Re: How many civilizations are on Earth today?

On 22 Feb 2006 12:39:28 -0800, "Ben Goodman" <goodben@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

Ted Nolan <tednolan> wrote:

Is it right to say that written Chinese is "Mandarin"? I had the
impression that since the written language was conceptual rather than
phonetic it couldn't be identified with a particular dialect.

I'm not sure on this, but I think written Chinese is phonetic in
Mandarin.

What? How is it phonetic?

As you say yourself, "So you have quite a few symbals that have the
same sound."

If you have eight different characters all pronounced "shi," first
tone, how can you call that phonetic?

You can have one character that has multiple meanings, even though
it's always pronounced the same, but that doesn't make it phonetic.

Each character represents a word. Every word has a consistent
pronunciation. Sometimes you get more than one word with the same
pronunciation (like the English "reed" and "read"), and they'll be
different characters.

Some characters are built up of radicals -- pieces of other characters
-- which may reflect a meaning (e.g. I'm told the character for
"discord" is the radical for "woman" twice under the radical for
"home," i.e., "two women under one roof"). Sometimes the radicals
instead indicate a similarity of sound, so that a word pronounced
"guang" might include a radical that's the character for a completely
unrelated word that _also_ happens to be pronounced "guang." This
latter case is as close as Chinese gets to being phonetic.

The writing system is thousands of years old. The dialect called
"Mandarin" only dates back maybe six hundred, and there's evidence
that pronunciation has shifted significantly over the past two
centuries. Saying that the writing is somehow more phonetic for
Mandarin than for any of the other Chinese languages is kind of silly.

Because the writing is standardized for all those languages, that
means that the grammar is standardized, too -- all the languages that
can be written as Chinese have the same simple grammar, they all
construct sentences the same way and use the same basic concepts, but
the vocabulary is different.

I wish I knew enough Chinese to give examples, but I know maybe twenty
words of Mandarin and three of Cantonese and that's about it.

Anyway, written Chinese is written Chinese, it doesn't work any better
for one language than another, and it _definitely_ isn't tailored for
Mandarin because it's _older_ than Mandarin. I'm trying to remember
when it was standardized and all the old local variants outlawed --
the exhibit on seals at the Shanghai Museum went into some detail
about that, but I can't remember what it said.




--
My webpage is at http://www.watt-evans.com
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