Kevin's Watch

I heard that a chinese speaker could communicate with [relative] ease with a japanese speaker, even if they didn't speak a word of eachothers totally different language, as long as they could both write their own language. The explanation for this is apparently that the same pictogram/ideogram symbols apply to the different words of each language, this not being a problem sinse the writing system is not 'phonetically' [ie sound] based, but rather idea based.

This sounds like a damn usefull thing to me, but then the down side of it strikes home. There are hundreds of thousands[?] of symbols needed to represent all of the thoughts and ideas in a pictorial manner, yet 26 symbols will perform exactly the same function if used to rather, represent sound [ie all sound units can be represented by just one or a small combination of a phonetic based symbol. In addition - I can't speak french, but I could read a french text to a frenchman and he would [ok, with a bit of difficulty] be able to understand what I was saying - even though I couldn't. So there are pro's and cons to each system I guess, but can anyone answer me this. In english, we have certain words that sound exactly the same even though they are spelt differently and have different meanings. Take son and sun. Now clearly these words will not translate into the same words in say chinese - but there must be words in chinese that do sound exactly the same in the same manner. Are these words expressed by the same symbol - it seems unlikely now I think on it but who knows. I also heard somewhere that in written chinese the same symbol can have multiple meanings and the one of which is intended is entierly dependant upon the context and the surrounding symbols in which the symbol is used. Does anyone have any understanding of how these things work or any [easily grasped] lesson they could throw my way.

Heh...I don't know if there are many easy lessons/answers. People are still arguing about the "superiority" of one or the other kind.

But, a few things [not necessarily graspable answers]:
Not only does english have words that sound the same but mean and spell differently, we have words that are identical in ALL ways except meaning...and no way to tell the difference except context.
Honestly, is there any meaning WITHOUT context in any language?

There are certainly lots of symbols. But, IIR the numbers correctly, to reach competency in reading various difficulty of texts, it is almost the same between English and Chinese [for instance, 80% in a newspaper is a bit over 2000 chinese characters/a bit over 2000 word families for English...]


There is a fair amount of evidence that learning to read/write Chinese is more difficult, especially in the early stages, than learning English and most other "Western" languages.
OTOH, that probably isn't, and certainly hasn't been shown to be, entirely the alphabetic/ideogrammatic difference. After all, Russian [and I think all the Cyrillic-based languages, but don't recall for sure] are also significantly more difficult to learn...and they're alphabetic.

Ideogram is fading from use, BTW...cuz very very few of the symbols have a direct connection between shape/image/picture and idea.
Also, don't make the mistake that a symbol is a word. Most "words" are 2 symbols.
Also...the Chinese word for crisis is NOT made up of "Danger plus opportunity" despite the fact that google will show it is thousands or millions of times. I went and got the link for this paragraph, so I wasn't totally just saying stuff:

www.pinyin.info/chinese/crisis.html

Thanks V. That was a nice debunking of a bit of 'new age' management gobledygook and highly informative as well.

Clearly the relationship between a phonetic based script and a non-phonetic one is not simple even at it's simplest. Particularly in the relationship between ideas and the symbols we use to record, them there is no direct correspondence [and no reason why there should be] between the overlay and limits of the meaning of a word in one language as opposed to it's counterpart in another. This will always make translation a fraught and risky business.

V. I don't mean to trouble you but can I just run certain terms by you to see if my understanding of them corresponds to yours. [Very often in searching out the meaning of these things I seem to get contradictory definitions and am never 100% that I have got the thing nailed.]

You refered to 'Cyrilic' - this I understand as the russian alphabet as laid down by one man, now remembered as St. Cyril in what, the 12th Century?

What is 'demotic'? I think it was a sort of low grade [plebian?] form of script used in ancient egypt that also was heiroglyph based as opposed to 'cursive' [which I understand essentially to mean language written using symbols on (above or below) a line] which though somewhat contemporanious [is there such a word?] used phonetic symbols instead.

Pinyin - a newly developed phonetic[?] form of writing chinese developed in the what, last 100 years or so, in order to make the teaching of chinese easier both at home and to forigners.

Espiranto - A language constructed academically in the last century with the idea that it could become an easily learned second language across Europe [the world?] in which ideas/meaning would easily be expressable without risk of misinterpretaion or misundestanding. The project was essentially a failure in that to date it is virtually unused [if the construction of the language was ever actually realised to any remotely sucessfull degree.]

The above has come completely of the top of my head and it will be intersting to see to what degree I am somewhere like correct and where I am wildly off the mark. Anyone who feels inclined to is entierly at liberty to tell me to "**** off and do your own research!" [You included V. ]

As always V. you come up with just enough information to prick my curiosity and make me run off and check things out. You are, you realise, running a real danger of turning me into someone who actually knows something!