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Simplified and Traditional Characters are equally bad - for general literacy.

Do like Vietnam and go from a character system to full alphabetization!

Pinyin, ftw, faggots

If you understand anything about Chinese you'll understand why Chinese cannot, ignorant faggot.

That comment made no sense.

Anyways, first post here, and I know Taiwan has a couple Scientology centers, and that they are fairly well know. I heard they donated money for some tsunami/earthquake reliefs before but I'm not sure how much members they have.

My news are a bit expired because I have not visited Taiwan in a long time.

I think Taipei has a Scientology center but Taipei's huge and I don't know where. I only heard about.

Taiwan has no anonymous.

That comment made no sense.

Anyways, first post here, and I know Taiwan has a couple Scientology centers, and that they are fairly well know. I heard they donated money for some tsunami/earthquake reliefs before but I'm not sure how much members they have.

My news are a bit expired because I have not visited Taiwan in a long time.

I think Taipei has a Scientology center but Taipei's huge and I don't know where. I only heard about.

Taiwan has no anonymous.

Originally Posted by anonyvamp

That comment made no sense.

Which comment? If it's mine, I submit that you have no reading comprehension.

Chinese has far too many homophones to change into an alphabetized language. All you need to do is open a dictionary to figure out why. There can literally be more than fifty different kanji with the same tone and same pronunciation, all with different meanings. Turn that into an alphabet and try to figure out what people are saying from that alone. If you thought memorizing kanji was hard, wait until you try to read a sentence that can mean thirteen different things. That's why Chinese cannot be alphabetized. It was the same problem Japan ran into. That's why they too, have kept kanji in their system.

To change Chinese into something that is "literate-friendly" means to change the entire basis of the language, structure, and culture. Only an idiot would think that a language could be changed so easily.

/linguistics soapbox

Um...I think you got me confused with the person above my accidental double post.

And BTW I agree that Chinese cannot be alphabetized, but for the sake of convenience, pinyin is very useful for typing on the computer. I know there are Zhu Yin Fu Hao keyboards out there, but those are a pain to learn and they'd still give the same results as typing in pinyin.

Originally Posted by anonyvamp

Um...I think you got me confused with the person above my accidental double post.

And BTW I agree that Chinese cannot be alphabetized, but for the sake of convenience, pinyin is very useful for typing on the computer. I know there are Zhu Yin Fu Hao keyboards out there, but those are a pain to learn and they'd still give the same results as typing in pinyin.

Well, that's why I asked, albeit, in a very trollish way.

The person was suggesting that Chinese rid itself of kanji entirely and only deal with pinyin, which is stupid. It's completely different from typing with it. I prefer pinyin myself when typing.

That's not smart. It's already bad enough that simplified words are losing the original meanings, but having everything in pinyin would be insane.

Are you familiar with the 施氏食獅史 poem? Can you imagine what would happen if it got changed into pinyin?

Taiwan doesn't have any Anon members, but I'm going to make a stop by in June. I'll check up the org and report back. From what I have heard, it appears that the Taiwan org doesn't have an extensive presence in Taiwan (the comment earlier about money worship is partially true), but it does have cash. I'll ask around when I'm in town.

About a complete alphabetized system for Chinese:

Yes, it is true that written Chinese characters does have a lot of homophones BUT only if you treat each character as a word - they almost never are treated syntactically in a stand alone manner. If you write pinyin with a system of delineating words by spaces, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I'd recommend The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis. If you want to discuss the merits of Chinese writing systems, read the book or at least the sample chapter here: Ideographic Myth

Otherwise, GTFO


Regarding my statement about Simplified and Traditional being equally bad for literacy, I was trying to make the point that both systems are way to complex and SIMPLIFICATION doesn't buy you much in reduced difficulty.

Michael Kaplan of Microsoft recently examined the stroke data from standards bodies in China for all 70,195 “ideographs” [sic] in Unicode 5.0 and compared it against “the 54,195 ideographs for which stroke count data was provided by Taiwan standards bodies” to see how how much of a difference there was in the stroke counts for the characters that both sides provided data for.

(I’m a bit surprised the two sides have compiled such extensive lists, and I’d love to see them. But that’s another matter.)

He found that 9,768 of these characters (18 percent) have different stroke counts between the two standards, with 9,045 characters differing by 1 stroke, 675 characters by 2 strokes, 44 characters by 3 strokes, 2 characters by 4 strokes, 1 character by 5 strokes, and 1 character by 6 strokes.

Doesn't buy you much simplification at ALL. FAIL

Originally Posted by anonyvamp

Are you familiar with the 施氏食獅史 poem? Can you imagine what would happen if it got changed into pinyin?

Yes, anonyvamp, I am very familiar with that poem. Now I have a question for you: Do you know anyone who speaks like that?

Dox Pl0x

Originally Posted by Asian-anon

Taiwan doesn't have any Anon members, but I'm going to make a stop by in June. I'll check up the org and report back. From what I have heard, it appears that the Taiwan org doesn't have an extensive presence in Taiwan (the comment earlier about money worship is partially true), but it does have cash. I'll ask around when I'm in town.

About a complete alphabetized system for Chinese:

Yes, it is true that written Chinese characters does have a lot of homophones BUT only if you treat each character as a word - they almost never are treated syntactically in a stand alone manner. If you write pinyin with a system of delineating words by spaces, I don't see why it wouldn't work.

I'd recommend The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by John DeFrancis. If you want to discuss the merits of Chinese writing systems, read the book or at least the sample chapter here: Ideographic Myth

Otherwise, GTFO


Regarding my statement about Simplified and Traditional being equally bad for literacy, I was trying to make the point that both systems are way to complex and SIMPLIFICATION doesn't buy you much in reduced difficulty.

Michael Kaplan of Microsoft recently examined the stroke data from standards bodies in China for all 70,195 “ideographs” [sic] in Unicode 5.0 and compared it against “the 54,195 ideographs for which stroke count data was provided by Taiwan standards bodies” to see how how much of a difference there was in the stroke counts for the characters that both sides provided data for.

(I’m a bit surprised the two sides have compiled such extensive lists, and I’d love to see them. But that’s another matter.)

He found that 9,768 of these characters (18 percent) have different stroke counts between the two standards, with 9,045 characters differing by 1 stroke, 675 characters by 2 strokes, 44 characters by 3 strokes, 2 characters by 4 strokes, 1 character by 5 strokes, and 1 character by 6 strokes.

If there's a protest in August, I'll be in Taiwan, and I'd be tempted for a little enburbulation just for shits and giggles.

And for what you say, Chinese was my first language. I know very well that the "phrases" make the meanings. I still think that there are too many similar sounding things that can only be differentiated by the use of kanji. I still remember a funny incident that happened when I was a kid. My mother had been telling us where my uncle came from. She said:

長沙人
We thought:
常殺人

Imagine our horror when we'd momentarily thought our uncle was a mass murderer!

That said, language isn't about efficiency. Oftentimes it's an expression of culture, thought, and a living historical record. I believe Chinese characters are more than just symbols used for communication. It's an art. I never wish to see it changed.

You should meet my students, who have a harder time learning how to spell English (which is in my opinion just as big a hindrance to literacy as it is in Chinese) than memorizing kanji. They were shocked when I told them that kids often had spelling tests because spelling in English doesn't make any fucking sense.

For the record, I no more want a spelling reform than I want to see Chinese reduced to some hideous alphabet.

Originally Posted by Anorumi

If there's a protest in August, I'll be in Taiwan, and I'd be tempted for a little enburbulation just for shits and giggles.

And for what you say, Chinese was my first language. I know very well that the "phrases" make the meanings. I still think that there are too many similar sounding things that can only be differentiated by the use of kanji. I still remember a funny incident that happened when I was a kid. My mother had been telling us where my uncle came from. She said:

長沙人
We thought:
常殺人

Imagine our horror when we'd momentarily thought our uncle was a mass murderer!

That said, language isn't about efficiency. Oftentimes it's an expression of culture, thought, and a living historical record. I believe Chinese characters are more than just symbols used for communication. It's an art. I never wish to see it changed.

You should meet my students, who have a harder time learning how to spell English (which is in my opinion just as big a hindrance to literacy as it is in Chinese) than memorizing kanji. They were shocked when I told them that kids often had spelling tests because spelling in English doesn't make any fucking sense.

For the record, I no more want a spelling reform than I want to see Chinese reduced to some hideous alphabet.

I'm considering doing a raid "balls of steel" style in June. I'll let you know what's the deal over there when I do. Should be fun. , packed.


About characters, I agree there is a lot of cultural heritage embedded in the script and I would hate to see them go a la a Cultural Revolution.

I think phonetic computer input systems are what's going to test the resiliency of character scripts in this century. When we type in English, it doesn't decrease our ability to write because the letters that we input correspond exactly with the letters that we see in the output. With phonetic input systems in Chinese this is not the case for reasons both you and I understand very well. I believe this is the cause of many people forgetting to how to write certain characters. Maybe one day ppl might just say "Fuck it" and stop or start using a mix. Specialists in Chinese will still have to learn all the characters for their research tough.

Also, I would point out again that this alphabetization transformation was done successfully in Vietnam, which had a character-based system modeled after Chinese script up until the early 20th century.

Chinese writing is such a high maintenance script. English is just messed up because the language borrows so much from foreign languages like French and German that the letter-to-sound conversion is not 1:1 but like 1:@#$%. I think one of the Scandinavian languages (Swedish?) has the most harmonic alphabetization system. Will check.

[quote=Asian-anon;266501]Yes, anonyvamp, I am very familiar with that poem. Now I have a question for you: Do you know anyone who speaks like that?/QUOTE]

No, but had Chinese been completely changed into pinyin earlier, then you wouldn't be familiar with that poem.

I was merely deploring the loss of a culture and art that lies in Chinese characters.

But like you said, some people are already saying "fuck it" and when people I know IM in chinese, they just use the character that sounds like the one they ment to use.

Ah I wish I could join the protest but plane tickets are so ridiculously high there's no way I could afford that.