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

On Sun, Nov 03, 2002 at 03:01:44PM +0000, Andreas Johansson wrote:
[snip]
> If homophones are such an obstacle to writing Chinese alphabetically, then
> how is spoken Chinese intelligible? (I'm NOT being sarcastic here; what you
> say seems truly strange to me and I'd like to be enlightened.)
I assume you mean Mandarin? ("Chinese" after all encompasses what are
properly separate languages, even though people commonly call them
dialects.)

For simplicity's sake, let's assume we're dealing with *one* regional
dialect of Mandarin, so that we don't have to worry about regional
differences.  From my (decidedly subjective) observations, there is a
basic core vocabulary in Mandarin which is unique enough that they are
unambiguous.  But context plays a big part; one syllable in isolation may
"default" to phoneme A, whereas the same in a compound word (the
polysyllabics so common in Mandarin) would be understood differently based
on what's surrounding it.

Outside of this core vocabulary, the entire context of the conversation
will "impose" a particular interpretation to ambiguous syllables. (I often
find myself "caching" a word ambiguous to me, until its following context
clarifies it. But of course, I can only speak for myself; this may not
occur for people more fluent in the language than I.)

And when it comes to technical jargon, words are almost completely
unintelligible unless you happen to specialize in the same area. In this
case, the listener will usually resort to asking the speaker or somebody
else who knows that was meant. Once clarified (interestingly, this is
usually done in terms of how it is *written* [1]), the person will be able
to recognize the word next time it occurs in the same context.

(Note [1]: It is quite interesting to realize just how much the writing
system has been integrated into Chinese psychology; usually, just by
learning how an unknown word is written, a person can immediately
understand or make a very close guess as to what it means. I would even
go so far as to say that, outside of the core vocabulary, people think in
terms of logographs instead of sounds.)

[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. 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.


T

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