Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP
Posting-Version: version B 2.10.1 6/24/83; site jenny.UUCP
Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!gamma!epsilon!zeta!sabre!bellcore!decvax!genrad!mit-eddie!think!harvard!seismo!mcvax!ukc!kcl-cs!jenny!jbdp
From: jbdp@jenny.UUCP (Julian Pardoe)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Reading Chinese
Message-ID: <255@jenny.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 9-Jul-85 00:30:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: jenny.255
Posted: Tue Jul  9 00:30:35 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 12-Jul-85 04:31:46 EDT
Organization: U of Cambridge Comp Lab, UK
Lines: 30
Xpath: kcl-cs west44

In article <1610@dciem.UUCP> Martin Taylor writes:
> Many  very  long-lived  writing  systems  have  only  a  tenuous  connection
> with the sounds of language.  Chinese (~5-6000 yr) ...  One can  read  aloud
> texts written in either, but this does not mean that such reading...

I  gather  that  although  one can indeed read a written Chinese text out loud
one's listeners might well not understand one.  This  is  because  Chinese  by
which  I  mean  Mandarin)  has  a  very limited stock of possible `words' -- I
think  about  four  thousand.   (Each  `word'  in  Chinese  is   monosyllabic,
consisting of three elements: an initial,  a final and a tone.  There are four
tones and some twenty initials,  which suggests about fifty  finals  --  these
figures seem about right but I can't promise.)  

As a result a single `word' has many meanings.  According to the Guinness Book
of Records the  fourth  tone  of  `i'  has  some  eighty  odd  distinguishable
meanings.  In  spoken  Chinese  the  resulting  ambiguity is often resolved by
using words in pairs.  Thus `to eat' is (I think) `chao',  but  if  the  thing
being eaten is not mentioned one says `chao fan' (`fan' means `rice'),  so `to
eat' is often translated as `to eat  rice';  likewise  `to  read'  is  usually
translated  as `to read (a) book'.  Furthermore,  it is not uncommon for one's
listener  to  interject  with  questions  like  `Do  you mean  "chao  fan"  or
"chao ..."?'.  

Written  Chinese  tends  to  have a character for each meaning and so does not
need to qualify words in this way.  Hence the characters on the  page  may  be
clear  in  meaning,  but  the  sounds  they represent highly ambiguous.   This
possibility was made stronger by  the  fact  that  conciseness  in  expressing
one's  thoughts  was  considered  a  great virtue.  Part of the art of Chinese
poetry lies in expoiting this ambiguity.  One of the problems of  Romanization
is  in  developing  a new style of writing the language which is less prone to
ambiguity than the traditional one, without being completely colloquial.