Re: intrinsic advantage of Latin alphabet over bopomofo (for Chinese)??

"ekkilu" == ekkilu <ekkilu@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

ekkilu> Chinese-reading-able people will tell you that for
ekkilu> everyday reading, Chinese is easier than reading other
ekkilu> languages. In fact, comparatively, Chinese is the one
ekkilu> language that intentionally makes the writing complicated
ekkilu> in order to achieve the reading easiness. There is
ekkilu> information correlation built into the shape of the
ekkilu> characters that is simply absent in other writing
ekkilu> systems. As a result, it's very easy to scan large blocks
ekkilu> of written text to do speed reading. This is for
ekkilu> everyday-reading articles.

Agreed.


ekkilu> One place where Chinese writing fails miserably is in
ekkilu> sorting and searching. Keyword indexing (having a index
ekkilu> at the end of a book) is a virtually unknown concept in
ekkilu> China until recently.

You're wrong. Chinese dictionaries have existed for over a
millennium. How do you think people can lookup from such
dictionaries, when there are no useable indexing mechanisms?



ekkilu> Even today, indexing is still a problem, despite the usage
ekkilu> of Pinyin order and all that.

If indexing is a problem, then how come Google can search with Chinese
keywords?



ekkilu> It's just not easy to use.

Just not easy for you, maybe.

If it's that difficult, then how come there are search engines
targeted for the Chinese audience? How can that be possible?

e.g. http://www.sohu.com/


ekkilu> And whenever there is a social event, finding your name in
ekkilu> the name list is still a problem,

The tradition for name lists and book indices is to order by stroke
count. It's not difficult at all.

Rather, nowadays, some people nowadays order name lists by the
Latin-alphabetical order of Pinyin, which I find difficult to search
from.


ekkilu> and communicating a character via voice (e.g: over the
ekkilu> phone) is still problematic.

Not a problem at all. If you need to go to "Alpha, Bravo, Charlie" in
order to spell clearly over the phone or radio, then, how is that
easier and less problematic than what we do in Chinese like ("li3 --
mu4zi2 : li3", "tian1 -- tian1kong1 de tian1", etc.)?


ekkilu> As for credit cards, they have to use alphabetized name in
ekkilu> order to make processing easier and compatible
ekkilu> internationally.

That's because the foreigners are not technologically advanced enough
yet to handle Chinese characters. Shame for them.

Indeed, I have bought air tickets in both PRC and RoC. In both cases,
I had my Chinese name printed on the tickets -- beside the
Romanization. When will you foreigners acquire that level of
technology?


ekkilu> I've been to a social gathering where someone was trying
ekkilu> to tell other people the character of a person's name. It
ekkilu> just so happened that no one had a pen. After trying for 5
ekkilu> minutes the person simply gave up.

Really? Then that person may have a low IQ. I can always easily
communicate characters with other people solely by speaking (unless
those are rare characters that I've never seen). I have even done so
with Japanese people, too -- even though I don't speak Japanese. I
speak English with these Japanese people, and despite this, it's
possible. It works like this: "Yumiko? How to write in Kanji?" "Yu:
soft; mi: beauty; ko: little child". "Oh! I see. I've got it."



ekkilu> Yellow pages (phone books) are hard to use, lists of
ekkilu> street names on maps are hard to use. These are all
ekkilu> real-life problems.

If so, then why are yellow pages still being published? If there
isn't a big-enough audience, then how can yellow pages survive as a
business?


ekkilu> So, yes, Chinese writing has its real-life problems,

Problems that exists in your you imagination only.


ekkilu> and often require supplementary help from an alphabetized
ekkilu> scheme (Pinyin or otherwise.)

Because you resort to these means? How can a literate Chinese
monoglot who knows no Pinyin nor Latin letters use dictionaries, name
lists, etc.?


ekkilu> Another place where Chinese fails badly is in phonetic
ekkilu> transcription of long foreign names.

That's because those foreign names do not map to characters directly.
It's not a problem of Chinese characters. It's a problem of those
foreign names. They should have invented Chinese names themselves
instead. :P

See? You're holding a hammer, and you want everything to look like
nails that can fit your hammer.


ekkilu> Because the characters carry intrinsic semantic
ekkilu> correlation information, they tend to interfere with the
ekkilu> phonetic correlation information. As a result, transcribed
ekkilu> long foreign names become extremely hard to parse and be
ekkilu> memorized.

So, it's a problem with those names, isn't it? :)


ekkilu> One practical solution is for foreigners to adopt Chinese
ekkilu> names. But that still does not solve the problem with
ekkilu> geographic locations, technical terms, and non-famous
ekkilu> people names.

Why not? You lack imaginations. How do you think "Yellow Stone
Country Park" gets translated into Chinese? Well... pretty
straight-forward. A more imaginative one is "yosemite" (spelling?).
It's translated as <you1shan1mei3di4>. A phonetic transcription?
Only halfly: it literally means "calm/peaceful mountains, beautiful
place".


ekkilu> There is definitely problem when you spend more than 5
ekkilu> minutes and are not able to communicate a character.

That seems to be a problem of the communicators, not the writing
system. Similar things happen to the Latin alphabet when you're not
using Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, ... because you haven't mastered it.


ekkilu> It's an unknown problem in an alphabetized writing world,
ekkilu> where you could spell things out.

Ever had the problem telling "s" from "h" over a noisy line?





--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

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