Talk:Written Chinese/Archive 1

Archive 1

Archive 2

Miscellaneous

Menchi, please don't forget to add in this entry that, in areas where the Cantonese language serves as a formal, or official language, "Modern Standard Written Chinese", though based on Beijing Mandarin, still efficiently serves as the literary, and does so without leading to "Cantonese-Mandarin bilingualism" in the normal sense. In other words, "Modern Standard Written Chinese" is not only the written standard for Mandarin dialects, but also Cantonese and many other major Sinitic languages, perhaps with the exception of extremely divergent ones like Minnan and Dungan.

Chinese written characters are used in Minnan. Curiously Dungan isn't very linguistically divergent from Mandarin (much less so than Cantonese), it's just convention that they don't use characters.

The written language is an important unifying factor for speakers of Sinitic languages world-wide, despite the fact that these socially, regionally and culturally diverse groups sometimes can hardly communicate with each other colloquially.

Written Chinese not much harder to learn

Actually no. Written Chinese is not much harder to learn than any other language. I've known several adults that have mastered it.

The language does not have to be learned entirely as wrote; rather, the underlying logic and structure are apparent to the initiated. Given its depth and sophistication, it is considered challenging for native speakers to master, and difficult or impossible for foreigners who learn it in adulthood.

It depends on what one means by mastering the language. If mastering the language means being able to use all the different forms of written Chinese, then I don't think that there is a single human being that has mastered it. I would dare say that it is only an extremely small number of native Chinese speakers that could write a coherent eight-legged essay in wen-yan (5-10% at most).

On the other have if you mean mastering the language, being able to have a working functional knowledge of Chinese (i.e. being able to write a letter, read a newspaper etc), I know a lot of adult learners that have been able to get to that level of Chinese. My experience has been that the writing system is much less of a barrier to English speakers than the pronounciation. I know a few native English speakers who can't speak the language very well, but read and write classical Chinese much better than most Chinese.

One other thing, I also know quite a number of Chinese who only learned how to read Chinese after becoming adults. Keep in mind that mass literacy programs were only introduced in the 1950's, and it's not uncommon for someone (especially females) to grow up without learning to read and write the language. -- Roadrunner

My experience with adult learners of Chinese is that the written language is not particularly difficult. What is almost impossible for them to get write if they were originally English speakers are the tones.

I think one reason people say Chinese is "more difficult" is that pronunciation and the shape for most characters are not related.

In an alphabet language, people's ability to write is governed by their ability to spell (some memory and some inference to pronunciation). In Chinese, their ability to write is governed almost entirely by their memory of the character shapes.

This also hinders the ability to read. In an alphabet language, an illiterate speaker needs to learn pronunciation in order to be able to read. In Chinese, an illiterate speaker needs to memorize shapes of sufficient characters in order to be able to read. Of course, both speakers will need practice. --voidvector

I can see that it is not noticeably harder to gain some basic proficiency in written Chinese than in written English. Basic English has 800 or so words (plus inflections) in it that permit the user to get around reasonably, and I'm sure someone could select 800 Chinese characters that would do the corresponding job.

However, in my opinion, enlarging one's written vocabulary in English is easier than it is in Chinese. In English, once gets beyond the very common Germanic words, where spelling is fairly irregular, one gets into the somewhat more regular French imports, and then into the even more regular Latin borrowings. In Chinese, however, one only encounters further arrays of characters that must be memorized. The logic of xingsheng construction is not sufficiently deterministic to allow for someone to "shape out" a Chinese character in the same way that one can "sound out" an English word.

At any rate, certain written languages are easier to "get" than others. In comparison with English, which has exceptions galore, the European languages are rather easier to read out loud--notably Spanish, which has practically no exceptions to speak of. Chinese, by comparison, can be thought of (though somewhat unreasonably) as consisting solely of exceptions, each of which has to be learned separately. Again, the logic of Chinese character construction is just not consistent enough for one to make a reliable determination of how to pronounce a new character.

Speaking of Chinese tones, they certainly are a problem--even for Chinese speakers. Mandarin speakers often have trouble picking up the finer tone distinctions in (say) Cantonese and Taiwanese. I think that it is not difficult to teach the tones of individual characters, but getting beginners to string even a short sequence of them together and still get the tones correct is a task. Not to mention the usual 3-3 sandhi rule, which by Chinese dialect standards is fairly simple. BrianTung 19:41, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Unicode links?

An idea: How about making all Chinese characters used in Wikipedia articles link to the proper unicode.org pages? For example, the beginning of the article about Wushu could look like this:

Wushu (武術 - wu3 shu4).

Or would this type of external linking be wrong?

- Wintran 12:58 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Chinese poems, constrained writing

Should add more on Chinese poems, Chinese constraint writings, etc. --Wshun

Chinese poems are, without a doubt, an integral part of Chinese written language, but it deserves it own page on Chinese poetry. You don't need to be comprehensive at the 1st try, of course. Just cover what interests you.

I have no idea what "constraint writings" refer to. Please add it.

--Menchi 02:02 27 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Oh! Sorry, that should be constrained writing. Wshun

Input requested

Input requested at Talk:Chinese_language#Rewrite needed. --Jiang 13:54, 22 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Written Standards

The article mentions "formal written Cantonese" in doing a comparison to "colloquial written Cantonese." To my knowledge, "formal written Cantonese" is standard written Chinese. However, when reading it, Cantonese people will pronounce the characters using Cantonese rather than Mandarin. I don't think it's necessary to make "formal written Cantonese" a distinction. --Umofomia 09:33, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

Actually I decided to make an edit that clarifies the situation much better. --Umofomia 09:56, Feb 11, 2005 (UTC)

On a similar note, what is the difference, if any, between the terms "古文" (gǔwén) and 文言 (wén yán), and why does the page say 文言? In my experience, studying classical Chinese, the term was always the former. siafu 04:51, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think both terms are used pretty much synonymously, however in my experience, the latter term 文言 has been more common, especially when talking about it in the context of being a written standard. 古文 may be more common when talking about it in the context of literature. These are just my observations though. --Umofomia 05:42, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Actually 文言文 is used in reference to the Classical Chinese language in both Mainland China and Taiwanese sources . 古文 represents the literature in Classical Chinese. 古文 translates directly to "Old Writing(s)" while 文言文 translates to "Written language". --Darthanakin 07:21, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

Direction?

I read this page to find out which direction Chinese is written in. The page says nothing about this, but I went on to find some sort of answer in Chinese character. I'm thinking something short should be said about it in this text also, but since I know nothing about written Chinese I don't know what to make of this:

On a larger scale, Chinese text is traditionally written from top to bottom and then right to left, but it is more common today to see the same orientation as Western languages: going from left to right and then top to bottom.

I'd try to write something to that effect myself on this page, but I don't know how to interpret the above. What is the larger scale where Chinese is written top-bottom,right-left? Other countries than the PRC? The Internet? Maybe someone with better knowledge about this could write something about it on this page, and maybe change the Chinese character page to be more clear? I may try writing something myself, and welcome peer review of that in that case. – Foolip 19:37, 12 May 2005 (UTC)

Perhaps Chinese books from mainland China in the 50s and 60s were written more and more in the horizontal L to R style as a first stage in the planned-for total Romanisation of Chinese, which of course never panned out.

p.s. Old-style Mongolian, still somewhat encouraged in Inner Mongolia as a counter-weight to the Cyrillic used in the (perhaps annoyingly) independent Republic, is written vertically, originally by taking the Syriac-derived Old Uighur writing system and turning it 90 degrees so it could be written in the civilised, vertical way. Tangut was also written vertically, again in deference to Chinese. Jakob37 (talk) 14:01, 15 October 2009 (UTC)

Punctuation

I don't see anything on punctuation here, which is an important aspect of written language, and differs a little between Chinese and English. I know I few things, but does anyone know of an online source with full information on ，、。【】〈〉etc? — Chameleon 14:16, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I wrote them at Punctuation#East Asian punctuation. --Menchi 14:20, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Great. I've linked to that now. — Chameleon 14:27, 17 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Chinese written "language"?

As mentioned in Talk:List_of_official_languages_by_state#Official_Written_Languages, I am trully wondering why this article is being refered to as a language, along with the associated confusion over whether Vernacular Chinese is a "language" or not in its own right (Classical Chinese appears to suffer from less self-identity problems). Is it agreed amongst linguists that the Chinese writing system is a language? If so, what is it called in Chinese, because I dont seem to know this despite having writtern in Chinese since decades ago?--Huaiwei 21:20, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Should be 書面語 or 書面中文. See {{漢語}}. — Instantnood 21:46, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Should be? Meaning you arent even sure yourself? This is supposed to be a basic concept in the Chinese language. If we cant even pinpoint its Chinese equivalant, then what does this article actually mean? May I point out also, that this article started life as Chinese writing system. What was the rational in turning it into a language out of the blue?--Huaiwei 21:51, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I can't tell if the term 書面中文 is universal among users of Chinese. Meanwhile I can't find any sign that this article started under that title [1] [2]. — Instantnood 22:39, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Well, who uses that term? I find not more then 10 results on google, so surely it is not exactly widely used. Meanwhile, I was looking at the page's content changes over time. This article only started becoming a "language" with this edit [3] dated 23 June 2003. Prior to that, "Chinese writing system" was bolded [4], as has been so since the article was first created [5] on 25 September 2002 after being split off from Chinese language. Chinese character started life on the same date as a redirect to this page as "Chinese written language" [6], so I suppose the title has been inconsistant with its contents from day one. Interestingly thou, two edits later on 25 February 2003 showed the link "Chinese writing system" appearing in [7], although it was changed back to the redirect a few moments later. Left me wondering if Chinese writing system was really formed as a redirect only on 11 August 2003 [8].

Whatever the case, any objections to changing this title to Chinese writing system?--Huaiwei 00:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I'd say that it's an awkward term that I've never seen used in Taiwan, in particular. --Nlu 22:59, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I have never heard of any of those terms in Singapore either, or that of Chinese writing being a language itself. It would be quite absurd should this be shown to people who basically use the language, and I am surprised no one noticed this earlier.--Huaiwei 00:09, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

"Chinese writing system" would refer only to Chinese characters and how they're used. If you want to change the title, you should probably move "written standards" out. -- ran (talk) 00:18, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

An alternative will be to simply take out the last word and call it Chinese writing, or Written Chinese. While we are at it, would you consider Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese as "languages" or merely "styles"?--Huaiwei 00:37, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

The two are not mutually exclusive. For example, Written Singlish and Standard Written English are simultaneously different English dialects written down, and two different styles that writers can use to achieve intended effects. Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese differ in vocabulary and grammar as much as, say, Latin and Italian. As literate Chinese people are (or were) generally literate in both, the two were also used as two different styles for two different effects. -- ran (talk) 01:13, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I am not too sure which two non-exclusive terms you are refering to, but anyway, writtern Singlish and Standard Written English are not exactly "writting styles", as they are mere writtern versions of the either language. It is not possible to write Standard English using Singlish "style" without basically writing Singlish, so I am not sure if this analogy is appriopriate.

On the other hand, I prefer to look at this from an Old English vs Modern English point of view. Anyway who has had to read Shakespear during his school days would agree with me that reading and writing "Shakespearean English" is almost as good as having to learn another language, but they are never considered a language in their own right. They are simply considered an older form of the same language, sometimes still delibrately used now to suggest the attainment of social stature. Not that different from how the best Chinese language students here in Singapore are expected to be deeply familiar with Tang poems and the like, as well as classic Chinese texts most likely writtern in Classical Chinese. Does this constitute learning a new language? Not exactly. Yes, differences do exists, but do linguists actually consider languages to evolve into a new language over time? Vernacular Chinese is in essense born out of frustrations with Classical Chinese, marking a change in style over the years. Does this mean a new language is born?--Huaiwei 01:44, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

do linguists actually consider languages to evolve into a new language over time? — Of course! How do you think any language in the entire world develops? By your logic, are we typing in Proto-Indo-European right now?

BTW, Shakespeare's English is Early Modern English. It's not even Middle English. Old English looks like this (this is the first three lines of the Beowulf):

Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum,

þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

Which translates to:

LO, praise of the prowess of people-kings

of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped,

we have heard, and what honor the athelings won!

Note that Zhou Dynasty Chinese (upon which Classical Chinese is based) and modern Chinese are separated by three times as much time as Old English is separated from modern English. The reason we don't notice it is because:

1. The Chinese writing system obscures all the sound changes. The Roman alphabet doesn't do this as well.
2. Chinese people study Classical Chinese a lot more than English speakers study Old English, so we end up more familiar with Classical Chinese grammar and vocabulary.

In other words, if you want to use Old English and Modern English as your analogy, then they are definitely separate languages, and thus, so are Classical and Modern Chinese. -- ran (talk) 03:36, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Agree. In fact there are language codes assigned to Old English, as well as Ancient Greek. — Instantnood 09:43, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Oh, so the same language which basically changes overtime becomes a new language (I am not refering to languages which branch out into a distinct branch. Say Singlish from English). Btw, I am not indicating that Shakespearen English = Old English. I am simply asking you: are Old English, Modern English, and everything in between different languages?

And in comparison to Chinese, are Classical and Ver. Chinese distinct languages from the "Chinese language" itself? Can we see some linguist views on this, because I have hardly ever seen these appearing in language trees? Is wikipedia breaking new ground in declaring them as distinct languages before others do so?--Huaiwei 10:51, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think linguists even talk in those terms. All languages change incrementally, and generally become incomprehensible (to its predecessors) in 1000 years, and all but unrecognizable in 5000. It is pointless to ask where one language begins and another ends, just as it's pointless to ask when the Ship of Theseus is no longer the original ship. Linguists talk in factual terms, e.g. this structure was first seen in this century; this sound change occurred in this century, etc. All these changes add up to the wide difference between Old English and Modern English.

For the same reason, linguists tend to avoid questions like whether Chinese is one language or multiple languages, etc., unless they are explicitly trying to promote a political or cultural POV. This is because there is a dialect continuum across Chinese, with small incremental changes that add up to wide differences; every location has its own dialect by definition. Instead, linguists divide Chinese into vague categories according to isoglosses (just as how they divide English and Chinese into stages according to arbitrarily-chosen changes) and describe those in factual terms. -- ran (talk) 23:02, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

But here we are, daring to call Chinese writing a "language", and calling classical and Vernacular Chinese "languages" too, even as linguists do not. Linguists are well known in not being able to decide if Chinese "dialects" are "languages" or not. Have they reached to the point of ever discussing if classical and Vernacular Chinese are languages? If not, why are we doing this before them?

Languages evolve over time. Sure. But linguists do make distinctions between language evolvements which involve a branch into another language, or one which just involves the evolvement of the same language. If not, we wont have language trees. Linguists do debate over stages in language changes, or else we wont have Old English being said to be distinct from Middle English and so forth. And where there is an evolvement, one naturally has to at least place an approximate temporal marker.

The crux of the issue remains hanging. Are we here to debate amongst ourselves if Classical Chinese is different enough from the Chinese language itself to be called another language? Ditto for Vernacular Chinese? Or should we be the ones debating in the first place? Who authorised wikipedia in calling them "languages", if we cannot pinpoint any said convention or agreement amongst linguists?--Huaiwei 01:00, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Your misconception about the evolution of languages is exactly the same as how some people misunderstand biological evolution. Ancient primates evolved into all the primates of today, humans included; it's not as if some monkeys "stayed" monkeys and others "became" humans. Humans did not "come from" monkeys. Similarly, ancient languages evolve into modern languages; no language ever "stays" as itself, whether it evolves into one descendent, or hundreds.

Frankly, this kind of hair-splitting debate that doesn't even have any application to historical linguistics is a waste of everyone's time. Classical Chinese and modern Chinese are more different than Latin is from any Romance language. If you wish to call Italian, French etc "modern Latin", there is really no technical reason why you can't. But if you wish to call Classical Chinese the same language as modern Chinese, just as how other peoples with proud literary traditions, e.g. Tamils, Persians, Arabs, Greeks, etc. like to do for cultural reasons, there is no reason why you can't either.

If you're really bothered by the term "language", do what Old English does then. Say that Classical Chinese is a form of Written Chinese that is based on the grammar and vocabulary of Old Chinese. -- ran (talk) 01:24, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

Contrary to Huaiwei's claim, there are 12 hits by searching with site:sg, 1 360 with site:tw, 4 830 with site:hk, 40 900 with site:cn, and 17 with site:mo. In an overall search gives 91 800 results.

There's no deletion history for Chinese writing system, therefore the link [9] pointing there was very likely a red link. This article starting with moving out the written aspects of the Chinese language [10] [11], including Han characters, wenyan and baihua, etc. [12], but it was not like an article to address the Chinese written language until this edit when it is reorganised, bridging the two parts of materials on the written langage. Chinese character was split from this article [13] [14] at a later stage in late June and early July 2003. No matter what, edit history of a Wikipedia article is not the evidence to justify if Chinese written language is or is not a language. If it's not a language shared by several spoken languages, are you going to say it's just the written form of Standard Mandarin? — Instantnood 00:47, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I do not know what kind of google you are using, but by clicking on those search links, I get 0 hits by searching with site:sg, 11 with site:tw, 34 with site:hk, 40,900 with site:cn, and 65 with site:mo. (the last one is an apparant error). You seem to be using the Chinese edition to do your searches, while I am using the English. Funny thing is most of your searches are done in English, with only one in Chinese...the one for .cn.

The edit history tells us that the original text of this page refers to tbe "Chinese writing system", and that is all I need to show the fact that this article did not have an appiorpriate page title for a long time before some effort was made to correct it. Even then, it remains doubtful. I dont think I intepret things as simply as you do. And just like for some reason, you again think I am trying to say that "it's just the written form of Standard Mandarin". Like I said before, please grow up and dont constantly give me the impression that I am talking to an early teen. I have much more educated and productive discussions with others, such as with Ran above, even if we have some disagreements.--Huaiwei 01:44, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

I think that some of the confusion over whether written Chinese constitutes a language probably arises from a difficulting in identifying what it is the written form actually records. In the various "Western" languages, we don't have a lot of trouble covering both the spoken and written variety under the general heading of "language," because the written form records (possibly imperfectly, as in English) the sounds as heard in the spoken form. Even in forms that are fairly old, such as Old English (before about 1000), the written form captures the spoken form, and if one is familiar with the pronunciation rules of Old English, then one can speak it and be reasonably confident that the sounds are close to what they would have been a thousand years ago.

The situation in Chinese is rather different. In other languages, the writing units (letters, typically, although they may be syllables) correspond to phonemes; in Chinese, the characters correspond to morphemes. They make no less sense when spoken with modern Mandarin pronunciations than with Old Chinese (say, Han dynasty) pronunciations. And yet, from a historical perspective, it leaves us speaking a language that never existed as such--one with modern pronunciations but with a grammar and meaning frozen in time over two thousand years ago. Conversely, we have Classical Chinese and Vernacular Chinese, both of which use the same set of characters, but with considerably different syntax and somewhat different semantics.

It's not a situation we're accustomed to in Western languages and it may make it more difficult for us to identify the written form as a language on the same level as modern Mandarin and the Confucian-era Chinese (which are undeniably two distinct spoken languages, just as Old English and modern English are). I don't think it's unreasonable to refer to the whole as simply "Written Chinese," because although there are considerable differences between Chinese as written in Confucius's time and as written today, there are enough commonalities to warrant a single article to cover them. BrianTung 20:34, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Written Chinese spoken as acrolect?

The article says " Standard written Chinese spoken aloud using Cantonese pronunciation (usually with some colloquial words substituted in) serves as an acrolect used in newscasts and other formal contexts. ". In fact the situation is not very true for Cantonese. Newscasts are seldom in written language being spoken, although the range of vocabularies used is affected by the written language. It's used in public announcements tho, say, in underground stations, but people would just consider it as plain reading from the written text, not speaking. As far as I know this is more true for Min Nan, that newscasts in Min Nan on CCTV are written Chinese spoken with Min Nan pronunciations. — Instantnood 21:46, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

Number of chinese characters and how chinese dictionaries work

It would be good to have a section on the number of Chinese characters - Hanzi(?), Simplified, etc..

It would also be good to have another section on how Chinese Dictionaries 'work' - Radical/number of strokes, initial stroke/number of strokes, etc., then reference to main body of dictionary...Duncan.france 04:39, 24 November 2005 (UTC)

Writing direction

Easy question, but unfortunately not answered yet in this article: in which direction does one read Chinese written language? From left to right? Are there special rules of reading (like right column first, then next left column), as there are in Japanese written language (see Yokogaki and tategaki for the issues I mean)? --Abdull 15:56, 26 November 2005 (UTC)

Of particular problem, if you're not very familiar with the language, are store signs, which can run in any of three directions: top to bottom, left to right, or right to left. Often times, there are cues that can tell you which way it goes (for instance, the presence of the two characters jiu lou), but there are plenty of other times when you're just on your own. BrianTung 19:47, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

Basically the same as Japanese for Traditional Chinese. For Simplified Chinese, vertical writing is very rare. -- ran (talk) 00:02, 27 November 2005 (UTC)

One thing I've found --living here in Taiwan--that is rather amusing: When large-character signs are painted on roadways (on the pavement) as reminders of traffic rules etc. the phrases or sentences are of course placed vertically; this is also the practice in the U.S., but in the U.S. the driver will see the first part of the message, then drive further on and see the next part, and finally the end. But in Taiwan, the driver will see the last part first, then the middle, and finally the beginning of the sentence. I don't think that this method leads to easily absorbing the message, especially if it is a bit long, but it seems it would be inconceivable to a native Chinese speaker to follow the American way, because the Chinese already have a tradition of writing vertically, but ALWAYS top to bottom. Since Americans don't have that tradition, it's not difficult to adjust to a bottom-to-top order in certain rare situations (like on the road) where it may be more convenient.Jakob37 (talk) 05:30, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

You know (answering this more than a year later), I have always found the U.S. practice annoying, because the words (let's say, "SLOW DOWN PED XING") simply aren't far enough apart for my eye to see them as separate entries. It's not as though they're Burma Shave signs. Instead, I end up reading it in one solid block as "XING PED DOWN SLOW", which is nonsensical. BrianTung (talk) 23:28, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Written Chinese

The title is just unnecessarly verbose. The "language"-part is used for language articles only when there's a need to disambiguate from articles that could have an identical title. See Hindi and Inuktitut for examples.

Peter ^Isotalo 22:27, 14 December 2005 (UTC)

True. I too requested for a rename of this article to Writtern Chinese as you can see above.--Huaiwei 09:58, 4 January 2006 (UTC)

Chinese is not logographic

It is sad that the myth that Chinese is logographic is being perpetuated here. Chinese is not logographic. Each character does not have a meaning. Each character is a syllable. Most characters have associated meanings when used in context, but this is no different than English with our prefixes and suffixes. The whole article is a complete mess and gives the reader a completely incorrect idea of the Chinese language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.162.143.21 (talk • contribs)

"Logographic" and "ideographic" are not the same thing. The whole purpose of the word "logograph" as opposed to "pictograph" or "ideograph" is to get across the idea that the characters don't correspond directly to ideas. Written Chinese is in fact the epitome of a logographic system. - furrykef (Talk at me) 04:51, 7 July 2007 (UTC)

A more absurd concept echoed in the current version of the article is that Chinese is a "phonetic script". It is obvious to anyone that although not all characters now have an independent meaning, it is far further from the truth that they simply represent sounds, especially as there are several ways of pronouncing written Chinese other than Standard Mandarin. Surely it is the characters that distinguish the huge number of homophones occuring in Chinese, such as at least 86 characters pronounced yì? Given that, should one individual's assertion that written Chinese is a phonetic script remain in the article? 82.1.155.30 (talk) 15:53, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

I think it is evident from the current text that this view (that written Chinese can be seen as a large, inefficient phonetic script) is in fact a minority view, championed by de Francis, but not followed by many. The article mentions this view, but does not give it equal time, by any means. The rest of the article, such as the character structure section, and the evolution section, are written from the perspective that characters convey meaning and sound.

Furthermore, the objection that there are 86 characters pronounced yi is not particularly compelling, since the same objection exists with respect to spoken Chinese, and that is clearly purely a phonetic system. Yet, people have been able to communicate via spoken Chinese for thousands of years. One should not make the mistake of confusing the characters of written Chinese with the words of either spoken or written Chinese. My own opinion is that one can consistently view written Chinese as possessing an essentially phonetic script, but that this view is not especially illuminating with respect to understanding how people read Chinese, nor how written Chinese evolved over time. BrianTung (talk) 00:20, 21 October 2008 (UTC)

Logos = "word"; a word is, according to modern linguistics, an element one level down from a syntactic structure, i.e. a "word" is a noun, or a verb, or a sentence-final particle, or a numeric classifier, etc. etc. Therefore the Chinese script is not logographic, although it may have approached that status in the earliest millenium or so of its usage. Now, anyway, each graph represents a syllable, and, with only minor exceptions, each syllable represents a morpheme. Whether that morpheme can function by itself as a part of speech (a verb, an resultive complement, etc.) or whether it needs to combine with another one or more morphemes in order to form a "word" will depend on each individual case.Jakob37 (talk) 07:15, 18 November 2008 (UTC)

I do not recommend relying on etymology to judge the meaning of the term "logographic"; etymology is a notoriously bad guide of definitions. Wikipedia's own entry for logogram indicates that correspondence to morphemes (rather than words) still qualifies. One can dispute that, but based on current consensus within the linguistic community, not by appeal to etymology. (Well, you can appeal to etymology; I just don't think it's particularly useful to do so. Linguists will continue to use "logographic" the way that they do.)

Of course, this is ultimately a subtle point: The actual issue—what Chinese characters correspond to—seems to be agreed upon. BrianTung (talk) 01:49, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

Spoken Language came first, then written

Numerous parts of this artcle talk about Chinese spoken languages/dialects (let not split hairs on this one) "deriving" from a unified written. First off, the spoken language came first historically and people learn to speak before they learn to read. Second, the written language was historically elitist. Talk of "literate Chinese" would include a few thousand among millions of people. Third, there was never a unified Chinese spoken language/dialect. This means that Cantonese and Mandarin had their languages applied to characters (as Japanese did at one point) ratehr than their languages being derived from. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 63.162.143.21 (talk • contribs)

Although it is true that Chinese regionalects did not derive from a unified written system, it is nevertheless inaccurate to say that Cantonese and Mandarin had their languages applied to characters in the same way that Japanese did. Mandarin is a fairly recent development, having appeared in its present form only several centuries ago. Cantonese is somewhat older, but there is consensus that both derived from Middle Chinese, as spoken during the early Tang dynasty (6th or 7th century). To the extent that Middle Chinese was not unified, it was still considerably more unified than the Chinese spoken language is today, and it is considered the wellspring for just about all of today's regionalects.

The written language is, of course, even older than that, having arisen in some form during the Shang dynasty in the second millennium B.C. and being more or less standardized with the advent of the Qin dynasty. By that time, the spoken language must have already been around for some time, but that would have been Old Chinese, and would have borne as little resemblance to today's regionalects as proto-Indo-European bears to English.

In short, the article should emphasize that the written language was developed to represent the spoken language, rather than the other way around, but it was developed organically, not applied after the fact to existing tongues like Mandarin and Cantonese. BrianTung 19:01, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

I moved these 2 comments to the bottom, the traditional place for new topics. Someone should archive this page.... --Alvestrand 11:43, 19 September 2006 (UTC)

Although lingustically incorrect, this view that the many Chinese languages/dialects are just different readings of the characters is commonly held by Chinese people, in particular people who do not speak Modern Standard Chinese (putonghua). Yes, historically only a very small minority of the Chinese were literate, but this is perhaps not so very different from other regions of the world in the pre-modern era. LDHan 16:31, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

Quote Mandarin is a fairly recent development, having appeared in its present form only several centuries ago. Cantonese is somewhat older, but there is consensus that both derived from Middle Chinese

All the current Chinese languages/dialects today developed from Old and Middle Chinese, it is inaccurate to say that Cantonese is "older". All the Chinese dialects have developed and changed in different ways, Cantonese has lost some features which have been retained by other dialects from Old and Middle Chinese. So the idea that Cantonese somehow is "older" is linguistically and historically wrong. Standard Chinese (Putonghua/Guoyu), or Standard Mandarin as wiki and no one else calls it, is a 20th Century development, but it is based on the Beijing variety of the Mandarin group of dialects (spoken in N and SW China), and can be traced back to at least to the Yuan Dynasty. LDHan 15:48, 14 November 2006 (UTC)

Can we agree that Cantonese is a more conservative tongue (retaining more properties of MC) than Mandarin? Based on what you wrote, I'm not sure we disagree on a matter of fact. I admit I put that pretty crudely. BrianTung 16:37, 18 November 2006 (UTC)

Of course each dialect or language may be conservative in its own way; many northern varieties of Chinese retain differences in initial sounds ( 聲母 ) which have been lost in southern varieties, but the southern varieties retain much more complex codas. A simple way to resolve the question of which varieties are more or less "conservative" is to count up the number of possible syllables (tones included) in any particular dialect. This has been done by many researchers. I believe I first saw some figures in Chao's old Mandarin primer. In any case, these statistics make it obvious that the southern dialects (Yue, Min and Hakka par excellence) are in general much more conservative.Jakob37 (talk) 05:43, 15 November 2008 (UTC)