
Bad Character: If Chinese Were Phonetic - bemmu
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/if-chinese-were-phonetic
======
sparky_z
Is it just me, or does this essay seem to be missing an introduction, like
someone accidentally deleted the first few paragraphs? I initially assumed I
had been linked to "page 2" and went looking for a link back to the beginning.

Edit: Apparently, this is part of a series where guest authors are invited to
choose something to "uninvent" and explains why they think it has had a
negative impact on the world. The essay's abrupt beginning makes much more
sense in that context.

~~~
Jtsummers
[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-
this](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/uninvent-this)

For more of the series.

~~~
tlb
This one is great: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-
dancing](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/16/ban-dancing)

~~~
pavel_lishin
A great read, with awesome quotes, but I wish it had been "ban social pressure
to do things you don't enjoy doing."

"Come on, just dance for a little bit, you'll like it!"

"Rollercoasters are fun, trust me, this one is great!"

"Why won't you come eat Ramen with us, we know a great Ramen place! Don't be
such a killjoy."

~~~
StavrosK
Do people really pressure other people into eating? In my group(s), it's
always "I'll come for the company, but I'm not hungry", and that's fine.

People don't have to be putting stuff in their face to keep you company.

------
truthexposer
I've seen this sentiment a lot in Chinese-Americans that are not educated in
linguistics, along with other self-loathing sentiments.

First, literacy isn't completely related to the writing system. Look at
Spanish speaking countries, where the alphabet is more phonetic than the
English alphabet.

Second, Chinese characters that are more complex, i.e. consists of more than
one radical, are usually composed with a semantic component, giving indication
to the character's meaning, and a phonetic component, which gives an
indication to the sound of the character. Although this isn't a rule, it helps
a lot, and it's not like English doesn't have crazy non-phonetic spellings as
well (how tf is "through" supposed to be pronounced for a English learner?)

Last, the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones. This isn't necessarily
a bad thing, and not one out of design, but something that is the result of
being one of the oldest language families in the world. It allows for the
concise expression of many things using only single syllables. You might say,
but what about the crazy amount of ambiguity if the language has a lot of
homophones? Well, ambiguity is a huge problem in all languages and our brains
seem to manage. Now, even though homophones aren't a big problem in spoken
language, because of intonation and prosody giving a clue to how to analyze
sentences, written language is a different story, and it would be very hard to
make an easier system to handle it. For all you engineers, the fact that
Chinese has characters is essentially a performance trade off. More
information density for more ambiguity.

~~~
Banthum
It's actually a myth that most Chinese characters have a semantic component
(indicating meaning).

And the phonetic component often doesn't correspond to anything any modern
person would know.

The problem in both cases is the shift of language through China's long
history, and its divergence from the original design of the written
characters.

The problem with the semantic components is that the meaning is re-used and
stretched over and over. E.g. they used to use a 'foot' radical to represent a
journey towards a destination. Later that shifted to mean "in a straight line,
not veering left or right". Later that took on the meaning of "straight and
narrow" or "straight shooter" or "not-deviant". Then it becomes, "not
deviating from the right path". So now, the old foot radical typically means
"justice" or "correct".

And the image shifts over time. This is the old foot radical now: 正 Does it
look like a foot to you?

The problem is with the phonetics is language shifts. In many cases, in
ancient Chinese, the characters do have a phonetic component that hints at
pronunciation. but, the pronunciation changed over the last 2000-3000 years,
so the pronunciation hint that made perfect sense in the Han dynasty is now
meaningless because you're speaking a different language.

The result is that in the end the characters end up being arbitrary phonetic
symbols with some arbitrary meanings attached.

~~~
truthexposer
You're speaking out of your behind. Of course the signs are arbitrary with
respect to their signifiers, that's any language, but there are still mappings
between signs and their signifiers. English is no difference, am I supposed to
know what a 'm' sounds like by looking at it? Look up the Rebus principle, it
happens in every language.

And with respect to the phonetic shifts, from a linguistic perspective, most
changes of the phonetic radical involve one change of the initial sound, i.e.
bilabial to interdental, dental to alveolar, voiced to unvoiced. With respect
to the phonetic inventory of the language, these shifts are only one feature
shifts within an old SPE framework. These small featural differences, whether
conscious or not, (usually unconscious because we acquire languages during our
infancy) are picked up and used by the speaker of the language to categorize
words.

~~~
grzm
_You 're speaking out of your behind._

Your detailed and substantive comment works just as well without this uncivil
lead-in.

~~~
truthexposer
it's a much easier way to say, I significantly doubt your credentials as a
person educated in both Mandarin Chinese and linguistics

~~~
grzm
HN strongly values substantive and civil discourse. If that requires a little
more work on your part, please engage in it to help make HN a productive forum
where discussions like this can take place. (That said, I don't see it
necessary for the longer version either.)

------
lstyls
Color me shocked that somehow the author found the alphabet of his native
language to be superior.

This article takes as a given some assumptions that I don't understand at all.
China being resistant to change? There are few cohesive societies that I can
think of that have experienced more change than China since the end of WWII.
And it would be an understatement to say that the rise of literacy rates are
more strongly correlated with industrialization than adoption of phonetic
alphabets.

I think it's telling that the author grew up in a Chinese-American community.
Expat communities tend to lag their mother cultures in terms of social
progress. An experience growing up in a community could explain this "steeped
in tradition" characteristic that is attributed to Chinese culture here.

Disclaimer: I'm a white American. My wife is Chinese and emigrated herself
from China as a young adult; I get a lot of my perspective from her. Would be
interested to hear what Chinese members of HN think of the article.

~~~
waqf
Here is David Moser also arguing that the Chinese writing system is
objectively inferior:
[http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html](http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html)

~~~
lstyls
Not sure if you're trolling or not, but I'll bite.

Did you even read the article you linked to? The author makes so such
argument. The point of the article is that it's extremely difficult for non-
native speakers to learn written Chinese.

~~~
bsdetector
"What I mean is that Chinese is not only hard for us (English speakers), but
it's also hard in absolute terms. Which means that Chinese is also hard for
them, for Chinese people."

Author is saying it's unnecessarily hard for everybody.

~~~
lstyls
Point conceded, but it still doesn't take away from the broader point which is
that the parent makes a false assertion:

> David Moser also arguing that the Chinese writing system is objectively
> inferior

~~~
lstyls
@waqf my point is that being harder to learn the written language does not
mean that the language is _objectively_ inferior as a whole. There is no
universal set of objective metrics to judge the value of a language, and such
an assertion approaches cultural chauvinism.

------
thedz
For context, to forestall some knee jerk reactions I'm seeing:

1\. This essay is part of a series, where guest authors are explicitly asked
to "uninvent" something. So there's a level of built-in hot take to this.

2\. The author is Ted Chiang, writer of Story of Your Life (and the work that
the movie Arrival was based on). He's explored how language affects how we
think before (Story of Your Life/Arrival is explicitly about this). So this
kind of falls in line with that.

Anyway, I think this is a fascinating thought experiment to work through. What
_would_ China be like with a phonetic system? What would change? How much of
the culture is derived from the method of language and how much from other
factors?

------
Nadya
_> I would never have to read or hear any more popular misconceptions about
Chinese characters—that they’re like little pictures, that they represent
ideas directly, that the Chinese word for “crisis” is “danger” plus
“opportunity.” That, at least, would be a relief._

But... they are? They're ideograms and there is at least _some_ reasoning to
many of them. Things written with a part of "fire" tend to have a relation
to..well...fire and heat.

火, 烧 炊. You might see the relation 秋 shares with fire. But don't fall into the
trap that it is 100% consistent because you'd be wrong about 約.

And the last statement isn't even (technically) _wrong_. I'm not sure if the
Chinese word is the same [0] but for Japanese it is 危機. With individual
readings of "danger" and "opportunity" although a more reasonable 1-to-1
equation would be "danger" and "occasion". A crisis _is_ a dangerous occasion.
機 happens to have several meanings and one of those is "opportunity". It is
probably intentionally misleading but not incorrect to say it is danger +
occasion.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. For most compound words the
individual meanings of the hanzi/kanji are very relevant - maybe not _always_
relevant but more often than not.

[0] Google Translate tells me it is, so my confidence is >0% but not by much.

~~~
gizmo686
Most of the time (In Japanese, at least), the Kanji do not map to meaning per-
se, but to roots. For example, in English, we have words like "lap-top", "uni-
cycle", "roof-top", "blue-berry", that clearly have multiple semantic
components within them. In these cases, in Japanese, the words would be
written with the kanji for their roots. In more linguistic terms, the kanjis
often refer to morphemes, not ideas.

There are some exceptions. For example, in Japanese, today (kyou) is written
as "今日”, even though it is a single morpheme. In cases such as this the kanji
are used for their meanings. In cases such as this, is is not clear how much
the kanji actually help, because the sementic information provided is precisly
the information that you would get from knowing the roots, and you (or rather
a native speaker) does not have to be taught roots (or at least those roots
that still have semantic meaning).

~~~
Nadya
I'm not sure what you mean by separating "meaning" from "roots". To myself
they are one in the same (the root word or a meaning of the root "word", there
is no difference in my opinion). Could you provide some examples of what you
mean? Maybe I'm thinking too literally or you meant "root" (as in radicals)
different from "root" (as in root word).

「自転車」, 「図書館」, 「作家」, 「日光」,「棋士」. You even have witty ones like 「親子丼」. Just have
to be careful about ones like 「多少」.

The reason I would say not to rely on such literal meanings to define words is
because some require some stretch of the imagination like「子宮」 and my rule of
thumb is if it it requires a stretch of the imagination it's because it
doesn't actually mean that. But literal translations can still be useful as
mnemonics to learn new words/kanji. Like a pair of training wheels that
eventually get removed.

------
phillryu
One of my favorite Ted Chiang short stories also explores how much is shaped
by our language:
[http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of...](http://subterraneanpress.com/magazine/fall_2013/the_truth_of_fact_the_truth_of_feeling_by_ted_chiang)

------
mdturnerphys
For those unaware, Ted Chiang wrote the short story that the 2016 film Arrival
was based on.

------
gumby
>Imagine a world in which written English had changed so little that works of
“Beowulf”’s era remained continuously readable for the past twelve hundred
years.

This works with an alphabetic system: in Iceland kids read the sagas in
school.

~~~
waqf
And in fact, written English has changed very little in the past five hundred
years or so: it's easy to read Shakespeare and not too hard to read Chaucer,
although their pronunciation would have been considerably different. Before
that period there was a much greater rate of change in the written language.

~~~
douche
Aside from the spelling, Chaucer really is not too bad. I must have had to
read a really, really abysmal treatment in school, because I did not remember
the Canterbury Tales rhyming at all...

[http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm](http://www.librarius.com/canttran/gptrfs.htm)

------
failrate
It is the intense educational requirements of the Chinese character system
that led to the development of Hangul-am, the Korean character system. You
still end up with a similar block structure, but it is phonetic and has about
the same number of components as there are letters in the English alphabet.

~~~
smilekzs
That might be true, but an (perhaps more) important reason is literally the
first 8 (chinese) characters in Hunminjeongeum [1], translated as follows:

> Because the speech of this country is different from that of China, it [the
> spoken language] does not match the [Chinese] letters.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunminjeongeum)

~~~
failrate
Yes, nationalism is an important consideration. I did not consider that in my
opinion. I will now freely admit that there are probably other good reasons I
have not considered. Thank you for the reference.

------
kmicklas
Some linguists (mostly Western) have advocated transitioning to a mixed system
of characters and pinyin. I don't think that will ever happen because an
uglier and less harmonious writing system could not possibly be devised.
Chinese would be much better off with something syllabic and square, like
Hangul. With some amount of fiddling I think it could be made to work for most
of the different Chinese languages and potentially even elucidate cognates
between them, retaining one of the main benefits of characters.

------
yongjik
FWIW, I like Jared Diamond's thesis better, which is that the geography of
China (a big habitable landmass with no sizable peninsulas or isolated areas)
made a single political entity inevitable. It probably explains why the
Chinese culture has more emphasis on tradition (if that is true, I mean): you
can more easily identify yourself with your ancestors from 500 BC, because
they are all Chinese. A Spaniard would have a harder time identifying with
Celts, Romans, or Moors.

~~~
mbroncano
I mostly agree: 500 BC might be a tad too remote in time, but while risking
being pedantic, Spaniards do identify themselves with Moors [1] or Romans [2]
often, in most traditions.

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moros_y_cristianos)
[2] [http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-
quieres/agenda/fiestas/murci...](http://www.spain.info/en_US/que-
quieres/agenda/fiestas/murcia/fiestas_de_carthagineses_y_romanos.html)

------
divbit
I think in a software startup mindset it could be easy to think that more
efficient => better, but a point not mentioned in the essay is that written
Chinese is simply beautiful compared to e.g., the simple 26 character
alphabet, which is quicker to learn. This also applies to some of the other
alphabets such as Hindi, Arabic, etc. But Chinese has so many characters, it
really shines.

------
wsxcde
As someone who knows a bunch of different scripts (Perso-Arabic/Urdu, Brahmi-
based scripts like Devanagari, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali and obviously the Roman
script), scripts do make a difference.

Yes, a lousy script isn't a fatal impediment. You can produce beautiful
literature even with a poorly-designed script. And I suspect script complexity
is only weakly correlated to literacy. Learning to read involves a lot more
than recognizing characters and words. But a bad script definitely adds a
layer of confusion that is completely unnecessary and ends up creating an
elitist and cumbersome language.

The standard counterpoint to complaints about scripts is some form of
whataboutism involving English. Yes, English is not remotely phonetic, but the
modern form of the Roman script for English is actually pretty decent. It has
a lot of visual differentiation between different letters. Compare this to
Persian and Arabic where the placement of a dot or three makes all the
difference between wildly different sounds.

The Roman script also has relatively few letters. This comes at the cost of
ambiguity, and we need to make up sequences for certain sounds (th, sh, ch),
but also means the learning curve is a lot less steep. Persian and Arabic have
the huge mess involving initial, medial, final and standalone forms of a
letter -- it serves no purpose really. Brahmi-based scripts are all abugidas
which means vowels are folded into adjoining consonants and so you need to
learn about 4X as many symbols as English.

You do have to guess what a letter sounds like in English (g,j,k,c). But this
is also pretty common. Tamil doesn't distinguish between voiced and unvoiced
consonants. This is an unnecessary annoyance. A much worse example is of
Persian, Arabic and Urdu where the script allows one to drop a lot of vowels.
This is especially bad for Urdu. For example, the Hindustani words for here
(idhar) and there (udhar) are written identically in Urdu, so you need to
"backtrack" to fill-in vowels appropriately based on the rest of the sentence.

Yes, English isn't phonetic, and is unstructured and unsystematic. But it is
still a pretty decent script compared to some of the others out there. From an
Indian perspective, I wish we could move to one script -- perhaps some variant
of Devanagari for all our languages. There's really little purpose in
differentiating between Gurmukhi and Devanagari. And we should just forget
about Urdu all together. It made sense when the goal was to teach people one
script that gave them access to both Hindustani and the official court
languages of Persian/Arabic. But for today, Devanagari is vastly superior for
writing any dialect of Hindustani. Similarly, Kannada has an almost bijective
mapping to Devanagari, but each symbol in Kannada is just so much more
elaborate and a pain to write. Life would be much better with one script.

Bring up changing scripts though and people -- and this appears to be a global
phenomenon -- just go nuts! People need to realize that changing scripts isn't
a terrible thing and has occurred many times for many languages. We're not
going to forget our languages/culture just because we choose to change the
symbols we use in writing.

~~~
xenadu02
Perhaps someone with a linguistics background can chime in but my (layperson)
understanding is that many writing systems start out pictographic and evolved
over time, become syllabaries, then eventually alphabets. The Chinese writing
system represents an incomplete transition. Egyptian represents a mixed but
mostly complete transition, as by the late third period their writing system
was mostly based on the sounds of the symbols, not the literal concepts they
originally meant (e.g.: using a snake symbol for the "s" sound). Middle period
writings are often a mix of all three: some symbols used for their literal
meaning, some symbols used to represent syllables, and some for their sound.
Sometimes (but not always) there were markings next to the symbols to indicate
what "mode" you should read them in.

All YMMV of course, I'm not an expert. I try to avoid being too euro-centric
as it is easy for me to claim alphabets are superior because that's what I
know, but it does seem like memorizing abstract rules and a small set of
letters is easier than memorizing thousands of characters. It is certainly
easier to deal with by machine (whether that be a typewriter, a terminal, or
designing a modern OpenType font).

------
warlox
> smartphones are impossible to use if you’re restricted to Chinese characters

This isn't actually true. Handwriting recognition is much more popular than
any other means of text input in Hong Kong.

