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

* Joachim Pense wrote:

Am Tue, 20 Mar 2007 18:16:35 -0400 schrieb Oliver Cromm:

* Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Mar 15, 7:01 pm, Oliver Cromm <lispamat...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
* Peter T. Daniels wrote:

On Mar 14, 8:01 pm, LEE Sau Dan <dan...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"Oliver" == Oliver Cromm <lispamat...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Oliver> Now I learned Chinese characters within Japanese, and the
Oliver> Japanese use of them is a bit more stretched: a character
Oliver> represents a family of morphemes with similar meanings,
Oliver> and can represent any other morpheme of similar meaning
Oliver> *exceptionally*.

So, the use of these characters in Japanese writing is very
ideographic.

No, it is logographic. Any kanji in any particular context stands for
one and only one word. (Any deliberate ambiguity would be called
"poetry.")

Now that is a hardline approach: As long as it's representing language
at all, it isn't ideographic. That leaves nothing to discuss.

[...]

But in the exceptional cases in Japanese I mentioned, the word it
represents is actually noted in Kana. So the Kana represent the word,
and the fact that the Chinese character is supposed to represent that
word this time is explicitly. That's about as ideographic as it can get.
A whole sentence can of course never be written ideographically, because
it represents the grammar of Japanese (or the language at hand).

I guess you're using "ideographic" in some private, unexplained sense.

I try to exemplify, as a first step towards explaining:

If any word in the Japanese language that has approximately the meaning
of "one*" can be represented by the same Kanji (and I believe this is
close to the facts), and any word that will be created tomorrow with the
same meaning also will be allowed to be written with the same Kanji,
then the function of that Kanji is to represent the idea of "one*",
rather than the word "one" ("ichi", "hitotsu" "i" ...).

But the Kanji denotes a word or morpheme, not the concept when it is
used. Of course the notation may be defective (so you in some
situations cannot derive which word meaning "one*" is supposed to be
written in that instance), but I don't think that a Kanji will just
denote the concept without a particular word meaning "one" in mind.

Ok, I understand, and I think we get the picture now. We are actually
arguing on a different level of abstraction. I already conceded that a
whole sentence will never be written ideographically, because it will be
a sentence in a specific language, represent its grammar etc. There is
some flexibility in the exceptions I mentioned, for example in song
lyrics you will find it often that the Kanji for "girl" is written with
an annotation that the intended Japanese word is "ko", "child", or you
may write "sky" and declare it stands for the word "heaven". But this
has limits.

I never claimed that Chinese or even Japanese *is* actually written
ideographically, only that Chinese characters as such (and not there
instantiations in a specific text) have ideographic character. This is,
among others, illustrated by the fact that they have been succesfully
employed to denote Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese words, besides
Chinese.

Take as an example from Western culture the sentence "I ♥ NY". In this
concrete sentence, the "heart shape" stands for the English word "love".
Is this because of a convention that ♥ generally denotes the word
"love", or is it rather because of a cultural convention that ♥
represents the idea of love? I think the latter.

Another case to ponder: If I write the Chinese character for "one" on a
piece of paper and hang it on the wall (as I started this sentence with
"I", I will avoid the expression "calligraphy"), what does it represent?
A Chinese word, a Japanese word? A number?

If you'd show me such a picture and ask me what this is supposed to
mean, I would say that it means "one" (and I would say that in the
language of our conversation - I wouldn't know immediately which
Japanese pronunciation to attach to it), but could be intended to stand
for "beginning". Or "unity". Or something else. So, how strong is the
link between that Kanji and some word?

The exceptions we mentioned are situations like kyoo where a secquence
of Kanji is used to denote a single morpheme or word in Japanese,

These examples are less interesting for my line of argument.

We left out one other case that is more supporting to my view: the case
where one Japanese word is regularly written differently in different
contexts.

My standard example for that is "katai" (hard). There are three
different Kanji in ordinary writing for this word. Ask a Japanese who is
well educated, but not a linguist, and you will likely get the
explanation that there are three different Japanese words that happen to
be pronounced the same and have similar, but slightly different
meanings. In my view, those are three nuances, three ideas of "hardness"
that aren't differentiated in the Japanese language, but only in
Japanese writing (as a Chinese heritage)?

If you think the Kanji represents the respective word that is spoken
when those sentences are read, then you should also claim that the
vowels are (implicitly) indicated in ordinary Arabic writing.

Why should he?

Because in a given Arabic text, the sequence <ktb> is not meant to
represent any arbitrary word that could be written this way, but only
one specific one, so the intended vowels are as fixed as the reading of
a Kanji in a given Japanese text is (in 99% of cases). This
instantiation of <ktb> stands for "kitab", even though in general, out
of context, <ktb> can represent a lot of other words as well.

Another hint: There is a book "Chinese for Mathematicians" (or similar)
that doesn't bother mentioning Chinese pronunciation. It teaches only
the Kanji and their meaning. Those who learn Chinese following that book
will pronounce the Chinese text in English, if at all.

That is possible with every language.

But with alphabetical languages, that can't be efficient, with Chinese,
it might just be the most efficient way of reading it for limited
purposes (and more efficient than the Chinese Room).
--
*Multitasking* /v./ Screwing up several things at once
.

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