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

Teoh wrote:
>[snip]
> > (Also, I'm told that for a non-Mandarin speaker to learn to write under
>the
> > present system involves learning Mandarin more-or-less as a foreign
> > language. Is this wrong?)
>
>?
>
>Not sure what you mean there, but it *is* true that for a Mandarin L1
>speaker to learn the language using the Roman transcription would be like
>learning a completely new language.
Anymore that for an L1 English speaker to learn written English? (I'm not
speaking actual difficulty here; only "foreignness", and obviously I'm
assuming neither the Mandarin or English speaker knows any other writing
system for his/her L1 beforehand.)

>Not to mention the nasty ambiguities,
>etc., unless you introduce variant spellings and such. Good luck coming up
>with a variant-spelling system that has any semblance of sense to it,
>though. Homophonic syllables usually have so little to do with each other
>that it is almost guaranteed to be impossible to come up with a consistent
>variant spelling scheme, unlike in languages like English where variant
>spellings are inherited from actual grammatical features in ancestor
>languages.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean here - surely the commonest causes of
variant spellings in English are collapses of things that used to be
pronounced differently and loans from langs with other orthographies? I
mean, we've never had a stage when phoneme X was written Y in verbs and Z in
nouns, have we?

Still, this's not what I meant. Assume we have an L1 speaker of, say,
Cantonese. According to what I've been told, in order to be able to write
"Modern Standard Written Chinese" (whatever the correct term for that may
be), he/she first has to learn the syntax and idiomatics, etc, of Mandarin,
and for this his/her native Cantonese will be about as much help as
English's syntax etc will help an anglophone learning another Germanic
language's syntax etc.

                                                      Andreas

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