I kinda find it hard to believe that could be much of a real problem. Pictograms may allow homonyms to proliferate more than in an alphabetic writing system, but as long as the language still lives as a spoken language, there will be limits on them that prevent them from becoming too much of a problem. A spoken language with too many homonyms just isn't useful, so it will be adapted to eliminate the problem.
All bets are off when the spoken form is dead, though.
but isn't that when you use context around the word to know what the meaning is? The same happens in English...you don't always know without context.
学习中文很有趣！
Xuéxí zhōngwén hěn yǒuqù!
hanzi or pinyin reading either way I know what this is intended to say.
For spoken Mandarin, you can probably infer enough from the conversational context, but for official documents, business and technical terminology, or any literature, full romanization renders the text much less incomprehensible.
This isn't helped by the fact that Classical Chinese, from which most complex vocabulary is derived, is even more homophonic than daily speech.
If you read something like duo(3) it could be a measure word for flowers (朵) or maybe mean “to hide or avoid” (躲)
I have the books school children buy in china and yeah 7+ it’s just characters.
I don't think so. The components of a polysyllabic word can give (more or less) strong hints to its meaning, but typically the word and its meaning must still be learned. But the same holds for radicals in Chinese characters, and even polysyllabic words in Chinese (电视/電視 is electric + vision, and that's TV. Television is distant + vision, and that's also TV.）
That two characters with 14 bits each carry more information than two characters with 5 bits each is clear, but not a huge advantage of non-alphabetic writing, or a decisive one (compared to the disadvantages).
Yes, agreed. It would by no means be trivial. Question is whether it would be worth it (in terms of freeing up time for children to study something else, for example).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_...
Homonyms like that don't exist in any living language. Spoken Classical Chinese is a dead language, like Latin. You only get that effect when you use modern Mandarin pronunciations, they wouldn't have been homonyms if you didn't use anachronous pronunciations. It's sort of like writing a poem that means one thing in Latin and an entirely different thing in modern Italian.
Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation.
But only essentially though translation. It's different enough that a typical Chinese reader can't jump into those works with ease.
Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon, and for many centuries Europeans went though the trouble of learning Latin to read them. You can still find fossilized Latin phrases in modern languages like English, et cetera. That doesn't mean Latin is a truly living language.
> There are no examples to "Lion-Eating Poet" in Italian and English precisely because phonetic writing systems cause most writing to be incomprehensible as pronounciations change.
> Your example is also egregious also because the entire point of "Lion-Eating Poet" isn't that "it means different things in classical and modern Chinese" but that semantical meaning can still be transmitted by the writing system completely independent of pronounciation.
There can be no exact analogy because phonetic writing systems are more conserving of pronunciation while systems like Chinese are more conserving of semantics. That's why I said it's "it's sort of like." My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language.
Classical works are not translated into Modern Chinese.
I think that's the source of our disagreement. When the writing system is focused on semantics, then the threshold where something is considered translation is different than for a phonetic writing system.
>Latin works are still part of the Western literary canon.
Yes, but most modern westerners can not read Latin on it's own, because of the writing system.
>My point was the poem is more of a stunt than a real statement about a real language.
What is a "real language" here? The poem is comprehensible to modern Chinese, although the grammar follows Classical Conventions. What makes it not a "real language"?
I should have been more specific: I meant a real living language. The poem is a stunt that demonstrates how far modern Mandarin pronunciation has diverged from Classical Chinese (which is dead as a spoken language), but it doesn't make much of a statement about the practicality of replacing hanzi with a phonetic system for writing modern living Mandarin.
What is everyday use? Surely a writing system should be capable of more than "Hello, my name is Knolax?". If a proposed new writing system was incapable of representing Shakespeare in any comprehensible way, would it be suitable for English?
I realize now that you consider Classical Chinese as a seperate language from Modern Chinese. I and most Chinese speakers would probably disagree, but I don't think that's a line that can be drawn without a lot of nitpicking from both of us.
Sorry I edited on you, but what I meant was a phonetic system could be used in all ways contemporary spoken Mandarin is currently used without getting too tripped up by homophones.
There would obviously be difficulties when dealing with very old texts, but I think such difficulties are inevitable regardless of the language as the changes pile up. Something will be lost unless you spend the appropriate effort learning the state of language as it existed when the text originally written.
> I realize now that you consider Classical Chinese as a seperate language from Modern Chinese. I and most Chinese speakers would probably disagree, but I don't think that's a line that can be drawn without a lot of nitpicking from both of us.
Yeah.
Except phonetic writing systems are aren't even capable of representing Chinese names correctly. I think you're underestimating the extent to which homophones are prevalent in Chinese. It's not just classical texts, it's all written texts and most non-trivial spoken words, including names. The vast majority of Chinese morphemes are only a syllable long, and have up to hundreds of homophones. Unlike most European languages, Chinese names do not all come from a fixed list like "John. Mary, Jane, etc..." and are instead constructed directly from morphemes. The result is that whenever you encounter a Chinese name transliterated phonetically in any system, there is no deterministic way of converting it back into Chinese without ambiguity.
I guess my question is how much of a problem are these in spoken communication (say over a telephone where there's less shared situational context)? My intuition is that if the prevalence of homophones were so troublesome to make a phonetic writing system difficult/impractical to use, they'd also make spoken telephone conversations similarly difficult/impractical. Since Chinese people can obviously speak productively on the telephone, then there must be enough context in the phoneme-stream that it's sufficient to effectively communicate without the extra context provided by the characters.
That's not to say the characters don't provide an extra layer of depth and subtlety to written text over phonetic writing.
I think that's the best way to put it. Like you intuited, a phonetic system is perfectly capable of writing down spoken conversations, but without as much context as a spoken conversation it's going to get more confusing. For example, he she and it in Chinese are all pronounced "tā", but are written as 他，她， and 它 respectively in Chinese. In fact it's common to write "ta" as an equivalent to xhe/xer/xem.
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/east_asian_languages.html#...
Beyond that, FWIW, homophones are words that are pronounced the same way. Homonyms are pronounced and spelt the same way. I guess in the context of Chinese (where disambiguation by character is the big issue), one should speak of homophones?