it started when i googled the name of the now famous all over facebook lady who sang 'twinkle twinkle little star' in the major indian styles (amazing and yet funny), then a friend showed me a vid of a hmong singing a cheena song in well, the hmong dialect. then i went to google 'hmong' and found myself reading this:
Transliteration and romanizationOMG THE COMMUNIST PARTY COULD HAVE DESTROYED 4-5000 YEARS OF CHINESE CULTURE!
Chinese characters do not unambiguously indicate their pronunciation, even for any single dialect. It is therefore useful to be able to transliterate a dialect of Chinese into the Latin alphabet, for those who cannot read Chinese characters. However, transliteration was not always considered merely a way to record the sounds of any particular dialect of Chinese; it was once also considered a potential replacement for the Chinese characters. This was first prominently proposed during the May Fourth Movement, and it gained further support with the victory of the Communists in 1949. Immediately afterward, the mainland government began two parallel programs relating to written Chinese. One was the development of an alphabetic script for Mandarin, which was spoken by about two-thirds of the Chinese population; the other was the simplification of the traditional characters—a process that would eventually lead to simplified Chinese. The latter was not viewed as an impediment to the former; rather, it would ease the transition toward the exclusive use of an alphabetic (or at least phonetic) script.
WHAT IS WRITTEN CHINESE WITHOUT THOSE PICTOGRAMS?
well it would be MUCH easier to learn it [pinyin], i guess. it's currently the best way, after writing it out on a tablet, to input chinese characters on the computer, imo! but it would be impossible to understand single words or short phrases unless the pinyin is unique.
but it's quite good that they decided to simply chinese characters. it'll take too long to write an essay if we wrote in 繁体... imagine half the words having the same number of strokes as the word 繁.
i can use one word to describe that... it's "ARRRGH!"
and i suppose the written chinese is like egyptian! especially older words because the chinese used to have a SINGLE character for EVERY POSSIBLE thing until they (thankfully) gave up and joined characters to form 'words', e.g. 幽默 (two characters!) means humorous. how cool is that, man.
imagine the chinese syllabus. will never end one lor! most of the lesson would be just to recognise 40 000+ words (the average chinese college student recognises about 40 000 to 60 000 words). never ending 课文 zomg!
1 comment:
Pinyin is a way to represent Chinese characters and express the sounds in the Chinese language using the alphabet. There are other systems to express Mandarin, but Pinyin is the most accepted and widely used. Once you learn Chinese Pinyin you will know how to pronounce any word in Mandarin using a Chinese dictionary. Pinyin is also the most common way to input Chinese characters into a computer. Although Pinyin and English both use the Roman alphabet, many letters are not expressed with the same sounds that English uses.
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