>the Chinese never invented an alphabet and still use shitty primitive hieroglyphs in the present day
Are they fucking dumb or what?
>the Chinese never invented an alphabet and still use shitty primitive hieroglyphs in the present day
>the Chinese never invented an alphabet and still use shitty primitive hieroglyphs in the present day
Are they fucking dumb or what?
Shi shi shi shi shi shi shi.
Shi shi.
Tonal languages do not take well to alphabets. Look at the mess that is Vietnamese for how that can go wrong in a big way.
Literally put some accent mark at the beginning or end and it solves that entire problem.
Why didn't Viets do that?
>Tonal languages
Retard here. Someone can explain?
In certain asiatic languages, the tone with which you say a word changes its meaning. That's why chinks go up and down in pitch while speaking
The tone of how a vowel is said changes a word entirely.
>Mōm with a flat tone means mother.
>Môm with a rising tone means rudder.
>Mŏm with a falling tone means plate.
>Mõm with a gliding tone means eyebrows.
Purely for demonstration.
even their "loanwords" are fucked
average japanese loanword:
>ビール
>beeru
>beer
average chinese loanword
>啤酒
>píjiǔ
>beer
The second makes more sense when you look at the Cantonese version first.
Which is pronounced 'bey-jow'. With the 'jow' half meaning something is alcohol in general.
All that really happened was the 'r' sound at the end of beer was dropped.
Sorry if this is a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem for the chinese word for beer?
When making new words for new concepts Changs prefer to capture the meaning instead of the sound. This is usually the case because straight up phonetic borrowing often means homophones btfo the meaning of the word.
Foreign Brands in China suffer this a lot and the Chinese often have to resort to poetry to save them. Mercedez Benz for example used to be sold in China as 奔斯 (Ben-Si). Obviously its phonetic borrowing but the Chinese can't help but read it as "rushing/running to your death." It was fixed up after a few years of mockery and is now 奔驰 (Ben-chi) meaning "running fast."
Holy shit lmao. They should have just transliterated it as Ma-ke for "Merc" from the outset. Yeah Ben-si is not a great look for a car company.
On the other hand, 可口可樂 must surely rank as one of the greatest names for a beverage in history.
So their loanwords actually fits in for the language? That doesn't sounds like a problem.
啤 sounds a lot more like "beer" in Cantonese (be1) which is where the word entered the Chinese language than Mandarin, and "酒" just means alcohol.
be1 "zau2" doesn't sound any more or less like beer than bi-ru "shu".
Chinese is basically impossible to truly master as a written language since there are technically an infinite number of Chinese characters, if you want to describe a novel concept you can just combine symbols together to make new ones. The problem is nothing in Chinese is "literal" in the sense that anything written in Chinese can be taken as direct except for a select few basic symbols that everyone in China just universally agrees has important meanings
In an alphabet system, there can be an infinite amount of words, and each word can be precisely defined, but the disadvantage is that you need significanly more symbols to convey the same concepts as a syllabary like Chinese. Alphabets overall are far more robust however. I think the only reason Chinese is still around is purely due to Chinese government mandates throughout history forcing it to stay relevant.
>if you want to describe a novel concept you can just combine symbols together to make new ones
is there a single example of this happening in the last century
Yes. In fact the Japanese are responsible for inventing a lot of them too in the 19th century
Words like 科学 (science), 电话 (telephone), 互联网 (internet)
all the time
DUANG蜂巢智能
What a nice Duwang!
What a beautiful Duang!
>chew
It happens all the time.
>Chinese is basically impossible to truly master as a written language since there are technically an infinite number of Chinese characters
This can be said about virtually any language, replacing "characters" for "words." Only a limited number of characters are actually used by Chinese people today because so many fell out of common usage, just like how there's at least 25% of the vocabulary in the average Shakespeare play you wouldn't use IRL unless you are a massive fedora.
>if you want to describe a novel concept you can just combine symbols together to make new ones.
Sounds like a vastly inferior combinatorial system compared to an alphabet.
There's a reason programming keywords are in English too.
Not really. I don't really like the idea of loan words so the chinese system is actually appealing to me since it acts as natural filters for foreign words
Why don't you like loanwords? I prefer them as opposed to making up some bullshit word in your own language.
Probably some incel/chuddy thing
It's making the language sound less consistent. I always cringed internally whenever I hear someone uses English loan words
So you think Anglophones should make up their own terms for things like bok choy, feng shui, lo mein, mahjong, tofu, kung fu, etc? Seems retarded.
>So you think Anglophones should make up their own terms for things like bok choy, feng shui, lo mein, mahjong, tofu, kung fu, etc?
Yes, unironically
Why do you keep making threads complaining about Hanzi over and over? This is the 4th one this week
This is so niche for a history board I'm sure it's the same guy
I made the first one a while back while studying Japanese, I think I started a trend, kek.