Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by women (2017)

Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by powerapple on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @02:51AM (#20864196)

In Chinese teaching system, part of a character is used to represent a phoneme, basically you take part of a common character, to represent the part of pronunciation, and use it to spell out the pronunciation of a new character. Which is very similar to a phonetic language, and it shares more similarity with Hirigana, which is also phonetic.

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Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by crimsonalucard on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @04:03AM (#20864515)

You mean the radicals. As far as I know you can't construct the pronunciation of a chinese word from the character that represents it, not even the radical will help you. You literally have to memorize it. Every chinese kid does it.

The radical exists for the chinese dictionary as an over complicated lookup mechanism.

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Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by yorwba on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @05:48AM (#20865034)

Radicals are the other half of phono-semantic compounds. For example, in 媽媽 māma "mother", 女 nǚ "woman" (the first half of 女書 nǚshū "woman's writing") is the radical and 馬 mǎ "horse" is the phonetic part. The radical helps narrow down the meaning and the phonetic component gives you an approximation of the pronunciation. Of course it depends on the time and place the character was coined and even then it wasn't always an exact match (see the phonetic series at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Chinese), but if you have multiple reasonable guesses for the word, it can pretty much narrow them down to one. Similarly, the radical alone can't communicate the full meaning, but it helps with disambiguation. That's why dictionaries used it as a coarse categorization method.

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Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by crimsonalucard on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @02:07PM (#20869333)

That's true, but as a person who learned Chinese the phono semantic part of the word didn't really help or is even taught in Chinese school.

I'm talking about Chinese school for ABCs where everybody is assumed to know how to speak Chinese. We are literally just taught the radical and we memorize the word and sound without being taught the phonetic part of it.

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Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by knolax on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @05:07PM (#20871193)

> Chinese school for ABCs

That's your problem, most American Born Chinese can barely pronounce their own last names right; "Chinese Schools" in America are mostly just a formality.

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Re:Nüshu, a 19th-century Chinese script written only by wome... by crimsonalucard on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @05:34PM (#20871425)

>That's your problem, American Born Chinese can barely pronounce their own last names right

This is an insult. An almost racial and cultural one as well. For some reason I don't have enough karma to report you but I humbly request someone else to do so. This is not true at all. Many American Born Chinese are Bilingual and speak both languages equally well.

>"Chinese Schools" in America are mostly just a formality.

Chinese schools in America are run by Chinese people who immigrated here so that their children can learn. Almost every ABC went to one. They teach it to their kids the same way it was taught to them.

What in the world do you mean by just a "formality." You mean to say that it's not legit?

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