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

"Quadibloc" == Quadibloc <jsavard@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

Quadibloc> Now, the Zhuyin Fuhao does have the property that one
Quadibloc> has to add additional symbols to it before one can
Quadibloc> render any of the dialects of Chinese other than
Quadibloc> Mandarin,

It has been done for some dialects. I think the Hakka speakers in
Taiwan has done it for Hakka.

Indeed, the original Zhuyin Fuhao even had a letter for "v". However,
it was later decided that "v" be considered a dialectual sound -- not
standard Mandarin. So, it was removed from the standard. But it
still survived for writing Mandarin dialects, and I think Hakka has
reused it.


And how is Hanyu Pinyin better? You don't need to adapt it to write
Minnan?


Quadibloc> and it can't be used to show the pronounciation of
Quadibloc> English words or French words and so on.

Why not?

And... can English spellings or French spellings be used to show the
pronunciation of Mandarin or Hakka words? Neither!


Quadibloc> But I suppose one could cheat and put the "initials" at
Quadibloc> the end of a syllable to do this.

Why not? I think they do that for Hakka, because Hakka has final /p/,
/t/, /k/, /m/.



Quadibloc> Since Chinese people are able to talk to each other
Quadibloc> without stopping to take out a pencil and paper and
Quadibloc> write down characters, of course Chinese can be written
Quadibloc> with a phonetic writing method.

Writing/reading and talking are two different things. One is
non-interactive, while the other is interactive. That makes a big
difference.


Quadibloc> As if more proof were needed, there are historical
Quadibloc> examples of groups speaking dialects of Chinese who
Quadibloc> ended up writing them using the Arabic alphabet or the
Quadibloc> Cyrillic alphabet.

There ARE still such groups. The Hui minority speaks Mandarin, but
they have a way to write it. The Dongan dialect of Mandarin is
written in the Cyrillic alphabet.

But these are minorities. Why are they the minority and those using
Chinese character the majority? And why has Japan kept using Kanji's?



Quadibloc> This, coupled with the general habit of linguists in
Quadibloc> regarding the spoken language as primary, and the
Quadibloc> written language as derived, has caused what I believe
Quadibloc> is "tunnel vision" among those who propose language
Quadibloc> reform for China; they think that the only way to
Quadibloc> abolish the difficulty of learning the characters is by
Quadibloc> following all the other languages, and devising a
Quadibloc> strictly phonetic transcription system.

Why follow other language? Is life better in many parts of Africa,
where they have adopted the Latin script to write their languages?


Quadibloc> But if you use accents for tones in Chinese, they will
Quadibloc> get dropped, and if you spell the vowels differently,
Quadibloc> as in Yale and Guoyu Romaytzh, the system is
Quadibloc> confusing. So there is a minor difficulty resulting
Quadibloc> from the nature of the Chinese spoken language - tones
Quadibloc> are important, but there is no comfortable way to note
Quadibloc> them.

So, the simple solution is to keep using characters. They have been
working for millennia.


Quadibloc> For the use of foreigners reading a phrasebook, I would
Quadibloc> suggest ! for a falling tone, ? for a rising tone,
Quadibloc> after the syllable, and italics for a high tone. Real
Quadibloc> punctuation would be separated by a space from the
Quadibloc> preceding text. In practice, writing systems for
Quadibloc> Chinese have managed without indicating tone.

Because the characters have other hints to let us memorize them
easily. There is no need to _precisely_ transcribe speech sounds in a
writing system. A mnemonic writing system is not only possible, but
also efficient.



Quadibloc> A computer keyboard has 47 keys.

What? Mine has 104 keys. My oldest PC AT keyboard had 101 keys.
Older PC XT keyboards had some 94 keys. What kind of computer are you
using?


Quadibloc> Include 26 letters, and that leaves 68 other
Quadibloc> characters,

Your numbers don't add up.


Quadibloc> if you use the letters in only one case. While making
Quadibloc> do with 68 radicals instead of 214 is perhaps going to
Quadibloc> cause difficulty... 68 radicals do cut down ambiguity
Quadibloc> more effectively than four tones. Or have extra shift
Quadibloc> keys if you must.

Are you going to invent yet another IME for Chinese? There are
already hundreds (if not thousands) of them invented by Chinese
people.


Quadibloc> A system which uses Roman letters - or Bopomofo, it
Quadibloc> doesn't really matter which - to replace the "phonetic"
Quadibloc> of a character, but which keeps the "radical" (of
Quadibloc> course, not all Chinese characters *are* phonetic
Quadibloc> compounds) would serve not *just* to transcribe speech,
Quadibloc> but *also* to render texts written in characters in
Quadibloc> Classical style without translation.

There are too few Bopomofo symbols to disambiguate. Further, Bopomofo
is only good for Mandarin (without modifications). OTOH, the phonetic
element in plain old characters work across various dialects most of
the time, because they represent sounds that may have been lost, but
consistently changed in different dialects. Replacing these phonetic
elements with Bopomofo letters will destroy this nice correspondence
between different dialects.


Quadibloc> One could be even fancier - educate the people of
Quadibloc> China, in addition to reading and writing in this
Quadibloc> system using the pronounciation of their own dialect,
Quadibloc> to read texts in this system written in an
Quadibloc> "interdialectical romanization" such as Y. R. Chao's
Quadibloc> "General Chinese",

Why? Why go for Romanization in the first place?


Quadibloc> and one could - say with the aid of a dictionary or an
Quadibloc> electronic dictionary in a word processor - create
Quadibloc> printed texts that could be read by people who speak
Quadibloc> *any* dialect of Chinese, who *did not* have to spend
Quadibloc> lots of time learning characters *or* lots of time
Quadibloc> learning Mandarin as a second language.

Neither of these take "lots of time". It takes no more time than
learning how to spell English words correctly.



Quadibloc> (So the Hakka would have to memorize, say, the
Quadibloc> Mandarin word for "soup".

Why should that become necessary? Our character system is simpler,
then, because the user doesn't need to learn how to pronounce Mandarin
words.


Quadibloc> The system could not be perfect, but it would still be
Quadibloc> far easier to learn than characters.)

Any empirical evidences? Why invent yet another elliptical wheel?


Quadibloc> Then one has a system which, just like characters (when
Quadibloc> used in Classical style), has the ability to bridge the
Quadibloc> dialect gap!

Even the Japanese -- who have a very phonemic syllabary -- have failed
to get rid of Kanji's. They didn't even try your method (using kanas
instead of Bopomofo symbols). I can't see a reason for the Chinese to
repeat this failure. We've got better things to spend time on.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

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

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