Re: Language comparison

On Sun, 9 Jan 2005 16:48:45 -0800, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
>> Now, one might be able to depart from this by writing semantically, [...]
>
> What if I gave you something written in Chinese, but didn't tell you
> what dialect it was intended to represent?
Well, I would have to admit I don't speak Chinese of any dialect.

But, to take a similar case, I will take a random sentence from
the French Wikipedia:

    << Le groupe 6 du tableau périodique des éléments contient les
       éléments chimiques suivant: chrome (Cr), molybdène (Mo),
       Tungstène (W), seaborgium (Sg). >>

I couldn't tell you the first thing about how to pronounce that,
but I do know exactly what it means because all the words (save "le",
"du", "des", "les" and "suivant") could be read as English.

The French person who wrote that was trying to convey French speech
to French readers.  It is a side-effect of the writing system that
it can also convey English meaning to English readers.

I expect similar would happen in a Chinese trans-"dialectal" context.

> Or, for that matter, if I wrote it only on the basis of knowing the
> grammar (nonphonetic) and looking up (by meaning) the characters?
Knowing the grammar, phonetic or not, is what will _make_ it an
authentic representation of Chinese speech: a grammar is, after all,
what separates genuine utterances from unacceptable ones.  The fact
that you have characters without phonetic information, strictly
speaking, only means that someone has already encoded Chinese speech
into written words for you.  (Your argument would be exactly the same
if you had, for example, a grammar and dictionary of Armenian or
Voynichese, without any information on how to pronounce it.  Chinese
characters are not a special case here.)  Since this is a bilingual
example anyway--you are looking up the meaning of the characters--what
you are really doing is using a machine [the grammar] to convey your
English (or whatever) speech by encoding it into Chinese.

(Compare "Searle's Chinese room", which isnt strictly related, but
is a very similar idea.)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=464104
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Searle's_Chinese_room



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