Re: Esperantist lies (Re: Learning a language)

From: Sean O'Leathlobhair (jwlawler_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 07/08/04 

Date: 8 Jul 2004 14:51:55 -0700

LEE Sau Dan <danlee@informatik.uni-freiburg.de> wrote in message news:<m38ydux654.fsf@mika.informatik.uni-freiburg.de>...
> >>>>> "Sean" == Sean O'Leathlobhair <jwlawler@yahoo.com> writes:
>
> Sean> You claim that the Chinese script contains phonetic hints.
> Sean> Of course, I know much less than you of the script but this
> Sean> description fits reasonably with what I know.
>
> Why don't you compare with me and my classmates when we(exclusive)
> were in primary school? At that time, my classmates and I didn't know
> much English. Teachers seldom directly teaching us how to letters in
> a word relate to the pronunciation, as an alphabet, "phonetic" writing
> was not familiar to us. They do teach us, though, that we should
> remember pronounce an ending "s" (Cantonese syllables can't end with
> an "s") when we see letter "s" or "ce" at the end of a word. Other
> than these minor hints, they don't teach us to relate English
> pronunciations to spellings. We had been learning English this way.
> Each word is learnt as a triplet of meaning, spelling and
> pronunciation. So, at that stage, my classmates couldn't pronounce
> any English words that they've never learnt. But at that age, most of
> us have enough familiarity with the Chinese script that we can guess
> what an unseen Chinese character means and how it is pronounce, with
> pretty high chance of success.

You may have been taught to read English in a similar fashion to
Chinese and as others have commented, some natives are taught that
way. I don't deny that you can treat the English script as if it were
Chinese. I only deny that you have to. I cannot read any Japanese,
does that prove that the Japanese script is unreadable? Of course
not. Your experience is no more proof that the English script is
unphonetic.

I, and many (most?) other, literate, native English speakers were not
taught that way. We can pronounce English words that we have not seen
before. Even when my son had been learning to read for less than one
year, if he encountered a word that he did not know, he would say:
"Daddy, what does blah mean?". He would not show me the book. On a
good day, he would say it correctly or close enough for me to
recognise. On a bad day, I would ask for some context and then be
able to guess what he meant. It was very rare that I had to ask to
see the book or ask him to spell out the word. Some 6 year old
children can read English words that they do not know.

I have only related one case against your one case but logically that
is enough for my argument and not yours. I am claiming that it is
possible for someone to read English words which he does not know. A
single example is enough to prove that. You are claiming the converse
and would need to show that not only you cannot do this but that no
one else can either.

> I was special in my class. At an age of 7 (before I even started to
> learn that wierd thing called "tense"), I was already able to infer
> the principle of an alphabetic phonetic script from the English words
> that I've learnt. I even developed a feeling of the spelling rules of
> English. So, I was able to "predict" how the English words the
> teacher was going to teach us in the coming lesson. The classmates
> came to me, flipped the textbook to the page for the coming lesson,
> and asked me how to pronounce the new words on that page. I guessed
> the pronunciation (with high success rate!) and they wrote it down by
> transcribing the sounds into Cantonese/Chinese characters. (Don't be
> surprised; that's what most HK schoolchildren do. We've already
> mastered our script at this age so that we can transcribe English
> sounds in Chinese characters!) Why were they doing this? The English
> teacher had to teach so many new words (plus other things) in a single
> lesson that he/she had to go quite fast. The classmates seldom have
> enough time to do the transcription and write it down. With the help
> of my predictions, they can catch up with the teacher.
 
You seem to be arguing against your own case now. Although you were
not taught to read English phonetically, you figured it out anyway.

Take this issue up with your teachers for an explanation. If I were
teaching English to literate Chinese speakers, I may also start that
way. Their experience with their own script may lead them to accept
an arbitrary relationship between the written and spoken form. But
after a few dozen or few hundred words, I would switch strategy and
start to explain the phonetics. That way, they could make a fast
start at reading simple texts without getting bogged down with trying
to make CAT out of the children's names of the letters. But the
switch would allow them to make more progress on their own. I believe
that English is sometimes taught to natives that way. But, with a few
exceptions, the teaching does soon switch to a phonetic mode.
 
> Sean> I know that, unlike it is commonly believed, there is some
> Sean> phonetic information in the script. But it is approximate
> Sean> so "hints" seems an appropriate word.
>
> The phonetic info in the English script are also hints only. You
> cannot rely completely on them. Those who pretend that they can rely
> on them as "accurate information" are also those who complain about
> the English script, apparently. Schoolchildren in Hong Kong aren't
> taught that the English script is "phonetic". (They're often
> encouraged to learn the IPA so that they can look up the real
> pronunciation from dictionaries.) So, we never complain that the
> English script is crazy. Rather, we learn it as a mnemonic script,
> and we're fine with this.

To me, at least, there is a big gap between hints and total
reliability. I would not claim that the English script is totally
reliable. Remember that I used the spectrum analogy and not a simple
phonetic / non-phonetic dichotomy. I accept that hints is an
appropriate description for Chinese and hence it is towards the
non-phonetic end of my spectrum. English is not at the other end.
For the problem of reading (predicting sound from writing) it is not
too bad. The worst exceptions are among the most commonly used words.
 Name some English words with unpredictable pronunciations which are
not among the few hundred most commonly used words. The really tough
ones such as: tough, cough, bough etc are not really very numerous and
are commonly used. I accept that it is further from the ideal in the
other direction, predicting the written form from the spoken is hard.
But, for me at least, I can do it well enough to find an unknown word
that I have heard in a dictionary.

> Sean> But although, far from perfect, I claim that the English
> Sean> script contains much more than just hints. Also, most of
> Sean> the difficult bits are in commonly used words. In the less
> Sean> common words, it is mostly minor points such as f / ph
> Sean> redundancy or whether a consonant is doubled or not. Have
> Sean> you looked at the links posted by Ruud on the subject?
>
> Yeah. I'm aware of those rules. Actually, those are basically what I
> have (more or less subconciously) inferred during my first 4 years of
> learning English, even before I came to "tense".

Tense does not have anything to do with this debate. I prefer the
Chinese absence of grammatically marked tense. I am not claiming that
English is superior to Chinese in all respects. In fact, I have at
some points in this thread and others claimed the reverse.

> For Chinese, it's even simpler. Every Chinese schoolchild know how to
> recognize the signific and phonetic parts of a Chinese character, and
> can guess the pronunciation from the phonetic hint, together with the
> *background knowledge* of the lexicon of the language. That's no
> magic. Every schoolchild of normal intelligence can do it. Our
> guesses are sometimes wrong, and hence we need to memorize the
> exception. But most of the time, we can rely on the phonetic hints.
 
A good English schoolchild does not read any word wrongly. He or she
will know all the completely unpredictable words and know the rules
for reading the rest. (Note that I did say 'good' schoolchild, there
are bad ones who cannot read well.) Remember for my point, it is not
necessary that everyone can achieve this, just that some can. Even if
the rules of English were so complex that only Einstein was able to
read it reliably, it would still show that the English script
contained more than hints.
 
> Sean> Not only can a well educated English speaker pronounce most
> Sean> unfamiliar words accurately,
>
> The same is true for a literate Chinese.

What happens when the phonetic hint has the wrong tone or a wrong
consonant or vowel? The hints are often quite approximate. If he
does not know the word, how will he know how to correct it or even
that it is wrong? The English speaker needs to remember a few hundred
unpredictable words. The rarer the word, the more likely the
pronunciation is to be predictable. If there are going to be
exceptions, it is better that there are in the common words than the
rare ones. I don't think that is true for Chinese, is it?
 
> Sean> he can usually hear a word and find it in a dictionary.
>
> This would be more difficult for Chinese.
 
> Sean> If I hear an unfamiliar word, I can usually find it in a
> Sean> dictionary.
 
> Me too, for English and German, and sometimes French (if liaison is
> absent).

So you do acknowledge some advantage to our script. Surely that also
indicates that the script is providing more than just hints. I see
this as a very valuable feature of the English script (and other
similar scripts). There are many contexts when it is not possible to
ask a speaker to explain a word (e.g. TV or radio). The ability to
find it in a dictionary can make the difference between understanding
and not understanding.

I can also do it with many European languages. French is a tough one
because of the liaison and if there are multiple words that you do not
know, the word boundaries can be a challenge. There are also many
spellings for some sounds. But it has less of the random variations
of English. For a native French speaker, I would expect the level of
difficulty of this task to be comparble to English. Spanish is an
interesting case. Reading is realible, I don't know of any Spanish
word which cannot be accurately pronounced with just a few rules. But
the reverse is not so simple (better than English). Few speakers
differentiate B and V. In many dialects S and Z are not distinguished
either.

> Sean> I may have to make several attempts, for example if it
> Sean> starts with the sound <ju> then it may begin u or eu, if it
> Sean> has the sound <f> then it may be spelled f or ph etc.
>
> I see. You mean multiple attempts. We can often do it with Chinese,
> too. Firstly, there are dictionaries with a phonetic index (based on
> some phonetic transcription method -- Pinyin is gaining ground). Even
> for dictionary without phonetic indices, we can find a homonymous (or
> similarly sounding) character. On that entry, there is usually
> another character of the same or similar pronunciation, so that people
> not familiar with Fan3Qie1, Pinyin, or other phonetic transcription
> schemes may guess the correct pronunciation. We can sometimes find
> the desired character there.

What difference in meaning do you intend by multiple rather than
several? Are you suggesting that a large number of attempts are
required? That depends on knowledge and experience. If your initial
guess is good then few attempts are required. I usually find the word
quickly and only rarely have to open several pages of the dictionary.
The worst case is of course when the word starts with a silent letter.
 But the kn words are limited and I know most of them. Other funny
ones such as ps, pn, mn are mostly restricted to well known prefixes
that I will recognise. Mistakes further down the word matter less
since they will be close in the dictionary.

> Rhyme tables (supposed to be a tool for poets?) have existed in China
> for over a millennium. They're another tool for looking up characters
> by sounds. Of course, with computers, it's quicker to use the various
> phonetic-based input methods to do a similar lookup. Type in the
> phonetic transcription of a sound, and you get a list of candidate
> characters. (Is there a similar tool for English, other than using
> the simplistic Soundex algorithm?)

I don't know. We don't really need such tools. There are rhyme
tables but their main purpose is to assist you in writing poems or
songs. I have not heard of them being used as a spelling aid. One
useful tool in the days before computers is a reverse dictionary.
This does not place Z before A. It sorts words by comparing the last
letter first, then the next to last. It is useful for crosswords and
other word puzzles. It could be used to assist finding odd words but
I have not heard of anyone doing that.

> Sean> This is a nuisance and makes the job harder than it would be
> Sean> in Spanish
>
> Not entirely:
>
> When you hear [x], do you know whether it is spelt with "j" or "g"?

Usually J only before A, O or U. G is far more common than J before E
and I. Not a perfect rule but a very good first guess. A perfect
rule is that [x] would never be G before A, O or U.

> When you hear [T], do you know whether it is spelt with "z" or "c"?

A similar rule. C before E and I and Z before A, O or U. This is
also not perfect but it is better than the J / G rule. It is also a
perfect rule that C would never be [T] before A, O or U.

A problem are the dialects that do not distinguish [s] and [T]. In
these the sound [si] could be SI or CI and maybe but probably not ZI.

Look at conjugations of verbs whose stems end in G, J, C or Z. You
will see these rules in action.

> And when do you know there is an "h"?
 
You don't but it is only common in a small number of frequently used
words such as the haber. If you cannot find a word that sounds as if
it starts with a vowel then try again under H.

> Sean> but it is possible with practise.
 
> What is not possible with practice and suitable tools?
 
Many things. If the association between written and spoken forms was
completely arbitrary then no one could read an unfamiliar word or find
an unknown word in a dictionary.

> Sean> I will need to find two closer Chinese dialects. Indeed
> Sean> Mandarin and Cantonese are further apart than UK and US
> Sean> English but they are closer than English and French.
>
> >> I don't think so.
>
> Sean> A separate debate that we could have but irrelevant for my
> Sean> point. Mandarin and Cantonese share many characters but
> Sean> they do not pronounce them the same way.
>
> Similarly, English and French share many words, although they don't
> pronounce those words the same. "cousin" is an example.
> "beauté"/"beauty" is another. "commence", "important", "instant",
> ..., "football", ...
>
> So, why do you think this pair is so different from the
> Mandarin/Cantonese pair?
 
I only raised this point to counter your argument that differing UK /
US pronunciations showed that our script was not phonetic. The
different UK / US pronunciations of missile do not show this, they
only show that the rules for the UK and the US are not quite the same.
 If you think that the differing UK / US / French / German
pronunciations invalidate my phonetic claim then the different
Mandarin / Cantonese / Japanese pronunciations of shared characters
invalidate your claims for your script. Both of our scripts are
shared by multiple languages and dialects. To be fair, let's
concentrate on one example of each. I will select Southern England
English for my example of the English script. You can choose one
language or dialect to represent yours.

> Sean> UK and US English share many words but do not always
> Sean> pronounce them the same way.
>
> But the differences are so minor that we don't have difficulties
> understanding both pronunciations, given time to adjust our ears. The
> same never happend to Mandarin/Cantonese.
>
>
> Sean> No one calls English and French a single language.
> >> I would call them a "European" language. :)
>
> Sean> If you wish but I don't think that you find many others that
> Sean> would agree with you.
>
> Many linguists agree that calling the Chinese branch of languages "a
> single Chinese language" is as ridiculous as calling the Romance
> languages "a single Romance language", or even the European IE
> languages "a single European language".

I agree as well. But is it relevant to our script discussion?
Remember way back, you were impressed that I realised this and
recognised that by selecting Mandarin, I would not be able to practise
with the Cantonese speakers that I often meet here in the UK.

> Sean> I thought you claimed that you learnt Mandarin easily, is
> Sean> that no evidence that Cantonese and Mandarin have a close
> Sean> relationship. The English and French do not usually learn
> Sean> each other's languages easily.
>
> Go to Hongkong and ask the HKers whether they find the learning of
> Mandarin easy. If it is really easy, then most HKers should be able
> to understand Mandarin easily, right? But this is not the case. Most
> HKers can't even understand a simple Mandarin sentence.
 
I would not expect a HKer to understand Mandarin without learning.
Also I would not expect an Italian to understand French without
learning. But I thought that you had said that you leant Mandarin
easily. Is that wrong? I am not suggesting mutual comprehensibility
but I did think that it would be fairly easy to learn your second
Chinese language.

> >> A couple of questions for you: Does anyone call Danish,
> >> Norwegian and Swedish "a single language"? Are they mutually
> >> intelligible? Are they more similar to one another than
> >> Mandarin is from Cantonese?
>
> Sean> I asked exactly the same question myself a while back.
> Sean> Remember the Flemish discussion? They are commonly regarded
> Sean> as separate languages but this is only because they have
> Sean> separate names and are used in separate countries.
>
> Remember that the Cantonese speaking region is larger than many
> European countries. I'm not refering to the minute countries like
> Liechtenstein or San Marino. I'm refering to countries like Germany,
> France, UK. That this region does not have political independence is
> the main difference here.
 
We debated the Chinese language / dialect issue a while back. I
thought that we agreed that it was not just European ignorance that
caused the assumption of Chinese as a single language. If the Chinese
community stressed the differences more, we might eventually learn.
But we also make the same mistake with our own languages and often
wrongly assume that one country = one language. This causes languages
such as Catalan to be ignored (no official EU status) whereas Danish
with fewer speakers is not ignored.

> Sean> If the national boundaries were ignored and the languages
> Sean> analysed from scratch, I expect that they would be regarded
> Sean> as dialects of one language.
>
> How about Dutch and German? (esp. Flemish vs. Austrian)
 
This is often debated. The extreme ends are not mutually
comprehensible and hence this suggests that they are not a single
language. However it is hard to find where one stops and another
starts. It is a continuum. Countries do have some significance since
they often set standards. I am not an expert on the Germanic
languages but I expect that there is a standard Dutch and a standard
German and that they are not mutually comprehensible without learning.
 So in at least one sense, they are different languages.

I have heard that the Australian aborigines understand the issue
better but it may be an urban myth. They do not classify their
languages / dialects as we do. They describe the speech of other
tribes in terms of the time that it takes to get to know it. So a one
week dialect is quite close but a one year one would probably be a
different language to us. In this way, Flemish may be a one week
dialect of Dutch and German may be one year dialect.

> Sean> Danes and Swedes can understand each other with practise
>
> This is impossible between Cantonese and Mandarin. The speakers needs
> to LEARN the others' language in order to communicate. Or communicate
> by writing in standard written Chinese (no dialectual style writing).
>
> Even Toishanese and Cantonese are mutually unintelligible, although
> everyone considers Toishanese to be a "sub-dialect" of Cantonese.
 
Does that "everyone" include the Chinese? If so, it is not just us
Europeans misclassifying the Chinese languages.

> Sean> but I have often seen Danes and Swedes talk in English even
> Sean> when no other foreigners were present. I know Danes that
> Sean> claim not to speak Swedish but that may be just a joke or
> Sean> prejudice.
>
> Why? They don't speak Swedish. They only understand it. These are 2
> different matters.
 
The Danes usually understand Swedish easily. The Swedes do not so
often understand Danish easily. Here is one example. In a hotel in
Stockholm I met a Danish woman. Later I saw her talking to reception
in English. I asked why use English since she was Danish and the
receptionist was Swedish. She said: "It's much easier that way".
Since both she and the receptionist spoke English well, it was easier
than forcing the Swedish receptionist to cope with an unfamiliar
Danish accent.
 
> Sean> I know nothing of Alsace.
>
> Alsace is a German dialect. I can understand a bit little of it. But
> it is spoken in a French department near Germany. That region has
> been ruled by German, French, German, (perhaps also Austrian) and now
> French powers in history.
 
I know the Alsace region and some of its history but I did not know
that there was a language called Alsace.
 
> Sean> I, and several others such as Ruud, disagree. Just because
> Sean> you may not be able to read an unfamiliar English word does
> Sean> not mean that I cannot. I am not saying that it is easy but
> Sean> it is possible.
>
> Apply the same argument, please. Just because you cannot pronounce an
> unseen Chinese character correctly does not imply that I and most
> other Chinese cannot do it with ease.
  
But do you claim to be able to read the vast majority of unfamiliar
characters accurately, including when you do not know the word? Can
you hear a word and find the character in a dictionary (unless it uses
an auxiliary index such as Pinyin).

I can do both of these for English. I would claim that I could read
99% of new English words correctly. Note that I am not claiming that
99% of English words can be read correctly from their spelling. I am
only claiming that 99% of those that I don't know are. This is
because I know the vast majority of the exceptional words. In
English, the rarer the word, the more likely that the pronunciation is
as expected from the spelling.
 
> >> With a good knowledge of the Chinese vocabulary, one can know
> >> which "possible" pronunciation derived from those phonetic
> >> hints would match the signific part to give a sensible word in
> >> the given context.
>
> Sean> If you know the word. I can read an unfamiliar English word
> Sean> that I have never heard. Could you read a Chinese character
> Sean> if you did not know the word?
>
> As mentioned before, most "unfamiliar" Chinese words nowadays are
> compounds built up from highly familiar Chinese characters. So, yes,
> I can pronounce each character of the unfamiliar Chinese compound
> word. e.g. new brand names. People aren't that stupid to invent new
> product names or jargons using characters that most people would
> mispronounce.
 
Do you know all Chinese morphemes? Even if you did, it would say
nothing about the phonetic nature of your script, just that either
your stock of morphemes was small or your memory was good.

I do not deny that the Chinese word formation is more logical and
simpler than English. I am only claiming that our script contains a
high level of phonetic information. It could be that the Chinese
script works for Chinese mainly because of the structure of the
languages (note the plural). The European languages needed to develop
more phonetic scripts since they have far more morphemes and the
Chinese approach would not work.
 
> Sean> I accept all this and I agree that Chinese is better at it
> Sean> than English. My only point here is that many English words
> Sean> do have some structure and it is at least sometimes possible
> Sean> to deduce the meaning without being told.
>
> And I inform you that the Chinese script is no worse at this.
   
I don't deny it. In fact, I would accept that it is better.
 
> Sean> But what can you tell from hearing the names spoken?
> >> Nothing. That's why I prefer reading a text, than having
> >> someone else read it out aloud for me to interpret.
>
> Sean> So here, English may be slightly ahead. Its "meaning hints"
> Sean> work when spoken as well as written.
>
> No. I prefer reading because I can proceed at my own pace, not the
> speaker/writer's pace. Moreover, homonyms are often distinguished in
> English spelling (e.g. "see" vs. "sea", "said" vs. "sad"), which means
> I have to do less disambiguation (even though it is subconcious, it
> still consumes energy). Also, words pronounced quite differently due
> to vowel changes or stress changes are spelt the same, making it
> easier to recognize the meaning directly from the glyphs, e.g. "says"
> (from "say"), "read (past tense)" from "read", "urbaniZAtion" from
> "URban".
 
As a native speaker, I do not have these problems. I learnt to
distinguish "see" and "sea" before I learnt to read. Note that for me
"said" and "sad" are not homonyms. This could be one reason why
non-natives find our script harder than the natives do. We have a lot
of phonemes in English and many of our distinctions (e.g. said / sad)
are not noticed by non-natives. Which are and are not noticed depends
on your native language. For example, the Spanish often struggle to
distinguish "sit" and "seat". Also, although the phonetic values of
"i" in "write" and "written" are quite different, the association is
automatic to me. I don't mean that they sound the same but that they
are regarded as close and do not necessarily signal unrealted words.
 
> Sean> If I read or hear a word starting Xylo then I guess that it
> Sean> has something to do with wood.
>
> What's a Xylophone? (That's the only "xylo-" word I know.)

Xylo = to do with wood. Phone = to do with sound (e.g. telephone).
It is an wooden instrument consisting of lots of bars (one per note)
which you hit with a stick. Do you know glockenspiel (German word
used in English). It is similar but the xylophone is made of wood.
Xylo is a fairly obscure morpheme. I picked it as an example of what
a highly literate speaker would know and recognise. Another example
is "xylograph" which is a wood engraving.

Seán O'Leathlóbhair

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Esperantist lies (Re: Learning a language)
    ... the Chinese script. ... You claim that the Chinese script contains phonetic hints. ... But although, far from perfect, I claim that the English script ... > Sean> Mandarin and Cantonese are further apart than UK and US ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Esperantist lies (Re: Learning a language)
    ... > Sean> were not taught that way. ... We can pronounce English words ... > What makes you think the same doesn't happen in a Chinese family? ... > that _the English script has more phonetic hints than the Chinese ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Esperantist lies (Re: Learning a language)
    ... We can pronounce English words ... Sean> that we have not seen before. ... What makes you think the same doesn't happen in a Chinese family? ... that _the English script has more phonetic hints than the Chinese ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Esperantist lies (Re: Learning a language)
    ... I know much less than you of the script but this ... Sean> description fits reasonably with what I know. ... they don't teach us to relate English ... us have enough familiarity with the Chinese script that we can guess ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Chinese dictation
    ... Richard> jotting down an English sentence, I cn omit sm vwls nd ... Richard> shorthand in Chinese? ... Chinese script in a similar way. ...
    (sci.lang)