The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy
"DeFrancis's book is first rate. It entertains. It teaches. It demystifies. It counteracts popular ignorance as well as sophisticated (cocktail party) ignorance. Who could ask for anything more? There is no other book like it.... It is one of a kind, a first, and I would not only buy it but I would recommend it to friends and colleagues, many of whom are visiting China now and are adding 'two-week-expert' ignorance to the two kinds that existed before. This is a book for everyone." --Joshua A. Fishman, research professor of social sciences, Yeshiva University, New York "Professor De Francis has produced a work of great effectiveness that should appeal to a wide-ranging audience. It is at once instructive and entertaining. While being delighted by the flair of his novel approach, the reader will also be led to ponder on some of the most fundamental problems concerning the relations between written languages and spoken languages. Specifically, he will be served a variety of information on the languages of East Asia, not as dry pedantic facts, but as appealing tidbits that whet the intellectual appetite. The expert will find much to reflect on in this book, for Professor DeFrancis takes nothing for granted." --William S.Y. Wang, professor of linguistics, University of California at Berkeley
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What Hacker News says
- Highly recommend on this subject John DeFrancis' "The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy" (1984)!
- That's a political hornets' nest that you're poking there.
There is Pinyin, the official romanisation of Mandarin Chinese, in which for example "汉语拼音" becomes "hànyǔ pīnyīn". So, one could write using that. The argument typically is that Chinese has too many homonyms to make that practicable. I'm not sure I buy that, as spoken Mandarin is presumably intellegible, despite those homonyms.
There's a lot of info in the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis, and on this website: http://www.pinyin.info
> But surely writing speed must be slower.
I've found that that is not the case. While a typical character is more complex than a typical letter, you need fewer of them. At uni, I tested that with a native Chinese speaker and a native German speaker. We chose several random English sentences, they translated them into their respective language, and then we timed how long they took to write them down (by hand, in Chinese, German, English). It was basically the same, no systematic difference.
> How do chinese people even type?
There are several input systems, some based on pronunciation, some based on the shape or strokes.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_input_methods_for_comp...
or https://www.hackingchinese.com/chinese-input-methods-a-guide...
- > It's a logographic language.
You're tongue-in-cheek, presumably, but others were not:
'It is because of the widespread discrepancies noted above that Kono (1969:85) places English in the category of logographic scripts along with Chinese while Zachrisson (1931:5) goes so far as to contend that "English shares with Chinese the doubtful honor of being made up chiefly of ideographs, pictures of words which must be seen and remembered." Both views are wrong, Zachrisson's ridiculously so, since even sight words like "the" and "one" that are often taught to children without regard to "phonics'' are by no stretch of the imagination pictures totally devoid of phonetic clues, as witness th in "the" and n in "one."'
This is from the informative book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John D. Francis.
- John DeFrancis has a section on the Yukaghir love letter in his Visible Speech: The Diverse Oneness of Writing Systems. The provenance of the "letter" is a bit obscure but it comes from a Russian political exile to Siberia around 1892.
"As the young people assembled for the dance, a girl might take a piece of fresh birch bark and start carving with a very sharp knife. The others gathered around and watched the progress of the carving. There was much banter, and guesses were made as to who was being depicted and what was being said. Incorrect guesses were met with derision by the carver, so that eventually all present would arrive at an understanding of the contents."
[...]
"In short, the notorious "love letter" and others like it are nothing more than the semiritualized product of these Yukaghir party games. They must not be thought of as real letters posted to someone who would read them as we do our mail. The Russian observers make clear that the compositions were primarily vehicles whereby young women could publicly express their feelings on the single theme of love and separation in a socially acceptable form before a small circle of friends..."
[...]
"The way in which the meaning of the Yukaghir "letter" was actually transmitted, first to a small circle of intimates at the time of its creation and later to a worldwide audience by a succession of scholars, most closely parallels the way in which the meaning of a highly allegorical medieval painting or of a Bayeaux tapestry originated and was transmitted over time. This analogy suggests that the Yukaghir birchbark carving should be viewed as an example not of writing but of anecdotic art whose message can be understood only to the degree one is in contact with its creator, the situation or culture that produced it, or someone who can interpret it for us."
I strongly recommend DeFrancis, both this book and his book The Chinese Language. He's an excellent writer and his take on the issues of writing in general is fascinating and well thought-out.
- DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy is excellent on that and many related questions [1].
First, Mandarin has no inflection (love/loves), which allows for writing in characters in the first place. Then, Mandarin has a fairly impoverished phonetic system, allowing for only about 400 different syllables ignoring tones, or 1200 or so when distinguishing tones (while English for example has some 7000 or so, without tones). This leads to many homophones, which can be distinguished by being written with different characters. Or so the traditional justification goes (I don't think much of that argument, because clearly people can speak to each other just fine, without having to clarify which word they mean - disambiguation happens by longer words (two or more syllables), which you could just write down. What happens is that in writing, you only need to write parts of a word: spoken out loud it would be ambiguous, but the chosen character disambiguates it, and thus people conclude that writing wouldn't work without the characters.)
However, arguably it's just a matter of habit (and resistance on the part of those that have already put in the time and effort to learn the characters). There are, in fact, Sinitic languages written alphabetically, eg Dungan [2].
The whole issue is very politicised, as you can see with the animated discussion here and the vigorous resistance to the initial comment (which was a bit unfortunately phrased, in my view, but fundamentally sound: Chinese is a very hard language to learn, mostly by virtue of its archaic writing system, and that is arguably somewhat deliberate.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and...
[2] see the articles linked from here: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=40417
- Agreed. DeFrancis (in his delightful The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy) wrote (quoting from memory) that Japanese has the worst writing system among the character-based ones, and English the worst among the alphabetic ones.
What a pleasure Spanish writing is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language%3A_Fact_a...
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