Comment by umanwizard
1 year ago
> How would you write, in Chinese, the words thingamajibber, gizmosity, or half the things that come out of AvE's mouth?
With Chinese characters, of course. Why wouldn’t you be able to?
In English “thing”, “a”, and “ma” are already words, and “jibber” would presumably be the first character in “gibberish”. So you could write that made-up word by combining those four characters.
> But how do you write it down without a phonetic alphabet?
In general to write a newly coined word you would repurpose characters that sound the same as the newly coined word.
Every syllable that can possibly be uttered according to mandarin phonology is represented by some character (usually many), so this is always possible.
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Regardless, to reiterate the original point: I'm not claiming Chinese characters are better or more flexible than alphabetic writing. They're not. I'm simply claiming that there's no inherent property of Japanese that makes it more amenable to representation with Chinese characters than English is (other than the fact that a lot of its vocabulary comes from Chinese, but that's not a real counterpoint given that there is lots of native, non-Chinese-derived vocabulary that's still written with kanji).
It would be possible to write Japanese entirely in the Latin alphabet, or English entirely with some system similar to Chinese characters, with minimal to no change to the structure of the language.
> In English “thing”, “a”, and “ma” are already words, and “jibber” would presumably be the first character in “gibberish”. So you could write that made-up word by combining those four characters.
Nonsense. There is zero chance in hell that if you combine the pictographs for "thing", "a", "ma", and "gibberish", that someone reading that is going to reproduce the sound thingamajibber. It just does not work. The meme does not replicate.
There may be other virtues of pictographic written language, but reproducing sounds is not one of them. And - as any Shakespeare fan will tell you - tweaking the sounds of English cleverly is rather important. If you can't reproduce this behavior, you're losing something in translation. So to speak.
Chinese characters aren't pictographs, so whether English could be written with pictographs is irrelevant to this discussion.
Each Chinese character represents a syllable (in Chinese languages) or a small set of possible sequences of syllables (in Japanese).
And yes, in Chinese languages, new words are created from characters that sound like the parts of the new word, all the time.
> I'm simply claiming that there's no inherent property of Japanese that makes it more amenable to representation with Chinese characters than English is
what? No, anything but IPA(only technically) and that language's native writings work for pronunciations. Hiragana, Hangul, or Chữ Quốc Ngữ, would not exist otherwise.
e: would _not_ exist
Then why are both English and Latin represented with Latin characters despite having a completely different phoneme inventory?
Because one is distant ancestor of the other...? It never adopted writing system from outside. The written and spoken systems co-evolved from a clean slate.
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