Re: OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!

On 24/02/2025 12:42 am, albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl wrote:

In article <voqh85$45vh$1@dont-email.me>,
Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
<SNIP>

China has had to cope with a truly terrible writing system. To get
access to Western technology they've had to train a lot of people to
read an alphabetic (phoneme-based) writing systems, and it may yet save
their bacon, but it's a pretty recent change. Computerised text
processing may be starting to help them cope with the defects of a
syllable based writing system.
>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese

 I'm following a course in Chinese. The language is sufficiently
different that pin-yin doesn't really help, that means it cannot
be a replacement for Chinese characters.
There are too much homonyms. Say 80000 characters and about 100
pronunciations available. If you express "know" , you use "ren-shi" in
speaking. Each of these halves mean "know", but each halve is only disambiguous
in writing. The combination makes it more or less disambiguous in
speaking.
 Pin-yin can help. You type in "ma" and press function key 3.
A computer looks up probable words with the 3th tone
in order of plausibility. Plausibly words are presented in
order of probability, so you arrive at the character for
horse expeditiously.
 A famous example is a poem that consist of a few dozen qi.
It is a story about a man named qi who eats (qi) 9 (qi)
lions (qi).
You can bet that this is incomprehensible for a born Chinese,
unless it is written.
 The upside is probably that Chinese children
are more challenged to master the Chinese language,
so they become more intelligent.

It is unlikely that they will become more intelligent. They will get a lot more practice in communication, but since the medium they use to communicate isn't well-adapted to the job the skills they are acquire will be as crippled as the medium they are stuck with using.

It helps that their government is pouring money in education,
instead of abolishing the department of education.

It would help more if the government poured money into solving the problems that the writing system creates, rather exposing more people to a flawed system  for longer.
--
Bill Sloman, Sydney