Re: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?

On 31/07/08 22:39:15, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi!
>
> A few days ago I was discussing with a friend that I want to try
> making a Hanzi-based writing system for German.  German is not really
> suited for this, even much less than Japanese.  'not suited' here
> meaning it will probably be fun. :-)
>
> My idea was to write the stems with Hanzi and the inflection with
> some
> sort of morphophonological script.  I have not decided about
> derivational endings, maybe they could be written with Hanzi, too, if
> there is some more-or-less clear semantic concept behind it (e.g.
> write _-bar_ ('-able') with the Hanzi for _können_ ('be able to/
> can').
>
> Dunno whether I should use a fully phonological one for inflection,
> however, or whether it would be better to use a morphologically-based
> system, and maybe a good mix.
>
> One question that arose was whether (and if, how) one should mark
> umlauts:
...
> Or ablauts:
...
> There is a combination of ablaut+umlaut, even, in the Past Condition
> forms, which are usually umlauted from the past forms (with a few
> exceptions, of course):
...
> And then, irregular form:
...
> Any ideas?
I'm currently throwing up a few ideas with myself for Hanzi for
English. My starting-point for it is that it irritates me when people
pronounce words as they're spelt because they're spelt like that, so a
phonetic spelling reform probably isn't really what I want to do
anyway. (Also writing the like the Chinese might have certain
advantages.) Anyway, this --- and the application to English, not
German --- might mean that my priorities might be a bit different from
yours, but this is what I was thinking of:

Basically, for umlaut/ablaut/etc, you would simply use the root symbol,
with the appropriate inflexional symbol, and voila! you get a word that
could as easily be regular as irregular:

    [dog]  -> [dog][pl.]
    [foot] -> [foot][pl.]

Applying this to your German examples, you'd have something like:

    [Hund] -> [Hund][pl.]
    [Haus] -> [Haus][pl.]
    [koch] ->
        [koch][inf.]
        [koch][3ps]
        [koch][past]
        [koch][pp]

    [lauf] ->
        [lauf][inf.]
        [lauf][3ps]
        [lauf][past]
        [lauf][pp]

and so on. Note that the ge- prefix is not explicitly written --- but
then again, neither is the -t suffix; it's just that I chose to make
the [pp] a suffix because it's more regular like that.

A parallel phonetic script is probably still necessary for spelling
existing proper nouns which would probably be even harder to adapt to
the system than in Chinese.

I think this is probably the best thing to do if you want to stick
largely to the Chinese set of characters. If, however, you merely want
to have Chinese-like symbols, you might wish to modify the characters
with an additional phonetic component (or entirely replace the current
Chinese phonetic components). So perhaps if ['] signifies i-mutation in
deyuzi (déyǔ = German language), then:

    [Hund] -> [Hund](e)
    [Haus] -> [Haus'](er)

or you might even encorporate the full inflexions into the phonetic,
using [@] for -e and ['r] for i-mutation + -er:

    [Hund] -> [Hund@]
    [Haus] -> [Haus'r].

Of course, this sort of system would be unencodable in standard
Unicode, but has the advantage of being mouldable very nicely to the
language --- you'd basically start of with the Chinese radicals and
diverge from there, only looking to complex Chinese characters for
inspiration.

--
Tristan.

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