Thread 18061355

Aren't Chinese characters just hieroglyphs with extra steps? Why did Egypt abandon them while China decided to keep them in?

>>18061355 (OP)
China kept characters because their phonetic ambiguity created political deniability.

>>18061400
makes sense, that's why corruption would be rampant

>>18061355 (OP)
Kind of but not really, Chinese characters have some internal logic, they are made up of components and you can guess the meaning of the character by which components it contains. Pic related.

Ironically this meaning sometimes gets lost in Simplified Chinese so those characters can get more like hieroglyphs compared to traditional ones.

>>18061464
i heard of the radical term used for them before
whats wrong with simplified, is it much harder?

>>18061355 (OP)
Chinese is closer to cuneiform than it is to hieroglyphs.

As for why hieroglyphs died out, it’s because by the 1st century AD, most Egyptians couldn’t read it anymore and had switched to writing their language in a Greek-inspired script (Coptic). Only temple priests could still read hieroglyphs and when paganism was outlawed and temples were closed under emperor Theodosian, knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs died with them.

>>18061490
simplified chinese is easier to learn than traditional chinese, but sacrificies consistency

>>18061499
ooh and it's easier to write too
how did ancient chinese even fit everything into paper?
>>18061496
why'd you say so
cuneiform was used in sumerian and akkadian right
did it have an alphabet or

>>18061569
Cuneiform wasn’t an alphabet, it was a logographic script like Chinese where each character represents a syllable (for example, “an” and “ki” had their own characters)

>>18061615
I had no clue, I guess that's why it'd survived for quite a long time.. didn't Persia use a form of it until the Muslim invasions?

>>18061464
Simplified sacrifices consistency of semantic based radicals but greatly improves the consistency of phonetic based radicals. The original idealistic goal behind simplification was to eventually push for a pure phonetic writing system in order to be "modern," and the current simplification was only supposed to be the first of many rounds of simplification.

Archaeology of ancient writings show that there was a point where the system was evolving toward a pure phonetic system around the Spring and Autumn era, but scholars and scribes end up fighting against and reverting this trend. Looking at simplification though, I now understand why those ancient scholars fought against it thousands of years ago, and why there was such a revolt against the attempted second round of simplification mere decades ago.

>>18061400
They're similar to demotic hieratics, I don't think those were made for the purposes of deniability. In the case of China it may have been an offshoot of an inscription script that was used in a similar way to missal scripts in the west. The supporting evidence for this is Khitan and Tangut scripts which are dead 'languages' that were most likely used for the purposes described previously.

>>18061355 (OP)
>chinese characters

>>18062249
The characters not the made up vernacular language that has barely existed for 60 years.

>>18061628
No, the Sassanid empire used the Pahlavi script to write Persian, the script being based on Aramaic

>>18061400
>their phonetic ambiguity created political deniability.

Lolno whole point of their invention was to facilitate written communication accross the Chinese Empire without the need for dumb language wars. Ambiguity is the last thing an Emperor needs when talking to a polyglot empire through writing. In fact Imperial Dynasties regularly publish official dictionaries all the time so bureaucrats of every language in realm are on the same page

>>18061355 (OP)
>Why did Egypt abandon them while China decided to keep them in?
I strongly suspect the reason is that East Asians are more likely to not have an inner monologue. It might even be somewhat limited to a certain segment of the Han because Hangul took off with Koreans.

Many of them employ a visual reading style whether they have inner monologue or not. It is technically more efficient but the way information is digested and analyzed is different in speech. But I think it has its origins in a genuine handicap where it isn't intuitive to encode sounds because they can't read with inner speech. It is more useful for these people to encode abstract ideas into glyphs because unique logographs are readily parsed visually.

The reason I suspect this other than the common visual reading style is that the one time I saw an interview with a person who claimed to have no inner monologue she was East Asian. I do not think it's likely to be a majority of East Asians. It's probably a minority and they were able to influence the writing system at the right time historically. Then the writing system was kept because of cultural inertia.

>>18061355 (OP)
>why did two cultures thousands of miles and thousands of years apart do different things?!?!

>>18061712
wait there was a movement against it years ago? i knew mao was somewhat involved in the new one

>>18061712
>Archaeology of ancient writings show that there was a point where the system was evolving toward a pure phonetic system around the Spring and Autumn era, but scholars and scribes end up fighting against and reverting this trend.
Where can I read about this? First time hearing anything of sorts.

Bureaucratic simplicity, oddly enough. With how many mutually-unintelligible spoken languages the dynasties had to manage, it helped to have a universally-intelligible written language.

>>18063845
chinese dialects are apparently completely separate too.

>>18061355 (OP)
Hieroglyphs are an alphabet. If you had to draw a bird, a chair and an eye every time you want to write "you", you'd go insane too.
Chinese characters are logographs.

>>18061712
Another example of intellectuals working to regress humanity.

>>18061355 (OP)
China still exists, and Egypt is an Arab bitch

>>18063433
I'm serious guys. I wish there was a global scientific study to see where the most people without inner speech live. Just see this Asian woman without inner monologue:
https://youtu.be/u69YSh-cFXY

>>18064940
Here we go again. An Asian man discovered one of his Asian friends has no internal monologue:
https://youtu.be/ViBxSgHoKew

>>18064958
Another:
https://youtube.com/shorts/x-BiBauoE-o
Asian man suddenly discovers new ability to think verbally inside his head which means he lived his life without the skill up until that point.

>>18061628
>>18062427
Achaemenids used a cuneiform-like script which used similar principles and graphic composition but with a completely new set of characters, unrelated to cuneiform proper used by Sumerian, Akkadian, Hittite etc. Kinda like Tangut script which superficially looks like Hanzi but otherwise is its own thing, while Korean Hanja or Japanese Kanji directly borrowed the Chinese script and characters themselves.

>>18062260
>made up vernacular language that has barely existed for 60 years.
Putonghua isn't a vernacular language in the first place. Guanhua, however, which Putonghua is based on, existed for hundreds of years.

>>18063845
>With how many mutually-unintelligible spoken languages the dynasties had to manage, it helped to have a universally-intelligible written language.
Written forms of southern Chinese languages like Cantonese aren't (fully) intelligible to Guanhua/Putonghua speakers as they may employ different syntax and characters.

Besides that, the "universally-intelligible written language" was Classical Chinese originally spoken mid-1st millenium BC which required learning as a language in its own right by any speaker of living Chinese idioms. All of them are related as French and Italian are related to Latin and to each other.

>>18063552
Simplification was intended to be a multi-step process, but when the second round of simplification was published in 1977, there was such a negative reaction that it was retracted.
https://thelanguagecloset.com/2023/10/07/that-time-china-tried-to-simplify-characters-again/

>>18063802
I read the article over a decade ago so I have no memory of its name, but I do remember the article making its argument by claiming that Spring and Autumn era texts were starting to show increased usage of characters for phonetic value only, and that later intellectuals fought against this trend by increasingly "correcting" the process by adding semantic components to disambiguate.

The funny thing is that you can still see the effects of that phonetic borrowing era in modern times in some odd cases where the "bare" form of the character ended up associated with a different word than original. For example, 四 is believed to have been a pictograph for breathing, but during the period of phonetic borrowing came to be used for its homonym meaning "four," but then during the scholarly disambiguation phase, 四 by itself came to be used for "four" while the older word for breath had a "mouth" semantic component added so that 呬 is used to mean "a breath."

>>18063433
>>18064940
>>18064958
This is nonsense. The process in which a person thinks differs. There are atleast two different types of thinking. Inner monologue and inner picture. The way things work is that if you're seeing inner picture, you are functionally blind. And if you're inner monologuing, you're functionally mute. So you cant speak inside and outside at same time. And you cant see outside and inside at same time. But both thinking modes have inner modes. There are people that fall in middle as well.

I've not found any study that show its limited to one race or another. Inner monologue is everywhere in Asian literature/media/etc.

>>18066018
And further more, there's even a book that deals with this.

"The origins of consciousness" which talks about Bicameral Mind and how ancient people did not have a inner mind but rather imo, they did not understand the notion of an inner mind such that they wouuld always refer to the inner mind as those of voices of god and such, never their own. The notion of an inner mind and the detailed analysis of human mind really entered through Buddhist exploration of human mind and consciousness as recorded in the Pali Canon. Abhidhamma which was written something like 2000+ years ago was detailing the notion of the mind, the consciousness, the nature of sensory perceptions, and the mind as a special organ of the body that which makes sense of the world. This was the single greatest invention of the Buddhism. From there on, it slumbered a bit until the European during the Age of Exploration discovered the notion of mind that is independent of the mysterious supernatural soul. Starting with Rene Descarte with the basic skeptical notion of everything else but the mind, then following with David Humes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and so on.

Even then the nominal notion of a developed mind did not enter our cultural importance until mid-late 20th century imo when psychology and hippie shit with gurus, psychedelics, etc become a thing. Before that, the notion of mind was completely outside the realm of science and was left alone to mystics/religious domain.

>>18061499
Lost opportunity

>>18066018
I can't prove it. I never said it was limited to a race. I also think women are more likely to be affected. You need scientific studies to support a hypothesis. It is only my suspicion that there is unusually large minority of East Asians who possess no inner monologue or who have weak inner monologue abilities. Quirks like this can develop within ethnicities because of inbreeding. It's probably impossible for a whole race to have problems like this because of genetic variability. It could be something like a subset of mainland Chinese or Han while Koreans and Japanese are mostly unaffected.

>>18066018
>This is nonsense. The process in which a person thinks differs. There are atleast two different types of thinking. Inner monologue and inner picture.
If I am reading you correctly it also sounds like you might be skeptical that people with this handicap exist and it's just a conscious choice or style of thinking. No, it's a real handicap. At best their inner monologue abilities are weak and at worst they can't summon one at all.

>>18066208
The inner picture meme is also a thing. Aphantasia. Thats the inner picture. Vs the inner monologue. If you watch this interview >>18064940, the girl clearly states that her inner mind is made up of inner images. Seeing filings of words that she draws from as her inner thinking way.

There's also another older video where Feynmann talks about how another scientist about how they count in the mind. Feynman was an inner monologue guy, so he counts verbally. His friend was a inner image guy, so he picture a catalogue that flips the numbers in his head.

This doesnt make inner image guy handicapped lmao. They are both distinguished scientists with long successful career, family, etc and Feynman never ever noticed the difference until he was thinking about this specific thing with counting in his head.

>>18066230
Yes, I understand there is both inner image and inner voice. People with inner image are handicapped if they are unable to produce inner voice or producing inner voice is difficult, so you have people who rely on one ability over the other because the other ability is poor. Just like how a person in a wheelchair will get stronger arms from making their wheelchair move because their legs don't work so good.

Only people who can do both inner image and inner voice are not handicapped.

>>18066250
Feynman's friend had no inner voice. He was a fully functioning and successful person. So was the lady inthe video. I think you're just inventing things

Chinese characters are a logographic system, not hieroglyphs.

>>18066256
If he had no ability to produce inner voice, objectively that is a handicap. Handicapped people can still be successful, functional, and smart. Just don't ask a man paralyzed from the waist down to run.

Keep in mind that Chinese have an unusually high rate of poor eyesight, so you shouldn't consider it impossible that an ethnicity could be affected by a random ailment.

>>18066264
Feynman could not produce the same inner picture for counting. Feynnman was handicapped as well?

You're reaching

>>18066278
Yes, Feynman was handicapped if what you say is true. He got along fine despite his weakness.

>>18065930
>were starting to show increased usage of characters for phonetic value only, and that later intellectuals fought against this trend by increasingly "correcting" the process by adding semantic components to disambiguate
I can't speculate what the article author meant by 'increased' use of characters for phonetic value but the point is after the Han dynasty solidified its rule and began spreading Confucianism as the state religion, ideology, and standard of education, there arose a need to unify the Confucian canon. This was complicated by the use of phonetic loans in the extant texts, as you described in the example with 哂, which weren't even uniform among various regional variants, and further complicated by pronunciation drifting from the Classical Chinese. It was making harder to establish correspondence between phonetic loans and the intended semantic value.

So in order to clarify the script, Han philologists reformed guwen (古文 "old script") characters (from pre-Han scripts) by adding, among other things, semantic radicals to disambiguate characters used as phonetic loans from the characters conveying the original meaning. This reform created the jinwen (今文 "new script") characters which were written using the clerical script which is basically the modern Hanzi for all intents and purposes.

>>18066257
>Chinese characters are a logographic system, not hieroglyphs.
'Hieroglyph' is a hyponym of the 'logogram'.

>>18067118
It's been over a decade so I'm definitely misremembering details, but that thing about Han era scholars adding semantic radicals to unify and standardize the canon is probably exactly the "push away from phonetics" event the article was talking about.

>>18061355 (OP)
Because Egyptians are extinct and now Arabs are living on the rotting corpse of Egypt.

>>18061464
When I learned Japanese the radical mnemonics were unbelievably retarded. I don't even know how I managed to persevere.

>>18067976
Probably because the radicals you were looking at were phonetic, not semantic, and since Japanese is so different in pronunciation, the phonetic radicals didn't actually convey any useful phonetic meaning.