User Comments - simonpettersson

Posted on: Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

I think we (well, mostly you) have successfully refuted the original claim. In fact, I think it takes more talent to make people listen to your music without dressing up like a christmas tree from the future (I'm looking at you, Liberace!).

Posted on: Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

And of course Elton John.

Posted on: Ch-ch-ch-ch-Changes

Michael Jackson comes to mind.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Yes, of course thought experiments are allowed. But they can certainly not be used to prove a point.

And I think, of course, that everyone else is overestimating the ambiguity problem. :) But at any rate, as I said, changing the spelling would annihalate that problem. Of course, it wouldn't be pinyin anymore, but it would still be romanization. Very few, if any, languages in this world are truly phonetically written. Just look at English! I'm not sure on how regular Dungan spelling is. It would be interesting to know. I do know, however, that they group words differently from pinyin. For example, in Dungan, the equivalent of wo3 shi4 is written as woshi (though spelled differently). It's considered a word. Where you put the spaces can do a lot to alleviate any ambiguity issues, I'm sure. For example, any chengyus that are hard to catch in spoken language can be treated as words, making them unique and easily distinguishable in writing. It would, of course, obscure their etymology quite a bit, which is one of the reasons I'm against romanization.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

First of all I doubt there's such a person as "a guy who is skilled in reading pinyin" in this world, so I don't know how that's testable.

Second, I'm not convinced that figuring out a meaning of a homonym from the context is something that takes time. We do it all the time in speech, after all. There are rarely homonyms that are problematic to distinguish, because the language would evolve them away. Homonyms are generally used in widely different contexts, or the pronounciation would have changed.

And if it really would be a problem (which I doubt it would), it would be a simple thing to use different spellings for the different words, thus solving any ambiguity problems.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Bodawei said: "Or are you saying that Dungan speakers experience none of the difficulties we see trying to read pinyin in isolation from characters?"

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying.

"In which case they must compensate somehow for the ambiguities that arise?"

Yes, the same way they compensate for it when speaking. By context.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Changye: It's not a fair comparison. Everyone who has studied Mandarin has spent a thosand times more time reading characters than reading pinyin.

If there's research showing the decline of "difficult words" in Korea and Vietnam, that would be very interesting. I could argue, though, that hanzi keeps difficult words from being used verbally, since people don't learn to recognize them by their phonetics, thus making hanzi responsible for bad verbal skills. Maybe an ideographic writing system encourages a varied and blooming literary language, whilst a phonetic alphabet (or abjad or syllabary) encourages a more flourishing verbal language that is closer to the written style. That's all pure speculation, though.

At any rate, whether or not latinization would make difficult words less used, it is clear that it's hardly impossible. It's possible and it has been done. Whether it would be advantageous or not is another issue, and I'm certainly not convinced it would. I'm vehemently against it, in fact.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Bodawei: I can only see these facts: The Dungan dialect is close enough to Mandarin for them to be mutually intelligible, at least after some exposure. The Dungan dialect is written with the cyrillic alphabet. They apparently do not find communication very difficult without the characters. Since this is possible with the Dungan dialect, a close relative to Mandarin, and the cyrillic alphabet, a close relative to the latin one, I'm having a hard time seeing why the exact same thing wouldn't be possible for Mandarin. If it's not, that means there's some significant difference between Mandarin and Dungan, or between the cyrillic and latin alphabets, and I'm not seeing such a difference.

As for the fourth-graders, I suspect it really is a timing difference. Children do not start learning characters in school, I'll bet. They probably have knowledge of lots of characters and are familiar with the concept of one character--one syllable well before they start learning them in school. However, I'm certainly not familiar enough with this to say for sure.

But as a counter-example, most foreign learners starting to learn Mandarin find that the pinyin is a lot easier to grasp than the characters. Only after learning for some time do they get more comfortable with hanzi than pinyin.

Posted on: Introduction to Pinyin

Bodawei: The Dungan people don't use hanzi. They use a cyrillic alphabet. Thus, Dungan does not serve the same purpose as Pinyin does for Standard Mandarin. While Pinyin is used as phonetic symbols to use in dictionaries, the Dungan script is used to write books. So unless there's some difference between latin letters and cyrillic ones, Pinyin alone is certainly sufficient. Hanzi is simply not needed to write Mandarin.

As I said, this does not mean it's not wanted. I love hanzi and don't want them to go away. They're a big part of the attraction of learning Mandarin. There would be advantages of romanizing Chinese (for one thing, non-Mandarin people would finally get to write in their own language instead of being forced to use Mandarin grammar, the way they do now), but the language would lose a lot more.

EDIT: It's also interesting to note that having an alphabet makes it a lot easier to import loanwords, as illustrated by Changye's example above.

Posted on: The Left-handed Child

There are a couple of different names. Zhé (磔), Nà (捺), Pō (波) or even Jīndāo (金刀).

Check out this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Principles_of_Yong