Discussion on answer by axsvl77: Did China ever consider a phonetic writing system?

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22:09

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A: Did China ever consider a phonetic writing system?

TLDR: Phonetic scripts won't work because of how the Chinese languages are structured. So it never really came up before Europeans arrived. Language Issues: There are several ways to answer this question; before I get into the history, it is important to ask: Is it possible to represent Chines...

T.E.D.

"it was unable to become a primary script because it was designed only for the Shandong Jiaolioa dialect" - This is yet another example of the root of the problem. The country requires a writing system that works for "dialects" that don't use the same syllables for the same words. So by definition they can't use a phonetic system.

axsvl77

Right. However, even if everyone did speak the same language, it still wouldn't work for something as technical as a software manual. Just not enough sounds.

Semaphore

@T.E.D. I think that's attaching too much importance to dialects than the Chinese themselves historically did. axsvl77 has it right - it's the number of homophones that render phonetic script impractical. I am reminded of an incident in Korea where a multimillion construction project went bust when "need to waterproof" was mistaken for the phonetically identical "need to water". Korean is far more phonetically diverse than Japanese, which is why the latter retained Kanji, and Chinese is even worse than Japanese in that regard.

romkyns

Homophones are clearly not hampering the understanding of spoken Chinese, so what makes writing different?

Semaphore

@RomanSt Spoken words are more verbose than written ones, and modern spoken Chinese is far more verbose than classical, written Chinese. Here's a famous sentence from classical Old Chinese: 若士必怒，伏屍二人，流血五步，天下縞素，今日是也。 = 20 characters. And here's a modern translation:

如果志士真的發怒，只會橫屍二人，血流五步，但天下人都要穿上白色喪服，今天就會這樣。

= 36, nearly double the amount of sounds to describe the same scene. A spoken version would be even more verbose on top of the latter.

Knetic

22:09

While I am no expert, this seems a little doubtful because Hangul was created to replace the Hanja, which are derived from older-form Chinese logographs, and which had a similar set of schisms between Korean dialects (some of which were more or less Chinese than others). This is especially true when considering that popular ways to input these logographs is to use Mandarin pinyin as latin characters. It can't simply be impossible, as this answer implies.

DrZ214

According to my first Chinese language book, Beginner's Chinese by Yong Ho, Putonghua has 21 consonants and 6 vowels, and all syllables are organized in the CV (Consonant-Vowel) format.

Three things. 1, why only 21 consonants? Is the book leaving out w- and y- ? 2, why only 6 vowels? Wikipedia article says there are 10 vowels. 3, in fact there are some Chinese words that do not start with a consonant, but a vowel. I actually asked this on Chinese.SE several days ago and got 9 words. chinese.stackexchange.com/questions/29989/…

However, your point about limited CV combinations means a lot more homophones, is well taken. But it seems to me, ala @Semaphore point, that if you have phonetic writing, you can afford to write the "more verbose" version and thus have enough clarity to understanding the meaning of each homophone, just like talking. Anyway, thanks for your answer, especially examples of phonetic writing at the end and the Qieyin Xinzi.

axsvl77

@DrZ214 Check this out. There just arent too many sounds.

Qsigma

I upvoted as I loved your historical paragraphs even though I don't understand your point about homophone ambiguity. A phonetic script represents speech, so the writing can be as unambiguous, or not, as the speech transcribed. The question is about Chinese language as a whole, and Chinese scholars were not a priori restricted by the limitations of classical written Chinese.

DrZ214

@axsvl77 Thanks for the handy chart. But I'm afraid I still disagree with the point. English also has sounds not represented by any letter, even when the letters are used normally lol. The vowel in "book" is kinda halfway between the vowel in "dog" (short o) and "cool" (long u), but the alphabet doesn't have a vowel between short o and long u. For consonants, the word "vision" has a weird sound with s, not represented anywhere in the alphabet (though Russian has it, Ж). So you see you don't need a precise alphabet to cover all the phonology...

...That is probably impossible, just considering all the regional dialects of English (British, Texan, New Yorker...), let alone all the neighboring languages within China. In fact, switching to a phonetic alphabet would actually seem to encourage the Han Chinese to enforce their dialect of pronunciation, and would be useful for that too.

lly

OP: I can't get Google to show me page 118 or 119 of Li's book but you should go check it out again. Your discussion of Sin Wenz being limited to Jiaoliao is wrong according to every source on its Wiki page, incl. Norman's book. It was apparently intended to cover a broad swath of northern Chinese dialects across Manchuria and was not limited to Shandong's at all.

You had also misread Ho pretty badly: an is not CV, neither is jiang. But at least there, I could get the source to be sure it was a transcription error and not one present in the original text. With Li, s/he might be the one mistaken about Sin Wenz but it'd be good to check and to phrase your correction appropriately.

Ok, never mind: found another source that explains the discrepancy; I'll go ahead and fix the problems and add it as another source.

axsvl77

22:09

@lly Thanks - your Chinese skills are better than mine.

Frédéric Grosshans

Writig a Chinese language with a phonetic alphabet is exactly what Dungan-speaking people are doing for a long time, since they have written their Mandarin dialect in Arabic script) since the 19th century, until the 1920s when they switched to Latin and they are now writing in Cyrillic since the 1940s. Their cultural context and history is very specific, and cannot be generalized to China, but it shows that, on pure linguistic grounds, alphabetic writing of a Chinese language can be actually used.

axsvl77

@FrédéricGrosshans Nice. I didn't know about the using the Arabic script. I am fairly certain that the Latin script version, introduced by Soviet authorities was based on the Sin Wenz. Sin Wenz, as I mention above, is another modern example of implementing a phonetic script with a Chinese language. A question for you: Was the Dungan script sophisticated enough to handle the sophistication of a cosmopolitan Chinese culture? Or was it more appropriate for simple communication?

For example, could the Confucian Classics have been transcribed into Dungan script? It is my understanding that it would be very difficult to understand in Hanyu Pinyin. "Unreadable", I expect.

Frédéric Grosshans

@axsvl77 It is sophisticated enough to encode a language, so I think there will be less problems tor write the Confucian Calssics into Dungan than into French. But I don’t actually know what texts are available to this relatively small (~100k) community. About the readability of Chinese in Pinyin, Language Log has quite a few posts about examples of Pinyin uses, some of them being books written in Pinyin

axsvl77

@FrédéricGrosshans I think that blog post is wishful thinking. I can't read Hanzi, so I will take notes in Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks. It takes my wife a long time to figure out what is written there. Partially from lack of practice, but also from the abundance of homophones. She can do it, sure, but it is far less efficient than using Hanzi.

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Discussion on answer by axsvl77: Did …