or practicality.

But these are little quibbles compared to the real issue: even if China threw
out Chinese characters tomorrow, all the historical linguists like Mair would
STILL be mad, cuz the damage has already been done: we may never have any
clear idea of the pronunciations of so many old languages from civilisations
in China's orbit. In the rare event those civilisations' literate elites
wanted to write in their own languages (instead of writing in classical
Chinese), they had to use Chinese characters to try to approximate the sounds,
because they never developed their own alphabets --- and their approximations
sucked. In the mean time, the Indologists point and laugh cuz they can tell
you _exactly_ how Sanskrit sounded all those thousands of years ago.

