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.
That's because most people only know about the 2000 Chinese characters used in everyday situations, so they have this misunderstanding; Others who don't know Chinese heard this and keep on parroting it. If you know more about the language (post-seconadary level), you would know Chinese relies heavily on semantic component.
Here is an example characters I saw in Stanley, Hong Kong a few days ago (as part of a 2 lines poem.)
巍峩 vs the normal form 魏我
Normally the character 魏 means "Tower on an emperor's building" and 我 means "I". By adding the component 山 ("Mountain") to the characters, the words 巍峩 now carries a connotation of epicness one associate with mountain range. ie. "The building and I, as impressive as a mountain range."
I am saying _advance_ Chinese writing has a significant semantic component, but most speakers are not knowledgeable enough to realize it.
>That does not sound very useful, especially when it comes to literacy.
Most people can speak English; You probably need an advance English degree to understand all the puns/word plays in Shakespeare's works (or use Cole's Notes.)
The flexible of a language's intricate details has no direct relationship with the literacy of its speakers(or how easy to become proficient at an language to the point where one can communicate compound ideas with it.)
Back to how useful all these are- not really if you stick with the basic. They are as useful as Shakespeare's or Wordsworth's works in the modern world. You could speak/communicate perfectly fine in English even if you are not able to understand advance details of English literature, especially the vocab side.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_(Chinese_characters)#S...
That works well because English and German are very similar. If China moved from characters to Pinyin, someone who doesn't know Chinese could sound it out, but it would be mostly unintelligible (wrong initials, no tones).
I don't know if the data supports this or not, but it's an interesting thought.
Regarding the example of 正, Wikipedia suggests the foot radical is actually 足/⻊(radical 157) [0].
It suggests 正 is not a radical but rather derives from radical 77, "stop (止)."
When you add the top line to form 正, the image meaning becomes "stop in the middle," which seems reasonably aligned with the meaning of "right/justice/normal."
Not sure who's right: Wikipedia or you, so please clarify if Wikipedia is wrong. Thanks!
someone could prove/disprove this by analyzing the 3000 most common chars and indicating what percentage contain a semantic component (even if obfuscated).
do you know if wikipedia or the parent is correct about 正 as the radical for foot?
It works well enough to guess the pronunciation of a character you've never seen. Or maybe a word you know how to say but don't know how to write.
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.
Your detailed and substantive comment works just as well without this uncivil lead-in.
"Hangul faced opposition by the literary elite, such as Choe Manri and other Korean Confucian scholars in the 1440s, who believed hanja to be the only legitimate writing system, and perhaps saw Hangul as a threat to their status.[9] However, it entered popular culture as Sejong had intended, being used especially by women and writers of popular fiction.[15] It was effective enough at disseminating information among the uneducated that Yeonsangun, the paranoid tenth king, forbade the study or use of Hangul and banned Hangul documents in 1504,[16] and King Jungjong abolished the Ministry of Eonmun (언문청 諺文廳, governmental institution related to Hangul research) in 1506."
A national standard, at best (in the PRC). In Taiwan, Zhuyin (Bopomofo) is universal, taught in schools and found on laptop keyboards, and romanisations are mostly following Wade-Giles rules. In Hongkong, Eitel romanisation is used even though their new commie overlords are forcing pinyin and yale canto down their kids' throats.
Using Taiwan as an example isn't really relevant given that it's majority Cantonese speaking, and Cantonese is a completely different spoken language than Mandarin.
Edit: I'm a clown. I was confusing traditional Chinese with Cantonese. Not the same thing.
It gets really complicated with japanese - there's a many-to-many-to-many <symbolic>-<phonetic>-<semantic> relationship... One character can have many different readings and due to the homophony, any given reading can have divergent meanings. For example - HASHI can mean bridge, "side of something", or chopsticks - and the character for "bridge" can also be read "kyo" depending on the context.
I imagine chinese is much easier for a japanese native speaker to learn than vice versa for those reasons (since often some of the phonetic forms "on-yomi" of the characters are directly borrowed - with some inflective changes).
That makes no sense. If we had a time machine, we'll be able to trace every modern language back to some African tribe that became the ancestor of all modern humans.
Perhaps you meant having a literary tradition that's among the oldest in the world, but even that doesn't necessarily explain why there would be so many homophones. Languages lose words all the time, even one with great literary traditions.
And while of course every language descends from another, and ancient Chinese isn't understandable to a modern Chinese speaker, there is a long tradition within the Chinese language, and change within the language hasn't been shaped by things as drastic as displacement of the linguistic community, or forced political rule under a foreign power, etc.
English is probably the worst case among alphabetic languages, but you can still usually guess the exact pronunciation of an unfamiliar word.
> the Chinese language consists of MANY homophones.
But still Chinese speakers make themselves understood without difficulty, even over the telephone. Most Chinese words are polysyllabic. Taking that into account, homophones are rarer than you might think.
There's a language+, Dungan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungan_language), which is to some extent mutually intelligible with Mandarin. It's written entirely in the Cyrillic alphabet without diacritics to indicate tone. Sample text: http://www.omniglot.com/babel/dungan.htm
+ You could call it a dialect, but it has its own script.
FWIW, I think Ted Chiang (author of Story of Your Life that Arrival was based on) knows a decent amount on linguistics.
At this point, Chinese characters aren't going to go anyhere. But I think it's an interesting thought experiment to puzzle through.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which underlies Arrival, has been debunked for years in academia, and the movie, if detached from that hypothesis, is more of a thought experiment on the effect of the linearity of time on human thought than a thought experiment on anything related to language itself.
If even the weak form Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in restricted contexts) is debunked, then I'd like to read up on it. Where can I look into that because a Google by this layperson doesn't turn up anything on it? Thanks in advance.
tell the eskimo seeing X different kinds of snow to any linguist and they will roll their eyes, debating whether or not to explain why the example is probably not only incorrect, but fabricated for the umpteenth time.
Well the "academia" has been debunked for even longer -- especially when it comes to soft sciences, so that doesn't say much.
If the author can be taken this seriously given his self-professed ignorance, I am probably much more qualified than him to speak about Chinese characters.
There are two points worth disambiguating here. One is whether Chinese characters hinder the literacy of native speakers and the other is if it hinders that for learners. Neither I nor the author have any authority to speak about the former.
As a heritage speaker, I actually only recently learned Chinese to a level where I consider myself literate. My experience was that the characters were not an obstacle, like the author suggests, but an indispensable tool for rapidly learning the language.
To learn any language, it is unavoidable that you need to memorize thousands of new words. Memorizing a Chinese character is not much harder than memorizing a word. However, the magic of Chinese characters comes when you combine them to form actual words.
The vast majority of Chinese words consists of 2 characters, but because each character also encodes meaning, you can more often than not guess the meaning of a word you have never seen before.
Although you can take advantage of common roots for words in other languages, the scale is simply incomparable. For other languages, you pretty much have to memorize every new word you see.
My experience has been that learning Chinese characters may be a higher upfront cost (although I disagree), once you learn enough, you rapidly understand way more vocabulary because characters themselves encode semantic information.
Perhaps it's simply the lack of any cognates between English and Chinese, and a tinge of cultural supremacy, that make people, like the author, think it's Chinese characters that's the root of everything that makes the language difficult to learn.
Your reaction would be reasonable if someone had claimed that a particular spoken language was hard to learn. Spoken languages are all equally easy, because they are all learned by children in a few years.
But written languages can be arbitrarily difficult, and in Chinese, people with post-graduate educations will often forget how to write common words. This is not cultural supremacy. This is linguistics.
The world's languages, of course, developed nicely without intervention from linguistics, a latter-day mostly retrospective discipline.
Perhaps more to the point, Japan, which uses Chinese characters for nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verb-roots, has a very high literacy rate. [1]*
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf
* Not trying to cherry-pick for Japan being at the top, but Japan's not listed in the 2015 UNESCO report that's referenced all over the place. This US DoE report from 2013 seems legitimate enough.
While literacy might be high, there's been a stream of articles over the years in Japanese media noting that literacy in kanji (the component of Japanese based on Chinese characters) in particular has been steadily declining, even among the highly educated; e.g. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/07/03/national/kanji-w...
Anecdotally, I feel like Japanese picks a better point in the tradeoff space than other languages - Chinese characters are used where they get some leverage, with phonetics for everything else, even with a bunch of half-kanji words. Still, I'd imagine some of the less-commonly used ones will get dropped over time.
On the other hand, English+Emoji+Txt simplification seems to be approaching the same point from the other direction.
Spanish adults read at a 5th grade level, English adults read at a 6th grade level, Japanese adults read at a 9th grade level - this isn't a reflection of education it is a reflection on how difficult the written language is to learn.
As a bad speller with a passing knowledge of Spanish I'm jealous: when I hear a Spanish word I can spell it, with English I have no clue.
A rough 1:1 phonetic correspondence between oral and written languages intuitively (to me at least) would be more fit for the creation and propagation of news words, or am I missing some other natural form of conveyance and propagation that exists in the Chinese writing system?
mobile phone: 手机 （hand machine)
programming: 编程 （compose orders)
QR code: 二维码 （2d code)
hacker: 黑客 （black guest, this also sounds phonetically like "hacker")
For brands and other names, there is a system of transliterating sounds using characters, or simply a literal translation of the name, e.g.
Android: 安卓 (an zhuo)
Microsoft: 微软 （small soft)
Apple: 苹果 （literally apple)
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.