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.