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

>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.)
 Spoken chinese is... not always understandable. Well, that's not so bad, but
it is true that there are often many ambiguities, and you have to ask your
interlocuteur what he exactly mean.
 Also note that spoken language almost always involve sentences, even simple
ones, expet for some situations like greetings, warnings, or other situations
involving excalmatory sentences. For written language, it is not the same, for
example, just look at a computer screen, and notice how many words are not
included in a sentence.

>Also, there's nothing to say that an alphabetic writing system has to be
>entirely phonetic (indeed, they practically never are). Different meanings
>could be distinguished by silent letters, empty diacritics or variant
>spellings of the same sounds; the system would hardly have to be as
>byzantine as the "phonetic guides" in Hanzi writing to achieve that.
 Well, the curent roman system for writin chinese is entirely phonetic. Indeed,
it was design as a phonetic guide to try to teach a uniform mandarin all over
the country.
 alphabetic writing system are almost never entirely phonetic when they are
native (or have been used for a long time) of the language. Non
straight-forward spelling allmost allways comes from historical variations of
the language.
 Creating lot's of irregularities (because of the number of homophones, yoou
really need lots of) a priori is not only a headache for the one(s) who design
the system, but also for the one who wants to use it. French or english are
known to have complicated spellings, but those system do have a logic.
 Those allmost random spelling rules would be much harder to learn than the
actual system, because this one has an internal logic.

>(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?)
 Partly. Cantonese, for example, write with hanzi, but don't write mandarin.
The sintax is clearly distinct, and they also include specific hanzi that
mandarin does not have. Some other languages are not usualy writen (as the Wu
language, from shanghai and the region). So learning t write is learning to
write mandarin. But it is not hidden, people learn mandarin, oral and writen,
and to not pretend to learn to write their language.
 Mandarin being the official language of china, i see nothing bad in having
allmost every body learn mandarin. Actualy, every british learn english, right?
I consider the linguistic situation in china to be more free than in europe,
because the offical language does not replace all the local speech, but
cohabitate. Bretons in france, for example, did not enjoy such a tolerant
situation.
 I am actualy quite jalous of this country where the vast majority of the
population is bilingual.

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