Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial
He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.
Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial.
There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415
Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.
English, due to its unique development history, has lost most of its inflectional forms, it used to be heavily inflected. So, in that sense its basic grammar is said to be simpler than, say, Ancient Greek or French.
Why not give an example of a grammar point that you think I am missing?
An example I often bring up to English speakers who are learning Chinese is that they have to learn that the Chinese verbal system is based on aspect
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect
rather than on tense. Many native English speakers misspeak Chinese as a second language because they struggle to impose their sense of tense on a tenseless language, and meanwhile get Chinese aspect marking all wrong. That can lead to misunderstandings in either direction, as my extensive acquaintance with persons who speak both languages often shows.
Chinese grammar is trivial.
Likewise with grammar. I'd imagine many of the complexities related in said books are due to attempting to list distributed evolved usages rather than what legitimately constitutes formal grammar. But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong.
Kindly define that. As a student of linguistics, I observed some very broad approaches to researching formal grammars of natural languages. Grammar of natural human languages includes much more than just the features of word accidence you would learn about in a course in Latin or Greek.
I would have just downvoted for disagreement, but you wrote, "But I'd also like to know if I'm wrong," and I can only cheer that willingness to learn. Chinese grammar is expressed largely through different means (word order and function words) from those through which Indo-European grammar is expressed (inflection of word endings), but end result is still that the language has many fussy, arbitrary distinctions constrained by historical accident (or possibly by information theory) that allow for miscommunication among speakers of Chinese who are not all native speakers.
I'll have to think for awhile if I want to come up with a formal definition for formal grammar. If you still care, email me in a couple of days.
Although there are numerous Chinese languages, the characters are basically the same. Although there are many variants in text, the written language is long unified. They can communicate by text.
In the past, Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages. But, you know, they are from different language families.
I already mentioned above that I have seen counterexamples--written Chinese that was incomprehensible to many of the people who might reasonably be expected to read it--in several daily life situations in various parts of China.
Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese can read Chinese text in their own languages.
No, strictly speaking they were reading Chinese text in Chinese (possibly with mind's-ear pronunciation of the Chinese characters reflecting influence from their native languages), which they acquired as a second language while learning literacy. The full details to respond to the point of view you have put forth can be found in
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
(P.S. I can read some current Japanese too, and of course current Japanese writing shows plainly that Japanese is a very different language from Chinese, as you correctly note. I had occasion recently to read a brush painting of bamboo with some Chinese characters on it hanging in the office of a physician, who is a man of Korean-Japanese heritage. We could both sight-translate the Chinese characters into English. I didn't ask him on that occasion how he would pronounce them.)
If one is illiterate and cannot recognise any written word, it is nothing to do with writing system. It is about education.
The news article (xinhaunet) you given is about spoken languages, nothing do with written language.
Yes, they read characters in their native languages, not in any modern Chinese languages. Characters are just symbol with meaning. It pronunciation varies from language to language. It does not matter you say "一" in /jat1/, /yi1/, /qit/, /ichi/, /itsu/, /hitotsu/, /hitotbai/, /hajime/, or /il/ and it basically means one.
I think the parent was speaking historically about how Chinese characters were read (and written) by Koreans and Japanese before they were adapted for writing Korean and Japanese. In a sense you are both correct, since Japanese kanji have both a "Japanese" and "Chinese" reading, and I believe the same is (or was) true for Korean hanja. In both cases "literacy" was nearly synonymous with "literacy in Chinese" in Japan and Korea for quite a long time, during which those languages adopted thousands of Chinese words. (Part of the resistance against other writing systems, including simpler phonetic ones, in Japan and Korea came from the assumption that any serious person would aspire to Chinese literacy, and a simpler writing system that was not a door to Chinese would only be of use to "stupid people" and women -- people who did not aspire to full literacy.)
Even today the distinction between "Japanese" and "Chinese" readings is used when teaching Kanji, and Koreans are much more commonly aware of the distinction between words of Chinese and native Korean etymology than English speakers are aware, say, of the distinction between words of Romantic and Germanic origin.
Correct. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orthography_for_the_Korean_...
North Korea in particular has gone to great lengths to de-Sino (and de-foreign) their version of Korean. So much so that they've introduced many, often cumbersome description words to replace more elegant Chinese (Korean pronounced) or other loan words like 전자 계산기 (Mechanical Calculating Device) instead of 컴퓨터 (Computer).
Most south Koreans can likewise tell you immediately if a word is of Chinese origin (usually because they know the Hanja for it) vs. of purely Korean origin. Like 공룡 (Dinosaur) which is pronounced almost the same as 恐龍 vs. 피 (Blood) instead of 血.
Again, I invite you to look at
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...
to see why that is not quite true. A newer book,
http://www.amazon.com/Reading-Brain-Science-Evolution-Invent...
is very good for explaining the neurological reasons why NO writing system could possibly operate that way.
To say that Chinese characters unify a nation of high illiteracy whose citizens in many cases cannot converse with one another in person or on the telephone
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838...
is much like saying that writing in Latin unifies the continent of Europe by providing a common means of communication among scholars from Basque Country to Finland. Each statement is about equally true, and each is about equally irrelevant to current language policy.
That's only partially correct though. Often as not, before Hangul was introduced in Korea, or Latin alphabets were modified for Vietnam, many people wrote their venacular using Chinese logograms, with the meaning known, but the word order and pronunciation adapted for their own language. Korean in particular has a whole class of special characters to capture the particulars of Korean grammar and language when written with Chinese characters. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanja
Most Koreans will likewise pronounce Hanja using Korean words not Chinese ones. Like 'Dae' (대) for 大, 'In' (인) or 'Salam' (사람) for 人, 'Sal' (쌀) or 'Bap' (밥) for 稻.
You are right that, in the old days, because of the nature of the political ties betweem 韓國 and 中國, it was expected that formal government documents were written, read and pronounced in Chinese. But in general, most Koreans today do not know how to read Chinese out loud in a way that a Chinese speaker would understand. Most of the time Hanja is just used to clarify homophones from Koreanized loan words from Chinese.
I can confirm the truth of this example, which is one of the examples I had in mind in some of my earlier comments.
This is the first time that I've heard this; could you supply some further reading?
[1] The Stories of English by David Crystal http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856...
[2] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRF...
[3] The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002...
All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2].
A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened.
OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain.
The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc.
English is an interesting language indeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History
"[Printing] introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries. For example, the h in ghost was influenced by Dutch."
oh no, anchor is 锚, you can tell it's metal, but you can't tell it's something about sea.
A slight modification to wisty's example would be if you're at a restaurant and the vinegar is at someone else's table. "Give me the vinegar/给我醋(把)" is equally polite to something in English like "Please would you pass the vinegar" which you might be more likely to say to a complete stranger. It's definitely minor, but creates a feeling of convenience which builds over time: terseness as convenience instead of rudeness.
Another example might be getting a stranger's attention to ask a question (again, something common to my experience if not the most varied example). In English it's "Hi, would you mind helping me?" "Hi, could you answer a question of mine?" "Hi, I have a question..." In Chinese it's just "please (let me) ask/请问". The "let me" is parenthetical to make it sensible in English, but it's not required to enunciate it (请让我问你）.
There is zero conjugation, a noun, the action most closely associated with it, and the verb which generates that noun might all be the exact same word with the meaning derived by context or (if ambiguous) helping words -- especially when speaking. People strive to speak chronologically so that "He took the train to the city" makes sense but "He arrived in the city by train" is strained. The 了 particle is so overloaded as to have many different, non-overlapping contextual meanings.
You might say that Chinese is structured more by convention than boilerplate, but that's at best a weak metaphor with a lot of connotations which I don't think carry to human languages well.
I don't know, but I guess my follow-up question to your factual statement would be, "Do you have any examples attested by professional linguists who have carefully compared languages, or is this based on your personal experience?" The reason I would ask that way, which I hope doesn't sound impolite, is that my experience is to the contrary. I find English to be a rather informal language among the dozen or so languages I have studied most closely.
That was the part I loved the most about learning Chinese, in school we were required to learn a certain amount of radicals, and once we learned those we learned what they looked like squished next to other characters at that point I knew there was a metal involved if I saw the character for metal, even if I didn't understand the rest of it. Gold being one exception :P
* Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no longer used, since it has the connotation (wrong, but older philologists believed this) that these symbols directly refer to an idea; "logogram" is the correct term.
The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor".
* Writing system not phonetic: Any other European language than English would have formed a much better argument, since English is notorious for its haphazard mapping of mapping phonemes to the alphabet, partly caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch with bare knowledge of English.
One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. Compare with, say, Greek grammar which has baffling complexity or Lithuanian that still has noun 9 cases! Some exotic native Indian languages have 10-15 noun classes (German has three, which we call gender). In pure writing complexity, some people rate Japanese to be even more complicated (with its three sub systems). Or for an older example, consider Mayan hieroglyphs.