Does Chinese take more brain power?

[Duncan Powrie]

I finally got off my lazy ass and did a search for "Bo po mo fo", and saw that indeed, they are the katakana-y -looking squiggles that I had seen before (thanks, woody), that can accompany Chinese characters in the same way that furigana guides to pronunciation/"reading" are often put on top of the more difficult Japanese kanji. I can certainly see the role and use here of these kind of systems (especially in Japanese, which can have multiple ways to read the same kanji): they help newer (and often older!) readers get by, and are aesthetically pleasing and therefore blend in well overall to boot.

But I still can't see what the advantage would be in learning the Bo po mo fo symbols over Pinyin. At least with Japanese kana, each kana represents a full mora (syllable) that needs to receive an equal amount of attention and "speech time", and they are an essential part of the full writing system in representing speech (i.e. they are not just an ancillary system).

With Chinese, however, there is no real advantage to be had in breaking the syllables down into initials and finals (which is what Bo po mo fo does - and which, incidentally, it is perfectly possible to do with Pinyin too, and is indeed often done in pronunciation tables of Pinyin in the earlier stages of many Mandarin Chinese language courses!), when it is again (as in Japanese) the full syllable that needs to be said as a whole; to insist on breaking them down seems almost like saying Japanese "ka" is made up of ?"k" + "a" (another bad but hopefully revealing analogy!).

When studying Bo po mo fo I admittedly had a slightly heightened phonemic awareness, but at the expense of reading/speaking speed (in terms of morphemes).

I found a link whose only argument for using Bo po mo fo seems to be that you won't be reading a "roman" alphabet! (Boo how ee sir!)
http://www.sinologic.com/faq.html

Pinyin is the more widely known and used system and seems to be the international standard means of transcription, and Chinese people who master it will therefore be able to converse in internet chat etc with many foreigners (not just English-speakers!) who are doubtless going to be more familiar with Pinyin than Bo po mo fo (and both sets of users would probably use Pinyin rather than Bo po mo fo to input characters into the chat).

So, people who have learnt Bo po mo fo should have little difficulty in learning Pinyin, and would have every reason to learn it, but the reverse is not nearly so true!

[Duncan Powrie]

The reforms made around 1950 have simply meant that everybody has more to learn. However, aesthetically I think they were quite well done.

Admittedly there seems to be more to learn initially...but ultimately, having fewer strokes means there is less to remember (when reading or writing "mainland style"), and the simplified characters really do save time in writing!

(Taiwan resists the reforms doubtless to help preserve their independence; I don't know what is happening in Hong Kong now, but I imagine the reforms are only taking hold slowly, due to the power change from British to mainland Chinese control being still only quite recent, HK being an SAR etc).

[woodcutter]

This has been discussed a number of times on the forum I mentioned. The new characters are a bit quicker to write, but less helpful to the memory, since semantic cues have been lopped off. And since the old characters are simply combinations of parts you learn anyway, even when they look fiendish they are not really so difficult. To be really educated you need to know both systems, and until one government controls all Chinese everywhere (and perhaps all the Chinese who ever lived!) all reforms will have that splintering effect.

[Duncan Powrie]

Now that you are being a little less glib, I have no problemo agreeing wholeheartedly with what you have written, Monsieur Woodcutter!

The reforms have upset the naturally-evolved and organic, historical "whole" of the traditional characters somewhat, and even just a passing familiarity with those older, more complex characters certainly pays dividends in better appreciating the simpler derivatives.

[LarryLatham]

Woodcutter and Duncan, I fully agree with your last comments here. Having learned my Chinese, including writing, on Taiwan, where the traditional writing system still is fully admired and pursued, I too believe that, streamlined as it may be, the new "simplified" writing of the mainland leaves out elements that may not matter much of the time, but sometimes leads to less precision. And I found too, that once you've learned the radicals, writing the traditional version doesn't seem to be nearly as hard as it looks to non-speakers of Chinese.

Larry Latham

[shuntang]

Chinese are foolish. We don't understand English tense.

Teach me some at the following link:

http://fine.serveftp.org/forum

Call me Xui

[Duncan Powrie]

Hey, is "xui" a syllable in Pinyin? (I wouldn't have a clue about syllables in Cantonese - Shuntang's from HK, right?). I don't have a Chinese dictionary to hand so I can't check, but I don't think it occurs in Pinyin...anyway, kind of begs to be read like "Shooey"! Shui (=shei)? You don't know or can't guess who should shoo? Ok ok, forget it, shui (=go back to sleep)!

Edited-in bit: I checked on the net, and found that it indeed isn't a syllable in Pinyin at least. That info, and more besides, can be had at the following new-looking website:

http://www.pinyin.info/index.html

You can read excerpts from John DeFrancis's (and other well-known writers') books! I can particularly recommend Ideogram, it's pretty challenging in parts but draws you back again and again! (Kind of a bit like Shuntang's new website, then? ).

[LarryLatham]

Have another fermented beverage, Duncan, and go back to sleep with DeFrancis on your lap. Hmmm...too bad it isn't Joan DeFrancis!

Larry Latham

[revel]

Good afternoon!

Let's be careful here, guys and gals, though he had said he was not going to follow the forums, Mr Shuntang is still checking us out and has raised his (ugly? handsome? sarcastic? argumentative) head anew! We might be in for some emotional exchanges soon!

That is, shuntang, welcome back!



peace,
revel.

[Harzer]

I learnt quite a bit of language after a stroke once.

I was playing golf with a Frenchman and he hit his ball into a tree where it stayed put.

Harzer

[LarryLatham]

I'll bet you did!

Larry Latham

[Duncan Powrie]

Have another fermented beverage, Duncan, and go back to sleep with DeFrancis on your lap. Hmmm...too bad it isn't Joan DeFrancis!

I don't care what you say, Larry, I still think John is a very very very sexy man (for a sinologist). He can grind his inkstick against my inkstone and brush his hairy tip over my paper anyday!

Hmm not as good wordplay as Harzer, but can't be too naughty on Dave's can we?! (Brain) stroke, golf stroke, brush stroke, breast stroke (AGAIN, not that I have big uns...YET!) etc.

Edited-in bit: I just made an interesting discovery. If you type in "breast" (singular) it's okay, but the plural gets censored (*beep*), hence the use of "big uns" above. No suggestions for fruity synonyms (melons, ooh that didn't get censored) or of any other kind, please!

[Duncan Powrie]

Hey, I'd be really interested to hear what you guys think of what William Hannas has to say (in the excerpt from his book, The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity, available on that website that I mentioned recently above).
http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/c ... iting.html

Anyone who has seriously thought about and studied Chinese for even a short length of time will probably have also been struck (as Hannas has) by how the hanzi "lock" the sound in and down, with the end result that the written language influences (or rather, constrains) the development of the spoken language much more than western linguists especially seem to realize (in the west, it is assumed that 'a script's efficiency - its "goodness of fit" to its language - is maximal when it is devised, and deteriorates thereafter'* - that is, that a spoken language will affect its writing system, or at least "call for" script reforms as the script begins to show its age in not keeping pace with changes in the spoken language).

Thus, it can get frustrating when opponents of Chinese script reform say that the script is the way it is due the nature of the spoken language, and that a better fit cannot be found. For Hannas, it seems to be much more a case of chicken and egg, than only egg then chicken.

But it needn't all be doom and gloom - at least the Chinese don't need to revise their script to reflect the explicit changes that have taken place in pronunciation at least (by that, I mean that the "spelling" has always been implicit rather than explicit, or, in Hannas's words, "holistic")...which kind of makes you doubt the ultimate validity or "unobjectionality" of Hannas's choice of title, if not his whole argument (surely the script is as cognitively demanding just as much as he implies it is undemanding of child learners?! Ah but he means demanding in the right ways, helping develop inferring and abstract thinking etc. I say this based on online reviews or snippets of reviews of the whole book, rather than just the limited excerpt available on the above website). Most of us must've had similar thoughts to his, but we didn't all rush off and write an entire book about it to vent whatever frustrations we might have felt!

* Peter T. Daniels (2001). Writing Systems. In M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller, The Handbook of Linguistics (pp. 43-80). Oxford: Blackwell. Will write a review of the whole book for Dave's once I've finished it, so far it has been excellent!

[woodcutter]

In what sense is the sound "locked down" in Chinese? The main frustration in learning it is that it bears little relation to most of the jabbering which takes place in that vast land!

[Duncan Powrie]

Oops, sorry woodcutter and everyone else, what I meant to more say was 'the hanzi "lock" the sound-form-meanings in and down...', or something like that. The sounds may have changed in Chinese, but the forms haven't, and it is not just the lack of a "spelling fit" that was always going to be a problem, but the reduction of meaning too always back down to ultimately a monosyllabic base. Anyway, it is hard to describe my thoughts exactly, because I've never tried to put them into words before, but reading Hannas, it seemed to me that he had had perhaps the same kind of thoughts (and he himself still isn't 100% clear or helpful about them!), but from them, then gone onto develop a much wider (and probably to most people quite objectionable) thesis about the effects of hanzi not only linguistically, but also mentally, socially etc. Still, don't just take my word for it or let me mislead or confuse you anymore, if you have the time, take a look at what Hannas himself has written, and perhaps post something later if you want to. Any thoughts would be appreciated (especially about the linguistic aspects, rather than just the obviously objectionable aspects, of his thesis ).