Comments by "神州 Shenzhou" (@Shenzhou.) on "Chinese is NOT picture writing! - History of Writing Systems #5 (Determinatives)" video.

Why do people insist on modifying the language to be all about the sounds? Just because they can't pronounce characters like "女"? "女" is Nǚ (Mandarin), Neuih (Cantonese), Neng (Teochew), Ng (Hakka) and even On'na (Japanese). You can even call it "Woman" in English because it has no phonetic component. Chinese writing portrays meaning not pronunciation. It was developed to facilitate trade and communication among the various Chinese dialects and it fulfilled its requirements. How can you achieve that with words with fixed pronunciations? Furthermore, Mandarin Chinese is monosyllabic and precise so an alphabet doesn't benefit Mandarin a whole lot. Think of the Pinyin system with similar sounding words like Cai, Kai, Chai, Cha, Jing, Jin, Qin, Qing, Xin, Xing, Zen, Zheng, Zhen. All of them have different sounds. Granted, it is primitive and tiring to memorize so many characters but that's just the way Chinese is for thousands of years. Won't it be a shame to abandon all that history for an alphabet that is only marginally useful?
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+tesko radic Many different ways. Here are a some examples: 日= Day, 月 = Moon -> 明 = Tomorrow (after 1 day and 1 night) 田=Field, 木=Tree -> 果 = Fruit (Harvest of the Trees) 子 = Child, 老 = Elder -> 孝 = Filial (Elder supported by Son) 文 = Culture -> 教 = Teach (Elder teaching Son about Culture) 火= Fire -> 灭 = Extinguish (Cover Fire and it dies, also means destroy) 衣 = Clothing, 皮 = Skin - > 被 = Blanket (Skin-like Clothing) 爫 = (Represents a grasping hand) -> 采 = Pick/Pluck (Hand over Plant) 艹 = Grass -> 菜 = Vegetables (the Grass your Hand picks up)
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Show the words "tree", "woods" and "forest" to a non-English speaker and they will have a hard time figuring out which one is biggest. Show 木, 林, 森 to a non-Chinese speaker and even a child can get it right!
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+tesko radic Yes, there could be multiple interpretations depending on the context. Its like how in English, "left" and "right" can have different meanings in different contexts.
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Yes, now everyone is going to think that Chinese people talk about amputating feet all the time. They are just doing it for the shock value and not for educational purposes or to get people interested in learning Chinese. This video is quite the disservice in representing the Chinese language.
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@dlwatib "Language is first and foremost spoken." Besides Chinese, other early writing systems were mostly pictograms like Egyptian hieroglyphs even Sumerian Cuneiform began as a system of pictograms. Therefore, this shows that not all languages are based upon the sounds, people communicate meaning, not sounds. "Chinese characters are doomed. They are much too inefficient and will eventually get replaced by the Roman alphabet." Inefficient? Chinese sentences tend to be a third shorter than English sentences. Chinese characters are compact and can be written left to right, right to left, even top to bottom. Just look at the colourful neon signboards in the streets of Hong Kong for example and Chinese sentences can be written in various directions and still be legible. Besides, using Roman alphabet to approximate Chinese pronunciation is only marginally useful, so many foreigners still butcher Mandarin pronunciation regardless of the Pinyin alphabet guiding them.
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+UserX-1099 How is simplified Chinese related to the Romanization of Chinese? Romanization of Chinese is the use of English letters to simulate Chinese pronunciation like the Pinyin system and has little to do with Simplified Chinese.
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In my opinion, a alphabetical system doesn't make words like Xiang, Qi, Cuo, She, etc. anymore easier to pronounce. Chinese language is short and tonal so an alphabet wouldn't make it more efficient. Without an alphabet, characters can have their own pronunciations. For example, 女 is Nu (Mandarin), Neuih (Cantonese), Neng (Teochew), Ng (Hakka) and even Onna (Japanese). 女 means woman by the way.
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+ Kazzantra Exactly, romanized Chinese characters only give information (albeit, a poor approximation) on how to pronounce a character. The original characters focus on preserving the meaning instead of the pronunciation. Modern technology has also made Chinese easier to type than English. I had to type every letter out in this paragraph while in Chinese it would be typing a few letters and selecting the correct word. +Captain Davy Very interesting. Compared to Portuguese, Chinese also has those markers " ` ´ ^ ~ " which we call "tones" to distinguish between sounds. So you also have to pay attention to the way a word is pronounced in Portuguese? Spoken Chinese (normally Mandarin) has only 4 tones while Cantonese (a dialect of Chinese) has up to 9 tones.
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@gklkjuhylpoiuyuiojhjklkjuh9976 Chinese characters constitute the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, having been used since 1200 BCE and today, Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language in the world by number of speakers. Whereas other ancient scripts like Sumerian Cuneiform (Mesopotamia) Latin and Egyptian Hieroglyphs are considered dead languages today, since they are no longer evolving with the times and no new words being added into their vocabulary. Source: Chinese characters wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters
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@venkatramakkineni Can anyone truly memorise all the English words? I mean, every single English word, from the scientific names of every animal and plant species, to new words being created as a result of slang and so on? People learning memorise terms that are commonly as well as those who are relevant to their daily life. No one is expecting you to memorise every single Chinese character. So how would you define "practicality" then? Today, Mandarin Chinese is actually the world's most spoken language by number of speakers which is testament to its practicality and Chinese characters constitute arguably the oldest continuously used system of writing in the world, having been used since 1200 BCE, whereas other ancient scripts like Sumerian Cuneiform (Mesopotamia) Latin and Egyptian Hieroglyphs are considered dead languages today, since they are no longer evolving with the times and no new words being added into their vocabulary.
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+Beliserius1 Yes, it has detracted from its basic roots but you can still derived the meaning based on what you know about Chinese. Take for example "Papa" or "爸爸 Baba". This is a new word, as ancient Chinese called their fathers 父. Since "Papa" sounds like 巴巴 (BaBa), they combined 父 and 巴 to form 爸. The 父 indicates that it refers to father and 巴 is how to pronounce the new word.
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@venkatramakkineni I never said that language can be represented by only one writing system. Take Japanese for example and there's Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji for writing the same word. But is learning this additional writing forms (like you said Sanskrit has 5 different scripts) means that the language has practicality? "Once you master English, Hindi, Telugu alphabet, you can read just about any text anywhere written in that language. You may not understand it, but that is beyond the point." How many words does English have compared Chinese? Including all those scientific nomenclature for the sciences? And like I said earlier, you don't need to know every single character in the Chinese language. An educated Chinese person will know about 8,000 characters, but you will only need about 2-3,000 to be able to read a newspaper. And what's the point of reading words when you don't know their meaning? Let's look at Chemistry for example and specifically at the Periodic Table of the Elements. In Chinese, the Chinese characters for metallic elements have the 钅radical for metal attached to them, such as 银(Silver), 铜 (Copper), 铁 (Iron), 铝 (Aluminium), 镍 (Nickel). The Chinese characters for elements which are gases have a 气 radical for gas attached to them, like 氧 (oxygen), 氮 (nitrogen), 氢 (hydrogen), 氯 (chlorine), 氟 (fluorine) and so on. The Chinese characters for non-metallic elements have the 石 radical for stone attached to them, such as 硼 (boron), 碳 (carbon), 硅 (silicon), 磷 (phosphorus), 碘 (iodine) and so on. You might even say that Chinese characters are more efficient than English words. Source: The Periodic Table Song With Chinese Character 元素周期表之美丽的汉字 youtu.be/MKn5FmWn_ME Again, adults have a harder time learning a new language because they already have their own 1st language and they're now learning a 2nd language. Compared than a kid learning a new language for the first time. And it's not that learning to write Chinese as an adult is hard, it depends on the adult's linguistical background. For example, Japanese adults often have an easier time learning Chinese characters (they have Kanji after all) compared to an adult English speaker learning Chinese for the first time. It depends on the adult's background, you can't just say that learning to write Chinese characters is not easy for adults. "English has 26 unique sounds" You're wrong, English has at least approximately 44 sounds, with some variation dependent on accent and articulation. The 44 English phonemes are represented by the 26 letters of the alphabet individually and in combination. You think that just because there are 26 letters in the English alphabets means that there are 26 unique sounds? Source: The 44 Sounds in the English Language thoughtco.com/sounds-in-english-language-3111166 And compared to that, Mandarin Chinese has about 37 unique sounds which is smaller than English. So by your standards, doesn't this imply Chinese is more efficient and more practical than say, English? You only need to program less sounds into a Mandarin voice-output software, compared to the sheer amount of English sounds so isn't Mandarin Chinese more practical in this regard? Why have more sounds, when you can communicate with less sounds? How does it make a language more practical? About decimal numbers, you aren't referring to spoken numbers so you're referring to written numbers? You can write in English all the numbers, such one, two, three, four, ... ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, ... twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven,... ninety-nine, one hundred, one hundred and one, one hundred and two.. nine-hundred and ninety-nine, one thousand, etc and its difficult to write (and read) everything out. Whereas in Chinese it's 一，二，三,... 十 (ten)，十一(eleven)，十二 (twelve),... 二十 (twenty), 二十一 (twenty-one), 九十九 (ninety-nine), 一百 (one hundred), 一百一 (hundred and one)... 九百九十九 (nine hundred and ninety-nine), 一千 (one thousand) and so on. In written numbers, written Chinese is much more efficient than written English numbers, so again, how does this make Chinese an impractical language? China actually publishes more books than any other country in the world per year, according to the following source: Books published per country per year 1. China (440,000) 2. United States (304,912) 3. United Kingdom (184,000) 4. Japan (139,078) 5. Russia (101,981) 6. Germany (93,600) 7. India (90,000) ... Source: Books published per country per year wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per_year
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+ Captain Davy Wow, it already sounds more complex than Mandarin. Mandarin characters have only a single syllable so there is no stressed syllable (since there's only 1 syllable and 1 of 4 tones or no tone). Mandarin doesn't have many nasal sounds but many non-Mandarin speakers say that it sounds "sharp" compared to some other languages. Its funny how many people regard Chinese as a hard language because of memorization and tones but I'm sure other languages have their own special emphasis on pronunciation words correctly. Also, when we sing songs in Mandarin, we totally disregard the rules for tones! Each syllable fits to whichever note that it's on. So you can sing Mandarin songs perfectly without knowing proper tones for normal speech!
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+Najmah Chant You could use Google translate or learn some Chinese ^^
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As a spoken language, most words have only 1 or 2 syllables (sounds) so you can cram lots of words into a certain sound limit (i.e. How many ideas can you express in a 8-syllable limit in English? You can probably squeeze in more words in Mandarin or Cantonese) As a written language, complex words occupy roughly the same space as simple words. So if you're getting a tattoo, the word " 智 " is more space efficient than "Wisdom" (although getting a tattoo is not wise!) Chengyu (成语) are 4-character idioms that compress an entire story into a few words. For example, 井底之蛙 means the frog at the bottom of a well, which refers to someone who ignorant of anything aside from the world of their own. However, in terms of writing speed, Chinese characters tend to suffer because of their complexity. For example, the Chinese word for police is 警察 which has 34 strokes in total, so yeah, it's a pain to write.
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@venkatramakkineni "Truly evolved scripts provide speaker the ability to come up with a series of characters and the order they should be arranged in to represent the word in writing merely by listening to the word. That is the function of a script. English provides this ability to some extent as I'm sure you'll agree. But English does not eliminate the need to memorize words." Chinese characters provide this ability to some extent too, it's a living language after all and it's are constantly evolving with the times, (whereas other ancient scripts like Sumerian Cuneiform, Latin and Egyptian Hieroglyphs are considered dead languages today). For example, modern Chinese call our fathers ba 爸 which a new character. Ancient Chinese called their fathers fu 父 and the modern character for father is derived from adding a sound 巴 (ba) below 父 to get the character ba 爸. So anyone seeing the character 爸 at least knows that it's related to father from the 父 part. Who knows, in the far future, we might start calling our fathers differently. But you can rest assured that the 父 character for father will remain relevant. As for my second paragraph, you didn't really answer my question of "So how would you define "practicality" then?" What's your criteria for "practicality" then? Is the script having been used since 1200 BCE? Is it the fact that Mandarin Chinese is the most spoken language by number of speakers today? Here's a list of the Top Ten Most Spoken Languages according to the following source: The Top 10 Most Spoken Languages in the World 1. Mandarin Chinese (1.1 billion speakers) 2. English (983 million speakers) 3. Hindustani (544 million speakers) 4. Spanish (527 million speakers) 5. Arabic (422 million speakers) 6. Malay (281 million speakers) 7. Russian (267 million speakers) 8. Bengali (261 million speakers) 9. Portuguese (229 million speakers) 10. French (229 million speakers) Source: What are the Most Spoken Languages in the World? fluentin3months.com/most-spoken-languages/ You said: "I hope you'll agree that coming up with more characters for words with each passing century doesn't count toward evolution." But how do you define evolution (of script or language) if adding new words to vocabulary doesn't count? What makes a language or script truly "alive and evolving" not "stagnant and dead" then? The problem is you refuse to define terms like "practicality" or "evolution" that's all.
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@venkatramakkineni How did I confuse written language with spoken language? Every spoken word has a written form like what I've shown with the character ba 爸 for father in modern Chinese. I mean, show the words "father and dad" to English kids and they may not know that they have the same meaning. But show the same words in Chinese (i.e 父 and 爸) to Chinese kids and once they know 父 is father then they'll know that 爸 is related to 父. Because they use the same radical after all. Let's compare the characters/words for trees, woods, and forest in English and Chinese. In Chinese they would be 木(tree), 林(woods), 森(big forest) and they are all basically repetitions of 木 that all. If you show a kid the words tree, woods and forest how likely are they going to get those words correct, compared to showing a kid 木, 林 and 森? I'll bet even English kids can guess the meanings of 木, 林 and 森. -About Education in China, children go to grade 1 at the age of 7 and when they graduated from the primary school (grade 6), they should know at least 2500 characters, and the target made by the China Ministry of Education. -Generally speaking, adults often have a harder time learning a new language different from their first language, compared to kids. Adult aren't as absorbant as children when it comes to learning new languages, that's why many non-English speaking adults have a difficult time learning English while as adults. Same goes for Chinese or Japanese or French or any language different from the one they were brought up with as a child. I disagree with the view that "each character should make a unique sound." Theres only a limited number sounds that human vocal cords can make (as impressive as our vocal cords may be) and it becomes tedious to make up new sounds for every single new word, and as long as you can differentiate similar sounding characters using context, then can't sounds repeat themselves? After all, it's more efficient to reuse the same sounds, rather than program new sounds all the time. "character set should remove the need to memorize spellings" Not sure how I feel about this criteria, but without spellings, words can easily be misspelt and written incorrectly. What Chinese does is that it simplifies the character. For example, the simplified version of 龍 for dragon is 龙 and this reduces the number of so-called spelling errors. But I don't think anyone can completely remove the need for spelling, you literally have to write nothing at all. About the decimal system, even kids counting from 1 to 20 in English may find it difficult. Once they count beyond 10 (ten) the next number 11 is (eleven) and 12 (twelve) comes next followed by 13 (thirteen) 14 (fourteen) etc and the pattern develops. So there's this strange "aberration" of eleven and twelve in the English numerical system. Whereas in Chinese mathematics, after 10 (十) comes 11 (十一) and 12 (十二) which are basically 10+1 and 10+2 respectively and the child has an easier time picking up the mathematical pattern. Hopefully this video better illustrates this example. Video: How The Chinese Language Makes Math Easier - Linguistic Analysis youtu.be/n7jHT7Tumcw
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+Joey Ouyang That's not a good name to use.
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The problem with the English alphabet is that they are based on "sounds". People can mispronounce and the whole word changes over time. For example, Dog was originally a subset of "hund" or hound and probably derived from French "dogue" or German "Dogge". Nowadays people spell it as dawg or doge(that dumb meme) so who knows what it will be in a few hundred years from now.
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