Mesaĝoj: 30
Lingvo: English
Senlando (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 05:25:32
LyzTyphone:For a better example of homonyms in Chinese,Saluton Lyztphone! Cxu estas iom da Esperantisto en Tajjxon escepte de vi? Mi estas ano de Tajnan, sed mi foriris Tajvan tri jaro antaux ol nun, kaj mi ne scias se Tajvan havas multaj da Esperantisto.
I recommend the prose written by linguist
趙元任(Juen Ren ĜAO):
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Ĝui~
apology's if i used bad grammar or vocabulary, reading is always much easier then writing for me.
Thanks for that article Lyzphone.
i really like the short poem
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十.
"Four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty."
(sì shì sì, shí shì shí， shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí.)
or in my Taiwanese accent...
(sì sì sì, sí sì sí， sísì sì sísì, sìsí sì sìsí. )
i had my brother read it to, and he ended up saying (sì sì sì, sí sì sí， sísì sì sísì, sìsí sì sìsí. ) also. lol.
no wonder why my Chinese language teacher gave me such a hard time with "是"! guess that's what I get for trying to earn easy university credits.
I doubt, regarding after reading this point of view.Also a very interesting article, very long read though (think it took me like an hour or more?).
even my Chinese teacher said that any good scholar of the language always has a dictionary at hand!
eikored85 (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 05:36:54
Senlando:Haha, I forced myself to make the 卷捨 sounds, ie the zh, ch, sh. In my university classes, my teachers would penalize us on oral exams if we didn't =PLyzTyphone:For a better example of homonyms in Chinese,Saluton Lyztphone! Cxu estas iom da Esperantisto en Tajjxon escepte de vi? Mi estas ano de Tajnan, sed mi foriris Tajvan tri jaro antaux ol nun, kaj mi ne scias se Tajvan havas multaj da Esperantisto.
I recommend the prose written by linguist
趙元任(Juen Ren ĜAO):
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
Ĝui~
apology's if i used bad grammar or vocabulary, reading is always much easier then writing for me.
Thanks for that article Lyzphone.
i really like the short poem
四是四，十是十，十四是十四，四十是四十.
"Four is four, ten is ten, fourteen is fourteen, forty is forty."
(sì shì sì, shí shì shí， shísì shì shísì, sìshí shì sìshí.)
or in my Taiwanese accent...
(sì sì sì, sí sì sí， sísì sì sísì, sìsí sì sìsí. )
i had my brother read it to, and he ended up saying (sì sì sì, sí sì sí， sísì sì sísì, sìsí sì sìsí. ) also. lol.
no wonder why my Chinese language teacher gave me such a hard time with "是"! guess that's what I get for trying to earn easy university credits.I doubt, regarding after reading this point of view.Also a very interesting article, very long read though (think it took me like an hour or more?).
even my Chinese teacher said that any good scholar of the language always has a dictionary at hand!
But I don't care too much, I speak Taiwanese dialect, which I'm very proud of, since I'm American-raised.
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 06:03:18
Senlando:I find simplified writing quite ugly, but I'd have to give them that its so much easier to write simplified then traditional (but traditional is still nicer to read)Actually I like 愛 better than the simplified one, however I prefer 语 to 語 simple because I love the little 'kick to the side' 讠 character more than 言. And it's muuuch easier to write too. I also prefer 吗妈马玛码 etc rather than their traditional form.
example: 愛, love in traditional becomes 爱 in Simplified, whats missing is the 心 (heart). So i say, the Communists took the heart out of love, lol
Ultimately when it comes to asian writing systems though I have to admit having a preference for Hiragana and Katakana over Hangul, ultimately because I always know what H/K will look like but with Hangul I have to figure out how the character will be formed. The spaces between words in korean helps though.
andogigi (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 10:45:29
I don't consider the characters to be a good means of interlanguage communication. Coming from a background in Japanese, I've tried on many occassions to "write" with my Chinese colleagues and had a miserable time. I can usually get my point across, however, there are many characters which have different meanings in Chinese. For example, my favorite is the time I wrote to my Chinese friends that I was going back to the hotel to write a letter. I later discovered the Japanese characters for "letter" really mean "toilet paper". We had a good laugh at that one!
Miland (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 11:07:33
1. They aren't usually a problem in other languages because of the context.
2. In some cases, a little un-phonetic spelling, or a change in the sound, could be deliberately introduced, to lift the burden of learning a huge number of characters.
But the ideal would surely be, not IPA, but for a group of Chinese-speakers themselves, who are genuinely concerned about the problem, to develop an adequate suitable slphabet and orthography that could be easily learned and used. In short, to do for the Far East, that which the developers of the first alphabets in the Middle East did for their time.
Just think, if Zamenhof had thought 'Latin is beautiful and traditional, and an impressive sign of being a scholar, so better not to entertain silly ideas like inventing something easier', there would be no Esperanto!
ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-30 13:46:11
Anyway to follow up on what I said before, has anyone else noticed HK cantonese/HK exchange student speakers ignoring tones? I remember trying to have some conversation in Cantonese with my mate and he was telling me to not bother with the tones at all (I though 'Ah thank god!'). And for the most part he understood 'o hai hok saang' (我係學生/我是学生/o5 hai6 hok6 saang1) and 'lei hou' (你好/lei5 hou2) or something like that with out the proper use of tones. So what's the deal with that?
LyzTyphone (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-31 04:12:27
> ceigered
That's probably because, in fact, certain dialects of Chinese (Cantanese, Sounth-Minnese) keep the tones that cease to exist in Mandarin. In fact if I remembered right, there are like 8 tones in Cantonese, I guess?
That's going to be a lot harder than Mandarin.
When it comes to the benefits, I certainly agree sinograms are great considering they convey so much more meaning for ONE syllable. I would like to point out they also make a challenge to (in the past) printing and (at present) typographers. Chinese fonts now available on the net are remarkably bulkier than ones for Latin alphabet.
As for the homonyms, interesting and thought-provoking as they may be, they don't actually, as people above already stated, cause much trouble in our everyday talk.
Please note the prose I gave you was in Classical Chinese where most words are Monosyllabic (like 獅, 嗜, 誓). Modern Mandarin, however, have most words Bisyllabic (The three words become 獅子, 喜好, 發誓, respectively).
This makes it again possible to speak in Chinese understandably without tone! Relish the Bisyllabication of Modern Mandarin~ People~
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ceigered (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-31 07:13:50
LyzTyphone:Relish the Bisyllabication of Modern Mandarin~ People~Will do
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.In regards to writing in the Chinese board, is it easier for them to understand dodgy writing than dodgy speaking? e.g. if I were to say something like:
"我走了
Mi promenis" would I fairly understood?
jchthys (Montri la profilon) 2009-januaro-31 17:41:59
Actually, the Latin alphabet is ultimately pictographic. (See this article.)
Senlando (Montri la profilon) 2009-februaro-01 01:53:57
The reason Simplified scripted was invented (from what i know) is because Traditional often took to long to write.
Well now in the world of computers, it takes just as long to write a Simplified word then a Traditional word (or at least with the pinyin system). So why doesn't China just use Traditional typing, or anything printed from a computer (almost everything!) and use Simplified for when people actually have to write the language, kind of like cursive.
That way people still get to write simplified when it maters (by hand) and traditional stays well used. And from the characters I've learned, its not usually that hard to know the simplified when you know the traditional.
Anyways I know the Chinese probably wont do that, although i see why not. But i just wanted to see what peoples opinion about it would be. In the mean time we can be happy that Hong Kong, overseas Chinatowns and Taiwan still use Traditional!