My understanding is limited because my knowledge of Mandarin is limited but it seems like a lot of the characters have translingual meanings that can be recognized and interpreted by speakers of other languages that also use Chinese characters. If this is indeed the case, is there any reason English sentences and texts couldn’t simply be written in these characters to be read by speakers of English and other languages who read them since English doesn’t already have logograms anyway (besides numbers) and there’s a void that could be filled? Like the sentence structures might be strange to a Mandarin speaker but possibly still interpretable.

I swear I’m not high [right now].

  • unperson [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    21·
    13 days ago

    This essay demonstrates that the languages that use Chinese characters have a way to form words in common with each other that doesn’t work very well when transposed to English. It does this by exploring the very idea of using the Chinese writing system to express English sentences.

    It takes the analogy to the point that it breaks, and continues as satire.

    http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

    • LupineTroubles [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      4·
      12 days ago

      Writing scripts have a tendency to shape the languages that are used by them, this is even true for the spoken language in low literacy societies in past. Even if English could not be written well enough with Chinese script now if it was used for a while it would be influenced by it as more of its rules would diffuse to the language and conventions or new meanings would develop. If anything the fact that there are similar features in languages as different as Chinese and Japanese or Arabic and Persian is all the proof one needs one could see this happen in just a few generations in English and Chinese which are similar in many ways despite the different language families.

    • OprahsedCreatureOPEnglish
      5·
      13 days ago

      I admit, when I made this post I was kind of in a hyper-focused trance 😂

      It’s just an interesting idea, with logograms you can express so much in a very small space, even given the added complexity they add to a language. It’s almost a little frustrating that English doesn’t really have them natively, save for numbers.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
        5·
        13 days ago

        I have examined

        “I have thought” was the intended reading, but good job at understanding that it was the perfect aspect.

        on top outside

        上外 is how I chose to render the word “about”, which etymologically means “on-by-out” — so I represented the “on” part with 上 and “out” with 外 and dropped any representation for the “by”. You can also think of 上外 as a sort of rebus: “up-out” sounds almost exactly like “about”.

        this askation

        “this question” was the intended reading, but good job picking up on how I was using the nominalizer 子 to represent the suffix -(at)ion. In hindsight I guess I probably could’ve used a better character than 問 for the “quest” part, even though “ask” was what quaerō meant in Latin (also related to our “query”!) and the Old English word that question displaced was āscung (lit. “asking”)

        a number of times before

        “sometimes before” was the intended reading, but I honestly really struggled with finding a good enough way to represent “some” and figured that if it could also be read as “a number of times” that the meaning was close enough to the intended one anyways. On the other hand I didn’t mark 時 as plural in any way.

        I commonly closeation

        “my conclusion” was the intended reading. So I opted to use 共 to represent the prefix con-, and then the “clus” in “conclusion” actually means “close”, and is in fact related to our word close via Latin claudō — so I used 閉 to represent that part. And you already gathered that 子 is equivalent to -(at)ion.

        I had considered that not explicitly marking 我 as possessive might be confusing, but if you have words in Chinese like 我国 for “my country” that it was probably good enough.

        is that you could do them

        “is that you could do it” was the intended reading.

        in outside not very good.

        “but not very well” was the intended reading. Interpreting “well” as “good” is reasonable enough, since a lot of people treat these words as interchangeable, anyways.

        The word “but” etymologically means “by-out”, hence 在外. You correctly ascertained earlier that 在前 meant “before”, and the 在 in that represents the be-, which also etymologically means “by”. Admittedly 在 which means something closer to “in” or “at” wasn’t the best choice for “by”, though.

        “But” was another word that was very tricky to find a way to represent. I’d also considered doing some sort of rebus with characters for “butt(ocks)” or “(head)butt” or “butt (of wine)”, such that I could ideally avoid splitting one word across two characters, however that sort of rebus would just be confusing if not vulgar… Not that 在外 is that much less confusing, though, but at least it conveys well enough that it’s a function word.

        So all in all the original sentence was

        “I have thought about this question sometimes before, and my conclusion is that you could do it, but not very well.”

        …And your interpretation basically proves the point. Although to be fair if English were written with Chinese characters, there would probably be a lot of 国字 which would make the system a lot smoother, and oftentimes if there’s a bit of ambiguity in the reading it isn’t that big a deal.

        • awth13 [fae/faer, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          5·
          13 days ago

          I was intentionally silly in some parts :)

          Regarding the possessive though, I didn’t expect what you wrote to follow Chinese grammar and, seeing how “my” and “I” are different words in English, didn’t consider that 我 could also mean “my”.

          Also, why not 但 for “but” and 於/于 for “about”?