Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

Florian writes:

>It is used for teaching chinese to foreigners, and to sort characher
>is some dictionaries. Allmost nothing more. And actualy, chinese
>written in the roman notation is hardly readable.
That's a little overstated perhaps. There is a chatroom at
zhongwen.com where people blithely tap away in pinyin without even
marking the tones. It's quite understandable to those who speak
Chinese well. Granted, as it's a chatroom, conversation deals with
basic introductions and topics of the day, and does not veer toward
chemical compounds in rocket fuel or the Chinese legal code, but
while it's easy to see that reading sweeping texts in pinyin (even if
with diacritic or numeral tone markers) would be draining, it may
just be a matter of what one is used to or trained in. (I believe the
PRC in fact publishes a magazine (with, like, real articles, not
watered down Chinese) written entirely in pinyin (at least it used
to)).

>There are too mainy homophones in chinese, you never know which
>characher you are talking about. my dictionary has an average 10
>characher for each sillable. This is average, so many ones have much
>more.
>
>if you consider that most electronic or informatic systems do no
>handle the diacritic notation of tones, multiply this figure by 4.
>
>If you write english in ponetics, you will have the same writing for
>to two and too. Ok, only three. but can you imagine the mess when
>not 3 but 40 words have the exact same spelling?
Again, I wouldn't argue that it's not without it's difficulties, but
I doubt the situation would be as dire as you suggest. Whether
"tuoxie" means "slippers" or "compromise", or whether "youyong" means
"useful" or "swimming" could probably be easily deduced from context.
Throw in tone markers, and the problem, at least for these examples,
disappears. And as John pointed out, sure, "shi4" has bazillions of
characters, but how many would be isolated, not in compounds, to
create the pandamonium of confusion you describe.

Don't get me wrong. I am a hanzi junkee and hope they live long and
prosper. In past postings when this subject has come up, I have
opposed anti-hanzi positions. That said, while I do not advocate
romanizing Chinese (beyond teaching basic Chinese to non-natives and
orgainizing dictionaries, as you mention above), it is not because I
think the system would utterly unworkable or impossible.

Kou