Thread 17838747

>>17838747 (OP)
filtered

I don't know if it's by design, but Chinese and Japanese caligraphy in this stroke style lead me to see the characters with depth, as three dimensional drawings, which make me wonder if that's how they're meant to be seen, and if that contributes to their meaning, through things like stroke order.

>>17838747 (OP)
It devolved from being purely utilitarian into an aesthetic form of art, and the canvas ended up growing as artists and poets demanded it do so. It ended up being sufficiently clunky and inefficient that the CCP had to revamp it.

>>17838759
fpbp and /thread

>>17838759
>>17839030
Nice meme, but you won't actually defend this language because it's indefensible.

>>17838747 (OP)
bug people, bug language

>>17838747 (OP)
Why is Mandarin so ugly and buggish compared to Korean and Japanese

>>17838747 (OP)
Because China is terrible?

>>17839315
Korean always sounds like a retarded inbetween of Japanese and Chinese to me. Japanese is a pleasant sounding language because the Japanese have always been a people that valued artistic culture, poetry, literature and the like for its own sake instead of merely being confucianist fables to glorify whoever the ruling dynasty was.

Thai basically is what Chinese would sound like if it wasn't ugly.

>>17838747 (OP)
Which one? There are several languages that use or used Chinese characters in writing.

>>17839420
Can you not read filenames?

>>17839021
And yet they use traditional characters in Taiwan and Hong Kong and have similar or higher literacy rates.

>>17839424
I never got how simplification was supposed to be easier.
>now the 10,000 arbitrary symbols you have to learn have even less logic to them!
There's the writing argument, but most people already did abridged handwriting anyway.

>>17839297
The language is fine, it's the writing system that's indefensible. Chinese Braille is phonetic, and there's a dialect of Mandarin spoken in a couple of the -stans that's written in Cyrillic.
>>17839423
D'oh.
>>17839436
There are ways it could have been simplified that would be more helpful for learning. For example, the phonetic and semantic elements were standardized for Old Chinese so they're about 2000 years out of date; you could restandardize them for either Mandarin specifically, or the diaphonemic aggregate of the modern Chinese languages (something like Chao's General Chinese).

>>17838747 (OP)
>>17839440
Or you could not treat people like retards and teach them the ancient etymologies and reconstructed pronunciations, Classical Chinese vs. Old Chinese, etc. Changs always get a kick out of hearing what Old Chinese sounded like.

It would be cool if they started writing modern Chinese in the bronze script (which, although it shows up later on the record, seems to be the system of which oracle bone script was a simplification). They'd have to invent new characters for it but it could be done

pic related

>>17838747 (OP)

Because it wasn't made by Christians.

>>17839461
That seems impractical.
>>17839462
Neither were most writing systems used today. The alphabet we're having this conversation in was invented by pagan Romans.

I've made good progress in learning it, but I think it's pretty safe to say that any writing system where you have no way to figure out how to read a new character that you've never seen before is absolutely fucked. Today you can use your phone to visually translate it, but prior to having smartphones, if you encountered a character that was new to you, you were just fucked unless you could ask someone nearby if they knew the character and could tell you what it was. Basically the total opposite of how a good writing system should function.

Also, there's no need for tones. Outside of Chinese, tonal languages are very rare. Everyone else figured out how to do a language without tone nonsense.

You couldn't design a worse language than Chinese if you had to. If its complexities served the language, then fine. But all of the complicated features of the language that make learning it a pain are entirely unnecessary as evidenced by literally all other languages on the Earth.

>>17839465

No it wasn't, it was invented by St. Alexander of Constantinopole, a theologian and scribe.

>>17839318
SARRRRRR

>>17839469
>simon the compulsive liar lies, latin alphabet edition

>>17839475

My name is not Simon, It's Samuel (look at my fucking 4username again since you clearly didn't read it correctly), and I'm not lying about any alphabet.

>>17839440
>For example, the phonetic and semantic elements were standardized for Old Chinese so they're about 2000 years out of date; you could restandardize them
Damn, this would have been based.
Chinese seems to have similar logic to English, in that there's just enough to make you think you can develop a system to understand it but you can't.
青 Qing.
清 Qing.
請 Qing.
情 Qing.
靜 Jing...? Okay so the phonetic is on the left and makes a different sound now.
靚 Fucking Liang.

>>17839476
what is this level of lying called

>>17839307
I've only ever seen the ugliest people call Asians bugs,like they're projecting

>>17839465
I didn't say it would be practical, I said it would be cool and fun for spergs like me. I do think people should learn more about comparative etymology, ancient pronunciations, and how that affects modern speech, whether Chinese, English, or whatever

Taiwan and HK have shown that you can achieve widespread literacy without simplification of the regular script. The simplified hanzi are mostly there for ideological purposes. It's also mighty convenient for keeping people from reading Chinese texts from the free world

>>17839466
>there's no need for tones.
Chinese only sounds good when it's sung and tones are completely disregarded.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLqaEnq1IPA

>>17839466
>but I think it's pretty safe to say that any writing system where you have no way to figure out how to read a new character that you've never seen before is absolutely fucked
What, like English? Yeah true.
>prior to having smartphones, if you encountered a character that was new to you, you were just fucked unless you could ask someone nearby if they knew the character and could tell you what it was
Or you could look it up by radical in a paper dictionary.
>Also, there's no need for tones.
You'd merge a good few homophones if you just lost them.
>Outside of Chinese, tonal languages are very rare.
Not really? Ancient Greek, Swedish, Serbo-Croatian, Zulu, Japanese, Vietnamese, Thai, Punjabi...
>>17839469
So what did the Romans read and write in before they converted to Christianity? And do you have any evidence for this claim?
>>17839493
Right, in Old Chinese it was reconstructed as *sʰleːŋ, sʰleŋ, sʰleŋʔ, zleŋ, zleŋʔ, zleŋs, in that order.
(If you can't read phonetic symbols: The superscript ʰ indicates it's pronounced with a puff of air like the P in "pit" but not "spit", ː indicates the vowel is pronounced longer, ŋ makes the sound of English NG as in "sing", and ʔ represents the little catch in your throat in the middle of the word "uh-oh".)
(Also, "jing" and "qing" are quite similar sounds, the only difference between them is aspiration, the aforementioned puff of air.)
>>17839554
At least in Cantonese they aren't disregarded, the tones have to match the melody normally, but it still sounds pretty normal.

>>17839573
>japanese
>tonal
lmao
pitch accent does not make it a tonal language any more than emphasis in english does

>>17839595
Many linguists do not consider pitch accent a fundamentally different thing, just a subset of tone.

>>17839573

>2

Phoenician script.

>>17839600
Oh, I see what you're doing, you're counting miniscules as a separate script. Sorry, but modern Latin miniscules have more in common structurally with the classical Latin alphabet than the Phoenician alphabet even if the glyph shapes have shifted. At no point was Latin written in the unmodified Phoenician alphabet.

>>17839605

Wait, no, I got Phoenician confused with cuneiform. They wrote in cuneiform.

>>17839611
The Romans wrote in cuneiform? Do you have any evidence whatsoever for this claim?

>>17839613

Goldberg, et. al -- Evidence of fired clay tablets with cuneiform writing in proto-Imperial Rome

for one.

>>17839616
Google finds no such study, link?

>>17839461
>what Old Chinese sounded like
Nobody knows what Old Chinese sounded like. There are no good phonetic reconstructions before the 7th century

>>17839625
We have some idea, but you're right that there's a lot of uncertainty.

>>17839573
That reconstruction approach sounds too gamey. If words Px and Qx are cognates where P,Q are consonants and x is vowel, just reconstruct it as PQx or QPx

>>17839643
To my understanding there is some external evidence, like borrowings to and from, and Sino-Tibetan cognates.

>>17839598
Many linguists can lick my balls.

>>17839476
>My name is not Simon, It's Samuel
No one asked, no one cares, not your personal blog.

>>17839672

>not your personal bog[sic]

>>17838747 (OP)
Confucianism, most likely.

because they lost their consonant clusters and inflectional morphology.
https://youtu.be/eqf_Kj8H_GU
imagine this kino spoken by 1.4 billion.

>>17839724
That voice sounds like the ILoveLanguages girl.

>>17839737
because it is

>>17839471
Sorry, Rakesh, but I'm white.

>>17839507
Simon Salva is a coping Japanese hikikomori pretending to be a tradcath for some reason. It's completely possible he thinks Simon and Samuel are the same name, like writing Haruto as 春人, 春大, or 春斗

>>17839512
Its not just about the looks retard

>>17839724
Chinese used to have inflectional morphology?

>>17839899
Old Chinese did, yeah, though not a lot of it. Some of it survives as tonal distinctions, like shu3 'to count' and shu4 'number'.

>>17839899
like the other anon said, we don't really know how much inflection since we can tell really little from the writing, but there was a preference in pronouns usage that's similar to a case system, like the I is different when it is a subject/object/possessive in old chinese. As for verbs, we don't know, it is likely it was isolating, or it was like tibetan that utilized consonate affixes to denote difference in tense and aspect. But that's just speculation.

>>17839904
>>17839918
That's a shame. I fucking love east asian affixsumnidesu.

>>17838747 (OP)
that's a script, not a language, retard.