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Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs
The article says that the former is used in PRC-style Chinese, while the latter in traditional Chinese, and both are actually pronounced the same. Despite the controversies surrounding simplified characters, PRC did try to carry on with language reforms since its inception, and regulating the use of words for measurements is one example. Whereas "traditional" Chinese largely changed without much regulation (so, quite naturally), Chinese under PRC did undergo systematic reforms.
Personally, then, I'd think the Chinese you could find in (essentially) simplified Chinese books would be quite different from other forms. While the Latin-ization issues are not on the agenda now, certain peculiarities of PRC-style Chinese might, at least imo, sound bizarre to those used to "traditional" Chinese, such as the prominence of using 性 xing4 as a suffix to denote nouns that would be -ity or -ness words in English, which I find to be entirely superfluous, because, for example, "need" and "necessity" can be written in the same form and even a poorly educated Chinese would understand that (yet, in PRC-style the latter would come with 性).
Yet, you may argue that, despite that such little words, as claimed by some to be "Russian things", might simply be optional even in formal writing, when putting Chinese in Latin letters only and forever we might need them...
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English has suffered a lot from using the Latin alphabet. It's why English spelling is so messed up. The Latin alphabet doesn't have enough letters to write all the sounds that exist in English, so we have to use letter combinations for single sounds (such as "sh", "ch", and "th") or even just write different sounds with the same letters ("this" vs. "thin", "boom" vs. "book").
But pinyin doesn't have this problem, does it? It is capable of representing all of Mandarin Chinese's phonemes unambiguously, isn't it?
Pinyin isn't at all perfectly phonemic, either. There are letters we don't need (v not for Mandarin or Cantonese, but possibly others) and scholars have to borrow one letter from German (ü). And there are certain rules governing writing out syllables in Latin letters, so... basically, it's not an Esperanto alphabet.
The problem lies, rather, in the correspondence of pinyin syllables to multiple characters. You might want to read a famous poem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
I'm not going to argue whether pinyin should be suitable for writing out any form of Chinese. I meant that, if Chinese were to be written only in Latin letters, for example, it would be difficult to assign a supposedly small number of letters to represent thousands of different characters, many of which having separate meanings. Characters that normally only appear in older writings, meaning-wise, could be as compact as ??polysynthetic?? languages where a whole sentence can be finished in "one" word - it might be a special kind of bird or flower or an ancient country, or it might be anything else that only existed in certain periods of history or simply served for the authors (like the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters_of_Empress_Wu
Wu Zetian characters). There would be a lot of complexities, for example, with translating classical literature. At present, in fact, it is still in traditional characters; despite political realities, at least in regard to the literary subjects, simplified characters simply cannot replace traditional ones, as they are just there. I do see classical literature in simplified, but more advanced books are often in traditional only.
Would scholars be creating their own words, whenever homophones occur? How do you "merge" bao1zi (a bun; Brötchen) and bao4zhi3 (paper; newspaper)? Let them stay they are? If so, what about 逝世 shi4shi4 (to pass away) and 世事 (lit. worldly affairs) shi4shi4 ? By "butchering" I mean, imo, it just doesn't sound plausible to merge the last 2 examples without compromising the spelling, for example. Add accented letters like Vietnamese? Or do I mark number 1 or number 2 for the same homophone for 2 completely different words? In Mandarin, it's homophonic, in Cantonese, it's not. And then, pinyin, while more commonly known as Mandarin pinyin, has been adopted to romanize other Chinese languages as well. So, if Cantonese were to be written in Latin letters as well... the same two words, while not being homophonic this time, would have to have rendered into something else.
Culturally speaking, the characters, no matter simplified (in the 50s) or not, have not just taken root in literature, culture, daily life.... and also act as a written lingua franca between Chinese and between the CJK languages. Being native, I might be biased; but even when speaking from a technical perspective, complete one-way romanization, while possible, could be immensely difficult.
Supplement: *The literature* I refer to is published in the mainland. The government is maintaining the status quo since 1978 and 1986, but, who knows, while the simplified set is the official script, people might know the (supposedly obvious) difficulty with studying literature in the simplified, when original works are there and so on. Academic convenience? Institutional embarrassment? I don't know.
I've had a lightbulb moment. :)
>> If characters were to be done away, an awful lot of ambiguities would be first to be dealt with. My examples would be hard to understand, but let's think about it: in Mandarin, for example, when there are many homonyms, homographs, how are you going to eliminate the ambiguities without "butchering" a large proportion of the Chinese corpus? I could imagine that it could be as hard as doing away homonyms in English, but, after all, English only consists of 26 letters...
>> How do you "merge" bao1zi (a bun; Brötchen) and bao4zhi3 (paper; newspaper)? Let them stay they are? If so, what about 逝世 shi4shi4 (to pass away) and 世事 (lit. worldly affairs) shi4shi4 ?
The English also have the problems of homonyms or homophones, such as “night” and “knight”, the “I” and “eye”. The “knight” is “k and night” to eliminate the ambiguities with the “night”, the “I” and “eye” are different spellings.
The Mandarin words “bao1zi” (a bun; Brötchen) and “bao4zhi3” (paper; newspaper) can be spelled as “bauzi” (a bun; Brötchen) and “baozhi” (paper; newspaper). The words “shi4shi4逝世” (to pass away) and “shi4shi4世事” (lit. worldly affairs) are as spell as “shiqshi逝世” (to pass away) and “shishi世事” (lit. worldly affairs).
But if so, Mandarin without Hanzi would be rendered something without ideographic stuff as well as phonetic stuff.
Minor correction: the former example isn't a good example of that stuff... you may simply disregard it. It's just a typical phoneme-tip for school children like me, when I was.
If I'm not mistaken, - since I don't have to "study" it in any depth other than to understand - certain syllables have some of the worst number of homophones, like shi and possibly zhi, and many others. I've checked
http://humanum.arts.cuhk.edu.hk/Lexis/Lindict/
and in the index of "shi", I found literally a 3/4 dozens of characters, and half of which being common ones, i.e. say 24 of them. Would you be going to invent 24 spellings for 24 shi's, when their characters were to vanish? How? For some very frequently used ones, like the particle "shi4" (may serve as "to be" in some sense), you might get by using only shi4; but all other subtle ones would be rendered in oh-I-don't-know-nor-can-I-imagine ways.
A hypothetical Latin-script Chinese language could be possible, if you could completely disregard all other Chinese languages (like those with the ru-tone or something like that, who have thus more syllables and less possible ambiguities), since they are all united to a great degree by the original script, without which, then, the links would be forever lost and generic Chinese might be dead like Latin, but then with, hypothetically, for example, 5 main daughter [Romance] languages each in a different script, or in the same [Latin] script with largely unintelligible word roots or such.
You might well say that, as long as some other Chinese languages do have their own romanization schemes in real terms (*but many do NOT; pretty like subject to free fall anytime in future, without proper protection), and you may do away hanzi in respect to each of them accordingly... but then, the whole mess of work would inflict really literally huge costs, at least in real terms. So far, I haven't yet taken cultural issues and *popular opinions* into account.
supplement: another correction. adding the tone, however, we might have much less spellings to invent, but for shi4 specifically, with roughly more than 20 common characters in use, so... you can still use the number of "alternate" spellings you would need to retain all of them in the hypothetic new Chinese. Yes, many other syllables could be dealt with much easier, but...
I don't really know. It's just like creating a conlang with a heavy dose of Chinese vocabulary. You would really have to change everything beyond recognition to make things work. But then, the sense of doing so might be lost. You were to uproot Hanzi that already appeared in the oldest writings, like those during the Zhou Dynasties, to "finish" the hypothetical project, because from *some sources* it's said that more than 90% characters aren't really brand-new pictograms (rather, very few) but, rather, borrowed from phonetic elements of some others - some completely, some partial. A similar scene would be the multiple readings of Japanese Kanji. It might be kind of like doing integration after you differentiate a function (I mean the basics). You can do it, as always, but you can't finish it perfectly. There's always something left on the curve...
If you differentiate and then integrate, don't you just end up with the same thing you started with?
Well, you do lose the constants of the original function, come to think of it...
I don't really understand some of the seemingly newly coined words. But well, yes, good, you've got back to the topic (but are you named Sino btw?).
Sometimes I do doubt whether I should post at all when you have wikipedia, even though I'm quite sure that wikipedia isn't enough, and could be sometimes misleading.
Just like many other "modern" languages, Mandarin Chinese, while having inherited "a lot" (a convenient word to use) of features from the "Oracle Bone Writing", is surely vastly different from what my ancestors spoke some thousands of years ago.
There's of course much to say about HOW great the differences are. The ancient Chinese spoke consonantal clusters, (virtually) no tones, used less characters, borrowed a lot of characters from time to time, used more monosyllabic (one-character) words, had a rich literary (but far removed from the public) tradition...
and now, much is different, and the characters you can see today... the easiest ones were the eldest, but over 90% of others were borrowed, coined or created for strange reasons over the course of history. So, here you are, like many other languages, the (easiest) characters are per se basic, root characters that derive others, and you can learn to read Chinese through a "gradual approach".
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