Spoken Languages In The Honorverse ...

John, you misread. Chinese most certainly is in the dust bin of history. Chinese in its written language, not spoken. There is no such thing as spoken "Chinese". There is Mandarin and Cantonese. They both used the same written form though...

In the 60's they added phonetic characters enabling them to type and make the printed book realistic to print. Outside of family crest symbols and symbols for common everyday items/shops placed on shops generally, you will not see these characters used in books or any printed media outside of advertising. So, instead of having to memorize upwards of 20,000 characters, they need to know about 200(EDIT I got curious and looked it up: it is 2000) or so and dropping every year as they go more and more based on phonetics and less and less on pictographs. If you want to real number search. At this point I am just parroting a Chinese friend I know from Hong Kong. EDIT: Judging by what I looked up, it would appear in school they learn upwards of 2000 characters, but only use ~200 according to my friend. He left, in 1995-8 I forget which year. Before it switched back to China.

This phonetics addition happened to all the languages of Eastern Asia that were based on the pictographs of Chinese characters. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and I am sure I missed a couple other languages in there as well who traditionally used the Chinese written language as China dominated the region for the last 2000 years.

EDIT: No, English is not easy. Spanish, now that is easy.

Relax wrote:John, you misread. Chinese most certainly is in the dust bin of history. Chinese in its written language, not spoken. There is no such thing as spoken "Chinese". There is Mandarin and Cantonese. They both used the same written form though...

In the 60's they added phonetic characters enabling them to type and make the printed book realistic to print. Outside of family crest symbols and symbols for common everyday items/shops placed on shops generally, you will not see these characters used in books or any printed media outside of advertising. So, instead of having to memorize upwards of 20,000 characters, they need to know about 200 or so. If you want to real number search. At this point I am just parroting a Chinese friend I know from Hong Kong.

This phonetics addition happened to all the languages of Eastern Asia that were based on the pictographs of Chinese characters. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and I am sure I missed a couple other languages in there as well who traditionally used the Chinese written language as China dominated the region for the last 2000 years.

Relax, I get my information on China and its languages from people who I presume know what they're talking about. In this case, Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/mair , who posts on Chinese language issues at Language Log, frequently on weird Chinglish translations and how they got that way. He's posted quite a bit about the state of the character writing system and how it's in dire straits, but it is absolutely not extinct. Maybe in another generation or three, but not now.

The idea that written "Chinese" is a common language is one of those utterly wrong ideas that simply won't die. The people who designed Unicode made this mistake, and the repercussions are still reverberating; it's one reason why Unicode hasn't caught on in Southeast Asia as it has in the rest of the world.

In another issue, by a strange coincidence the thread I mentioned at Language Hat turned up this reference on all the reasons why people do and don't learn languages: http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html . It's well worth reading.

JohnRoth wrote:

Relax wrote:John, you misread. Chinese most certainly is in the dust bin of history. Chinese in its written language, not spoken. There is no such thing as spoken "Chinese". There is Mandarin and Cantonese. They both used the same written form though...

In the 60's they added phonetic characters enabling them to type and make the printed book realistic to print. Outside of family crest symbols and symbols for common everyday items/shops placed on shops generally, you will not see these characters used in books or any printed media outside of advertising. So, instead of having to memorize upwards of 20,000 characters, they need to know about 200 or so. If you want to real number search. At this point I am just parroting a Chinese friend I know from Hong Kong.

This phonetics addition happened to all the languages of Eastern Asia that were based on the pictographs of Chinese characters. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and I am sure I missed a couple other languages in there as well who traditionally used the Chinese written language as China dominated the region for the last 2000 years.

Relax, I get my information on China and its languages from people who I presume know what they're talking about. In this case, Professor Victor Mair of the University of Pennsylvania. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/ealc/mair , who posts on Chinese language issues at Language Log, frequently on weird Chinglish translations and how they got that way. He's posted quite a bit about the state of the character writing system and how it's in dire straits, but it is absolutely not extinct. Maybe in another generation or three, but not now.

The idea that written "Chinese" is a common language is one of those utterly wrong ideas that simply won't die. The people who designed Unicode made this mistake, and the repercussions are still reverberating; it's one reason why Unicode hasn't caught on in Southeast Asia as it has in the rest of the world.

In another issue, by a strange coincidence the thread I mentioned at Language Hat turned up this reference on all the reasons why people do and don't learn languages: http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html . It's well worth reading.

Unicode... What the.. is Unicode...

Had to look it up. Ah you are talking uber modern computer translation standards... Blah.

I'll stick with first hand knowledge from the horses mouth of a Cantonese speaking, writing man.

In either case or whatfor, my point was that phonetics rule as they have proven to be far simpler overall as every modern writing system has them and all other writing systems are vanishing rapidly if have not completely vanished. People will use whatever is easiest to communicate or are forced to to live and make $$$.

I consider any language that has different gender dependant words for a and the, different endings for words following he and she & his and hers, to be destined for the galactic rubbish heap.

English as written here in the UK is not perfect due to the vagaries of spelling, I often wish that someone would bring about a simplified version of English, which given the lack of different words and ending changes for gender would make it even easier for non native speakers to learn.

In some respects (much as it galls me to admit it) written US English (hereinafter referred to as American) has a lot going for it in that a lot of words used in American are spelt more like they sound than their English equivalents.

That aside even though I did High school French, was stationed in Germany with the UK forces, worked in Saudi Arabia for 36+ years, my understanding of each of those languages is limited, mostly because, as a previous poster mentioned, when locals know you are from an English speaking country they want to practice their own language skills and invariably continue the conversation in English.


Ah well, such is life

Edited for clarity (bold words)

Relax wrote:In short, you said, I disagree, but then went into detail how you agree with me.

Delusional much?

Relax wrote: Tried to even show how Swedish is so amazing.

No, i made examples about how it differs from languages in general, and how it differs from English.

Relax wrote:Yippee skippy, when writing you can take all the spaces out/between/words/to/make/yourselves/feel/special. Yea, ok, way to go. Everyone can do that or close enough.

No, they cannot. That´s one reason why i added the wiki link, as from it you can find what languages allow for that sort of thing, where as most do not. Out of those listed there, only 13 are listed as max wordlength being infinite.

You are just making it more obvious that you don´t understand.

Relax wrote:Make your written language impossible to read. Join the Chinese and Egyptians. Might notice, both of those written languages are on the rubbish heap in the dustbin of history due to impracticality.

Seriously? You didn´t get the point at all?

Ancient Egyptian is a dead language, it did not however die out due to "impracticality" but because Egypt was overrun by Islamic conquest.

While Chinese hanzi script is known (and used ) in Japan as kanji, in Korea as hanja and Vietnam as chu nom, and it just happens to be the second most used way of writing in the world. And with over 1.3 billion daily users, i doubt it will disappear anytime soon.

Relax wrote:As for "beauty" of a language, it is all in the ear of the beholder.

Nope. This has actually been tested as close to scientifically as is possible. People get to hear a number of languages they don´t know and asked to rate them by various criteria, if asked about "beauty" there are very clear trends to the answers.
And even when languages are included that people know, that´s not the same as them ending up as "best".

Relax wrote:Every language can have trills, fluff, and lace thrown on it to make it "beautiful".

No, the most certainly do not!

Relax wrote: Just ask the damned British. They made an art of their "beautiful diction" BS as a distinguishing class benchmark from the "peasants" by rounding vowels and creating a melodious voice. Well at least in their ears. Everyone else thought they were pretentious uptight self righteous pricks.

You can´t even differentiate between languages and dialects?

You can find upperclass dialects(or attempts at such) in most languages, but that has little to nothing to do with differences between language, or making the language "prettier".
It´s just a common groupthink aspect, its the exact same thing as causes gangs to adopt variations on their own languages.

Relax wrote:PS. There has been not a single group of people, be they "noble" stone age people or technologically advanced people who are not constantly at war.

Do you have ANY inclination to ever check what the real world is doing, or is your personal fantasy edition the only thing you need?

If at least you had said "often" or something you might be getting away with it because of how "often" on at least a geological timescale can cover a lot of things, but "constantly" just makes your claim stupid and laughable as it is blatantly false.

"group of people" is also so unspecified that you can zoom in or out at will to make it a ridiculous claim.

Relax wrote:Equating, a vanishing language of a primitive technological people with "nobility" and "peace" is COMPLETE BULL.

And huzzah for the big bad strawman argument!

I don´t think anyone here ever claimed such a thing, i most certainly didn´t.

Maybe you should try to come up with something more relevant? And preferably something that also makes sense, because your above statement is just weird.

Relax wrote:War is human nature. Believing otherwise is racism.

And there we have another bullshit statement.
Actually, TWO of them.

Calling it racism to not believe your first idiocy is just strange and stupid, you´re not even making sense with that claim.

And if you actually bothered to check, you would find that psychology is in a protracted war about your first statement, but more and more, "war is human nature" is loosing the fight as every time a new serious and welldone study is added, it kills off a bit more of the credibility of the foundation of that claim.

Basic truth, the younger the children, the more likely they are to cooperate rather than fight.

Relax wrote:This phonetics addition happened to all the languages of Eastern Asia that were based on the pictographs of Chinese characters. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and I am sure I missed a couple other languages in there as well who traditionally used the Chinese written language as China dominated the region for the last 2000 years.

Showing off your ignorance again? Japan imported the Chinese script.
And the kana alphabets are only used as an ADDITION to kanji, not a replacement, with high schools having standardised on teaching 2136 kanji as "basic literacy" package.
Only children write in kana, the exception being that foreing words are written phonetically in katakana.

Kanji is even more dominant than in China however.

Relax wrote:In either case or whatfor, my point was that phonetics rule as they have proven to be far simpler overall as every modern writing system has them and all other writing systems are vanishing rapidly if have not completely vanished. People will use whatever is easiest to communicate or are forced to to live and make $$$.

Except you´re wrong. As Japan blatantly shows.

The reason why the latin alphabet has taken over so much, and to a lesser degree the arabic one, have very little to do with linguistics.

I would consider any language that _didn't_ have different words for 'a' and 'the' to be headed for the scrapheap. As an editor of translations from just such a language I see that the distinction is vital in many instances. What I do really think is likely to happen is that languages that have masculine, feminine and neuter (I think some have even more cases) is sooner or later going to unify them so that only one case exists and no-one has to remember which form of an adjective or of 'a' and 'the' goes with which case.
Cheers
John

George J. Smith wrote:I consider any language that has different words for a and the, different endings for words following he and she & his and hers, to be destined for the galactic rubbish heap.

English as written here in the UK is not perfect due to the vagaries of spelling, I often wish that someone would bring about a simplified version of English, which given the lack of different words and ending changes for gender would make it even easier for non native speakers to learn.

In some respects (much as it galls me to admit it) written US English (hereinafter referred to as American) has a lot going for it in that a lot of words used in American are spelt more like they sound than their English equivalents.

That aside even though I did High school French, was stationed in Germany with the UK forces, worked in Saudi Arabia for 36+ years, my understanding of each of those languages is limited, mostly because, as a previous poster mentioned, when locals know you are from an English speaking country they want to practice their own language skills and invariably continue the conversation in English.


Ah well, such is life

Relax wrote:John, you misread. Chinese most certainly is in the dust bin of history. Chinese in its written language, not spoken. There is no such thing as spoken "Chinese". There is Mandarin and Cantonese. They both used the same written form though...

In the 60's they added phonetic characters enabling them to type and make the printed book realistic to print. Outside of family crest symbols and symbols for common everyday items/shops placed on shops generally, you will not see these characters used in books or any printed media outside of advertising. So, instead of having to memorize upwards of 20,000 characters, they need to know about 200(EDIT I got curious and looked it up: it is 2000) or so and dropping every year as they go more and more based on phonetics and less and less on pictographs. If you want to real number search. At this point I am just parroting a Chinese friend I know from Hong Kong. EDIT: Judging by what I looked up, it would appear in school they learn upwards of 2000 characters, but only use ~200 according to my friend. He left, in 1995-8 I forget which year. Before it switched back to China.

This phonetics addition happened to all the languages of Eastern Asia that were based on the pictographs of Chinese characters. Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese and I am sure I missed a couple other languages in there as well who traditionally used the Chinese written language as China dominated the region for the last 2000 years.

EDIT: No, English is not easy. Spanish, now that is easy.

The language spoken in Korea is not Chinese. It is Korean. And it does not use pictographs. It has 24 letters known as Hangul in South Korea, Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea and China that look like pictographs to Western eyes, but are not.

Vince wrote:The language spoken in Korea is not Chinese. It is Korean. And it does not use pictographs. It has 24 letters known as Hangul in South Korea, Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea and China that look like pictographs to Western eyes, but are not.

I never said Koreans did. Their written language was originally based on Chinese script. The schooling was difficult as the meme's to memorize the pictographs while taught in Korean, the description brush strokes were based in Chinese. Finally got smart and created their own. Took their king to come up with their own language and they did so phonetically. But, they most certainly DID and DO continue to use Chinese script for signage etc. Every Korean student are taught these pictographs in school. They call it Hanja. Watch a Korean variety show and many of the questions, puzzles, jokes, etc are all based on these meme's used to memorize the Hanja. As a foreigner with only a phonetic alphabet, it is utterly confusing. Until I looked up what they were talking about so I could understand what was being said on their variety shows. Running Man is great by the way. Highly recommended, though a fast forward button is sometimes required...

I counted 107 letters in 24 words of your translation.
Including {belonging to}, without that, 96 & 22.

HTM

Tenshinai wrote:{snip - htm}
Swedish grammar makes it possible to create arbitrarily long words. One such word is Spårvagnsaktiebolagsskensmutsskjutarefackföreningspersonalbeklädnadsmagasinsförrådsförvaltarens (95 letters)
which means: "[belonging to] The manager of the depot for the supply of uniforms to the personnel of the track cleaners' union of the tramway company".[/i]
{snip}

JohnRoth wrote:Other languages on the endangered list include two of the remaining Celtic languages: Irish and Scots-Irish. Welsh has never been endangered, and Cornish seems to be reviving after a near-death experience.

Welsh was considered (by the Welsh) to be endangered in the first half of the 19th century. They were sufficiently concerned that they established a Welsh-speaking colony in a remote part of Patagonia in the hope that this would preserve the language (They had observed that Welsh-speaking communities in the US had succumbed to the pressure to use English).

Perversely, the Welsh language had a revival in Wales, while the Patagonian community now primarily uses Spanish.