Do you think logographic writing will ever make a global come-back? Seems like it's inefficient for representing speech...

>What do you think speedreading is?

a meme.

Do you have any empirical evidence that the Chinese are faster readers than Latinates?

No. I'm not even certain if Hanzi 100% logographic. In fact I'm pretty sure it's not. But I do think if you had a pure logographic written language you would read it faster than phonetic script simply because as I said there would be no converting process.

I live in a heavily multilingual country. The Chinese do maths the fastest out of everybody because in their heads they count in Mandarin.

>7-1
I didn't know the World Cup in Brazil drew such large attention in China

I don't think so, this isn't effecient enough. Chinese has little phonetical value, and it leaves out the stability and visual support our languages have. That's the reason the pronounciation is clumsy, and varies a lot from an individual to another. The reason China lost to Japan is—amongst others, naturally—that Japanese managed to develop a script that is phonetical and easier to learn. In 1954, literacy in Japan was roughly 95.5%, while 60% of Chinese were still completely illiterate. Japan has carried on a deep reflection on the simplification of its writing system. This isn't a surprise English has been adopted as the language of formal sciences, it has suitable features. Do you imagine quickly making up words and verbs in French, or in Japanese? Asian cultures should value and promote such languages, but it definitely isn't the optimal way to communicate.

Chinese counting system is very similar to the English one. “Counting in Mandarin” doesn't make sense.

>7-1

Is this about what I think it is?

No. Why learn thousands of symbols when you could learn dozens?

B T F O
T
F
O

No, it's the date. 1st July.

I don't think anyone would argue that logographic could ever beat phonetic in practicality. Obviously it is way easier to just create symbols that are essentially notations for speech. But I still think logographs have their pros. Imagine you have a population of deaf people who for whatever reason instead of communicating with hand signs they communicate with pen and paper. Eventually they've developed a natural language so rich they can express every day things as intricately as densely as they can express mathematical facts. So the idea is the writing isn't simply a system to use to represent an oral language, but that the writing is an independent language of it's own. You can glare something written and instantly consume it's meaning because instead of the symbols representing morphemes, the symbols simply are morphemes.

Phonetic:

Written symbols -> Words -> Meaning

Pure Logography:

Written symbols -> Meaning

Soccer is the biggest sport in China(and all the countries not named USA)

It's a borderline consideration that doesn't match reality. How many entries should there be? 1,000? 2,500? 50,000? 750,000? 15,000,000? How will you name the flora and fauna, the minerals, the chemical elements and compounds, the muscles, the bones, the diseases, the colours, the engineering and economics concept, the countries, the stars? How will you name the names? Chinese and Japanese people either write phonetically the names, or consolidate two or more characters to form a new word, hence it isn't logography. It isn't even necessary quicker, like “biopsy” which translates as 生体組織検査, which is read “seitaisoshikikensa”. I can assure you that, with less than 1,000 characters, your brain instinctly creates a library of entries and has to go through a longer process. You know “q” is “q”, that's obvious. The difference between 溶, 浴 or 裕 is much less evident.

Japanese and Chinese are pretty simple. Chinese has a familiar and straightforward grammar, whereas Japanese is very consistent in its declension and use of enclitic particles. No formal structure, no order. No gender, no number. Save for the phonology, which is naturally isn't an issue for natives, it would be a piece of cake to learn them. The reason a young Japanese is still learning how to read and write his own language in high school isn't different. In Dutch, German, French, Italian, Spanish, by the time you're twelve years old, you're operational.

>How will you name the flora and fauna, the minerals, the chemical elements and compounds, the muscles, the bones, the diseases, the colours, the engineering and economics concept, the countries, the stars? How will you name the names?

The speakers (or writers) of the language would collectively make symbols for those things over time just like in oral and sign languages. It's not about recording speech or preserving elements of oral language, it's about transferring ideas directly. Also, it's not like phonetic notation is going to disappear. It can coexist.

>Implying people subvocalise any words that aren't very unusual to them
Rlaley user? Poelpe don't need wrods to pohntecilaly splel the tihng tehy dscbrie. What they're looking at just needs to resemble the word that they're trying to read. This is because humans, by nature, look at things as if they logographic.

Logographics are the only system that works for Chinese.

The Pinyin system ,essentially our letters, doesn't work for writing the language.

more important, does he have any empirical evidence that Chinese readers don't "subvocalize"

>The point is without logographs you bypass the need to subvocalize. Try reading this post without saying it loud quietly or hearing a voice inside your head. Doesn't work to good, does it? That is obviously because phonetic scripts represent the speech of an oral language. Logographs on the other hand are theoretically a language of their own. So you can just quickly scan the page with your eye and instantly grab the meaning just as you do when someone speaks to you.
Chinese people still sub vocalise because each character is still a sound to them. There's really very little difference.

He doesn't, and they don't, I am sat next to a Chinese person and she assures me reading is identical to English.

The benefits of the character system are that aslong as you know the meaning of each character you can read it which allows the various different languages of china all to read and write the same because they all use the same character for "dog", "cat" etc, regardless of how they pronounce it.
And further because Chinese has an insane amount of homphones, so if it was written phonetically, many sentences would just be

shi shi chi shi chi xi xiao shi shi shi shi shi shi chi zi zhi zhi zhi shi

>le chinese characters represent ideas maymay

They're LOGOgraphs not IDEOgraphs you fuckwit, they're not some fucking rebus they're morphemes in actual languages

fuck logographic systems, OP. They are still glottographic and represent speech. What you want is a good old fashioned semasiographic system

historyview.blogspot.com/2011/10/yukaghir-girl-writes-love-letter.html

have fun in your super-efficient mud hut by the way!

Like 30% of them or something are just overly complex and developed ideographs

>Doesn't work to good, does it?
>he's not a Veeky Forumsizen that has ascended subvocalization

If you insist on 'hearing' it in your mind you might as well read it out loud, it flows better that way.

Only half true.

Ideograms and logographs are practically synonymous.

This thread isn't specifically about Chinese. Just logography in general. Like, math notation is completely logographic. You don't necessarily solve "2 + 2 = _" by converting it to "two plus two" in your head. The visual symbols are good enough on their own, you don't need to convert it to vocal symbols.

No memes please

This stuff is actually pretty cool. Thank you.

We're using Chinese as an example because it's a system that actually works and can be used to write the whole of human discourse. How would you use maths notation to do anything beyond elementary arithmetic? Even higher mathematics needs words.

Why on Earth not? Is it because of ambiguity? If it were, you'd expect that the ambiguity would render spoken Chinese unintelligible.

Y'all. Read this. Like, seriously, read it.
zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

>The reason China lost to Japan is—amongst others, naturally—that Japanese managed to develop a script that is phonetical and easier to learn. In 1954, literacy in Japan was roughly 95.5%, while 60% of Chinese were still completely illiterate. Japan has carried on a deep reflection on the simplification of its writing system.

This has nothing to do with the writing systems and everything to do with the state having the capacity to educate its citizens which a poor, starving China could not do.

Get off a history board if you're going to ignore history.

it's definitely possible, especially if you include diacritics to show tone. But it's still a pain in the ass to read.

You don't suppose that that's because no one's used to reading it? I mean, English written in the Cyrillic alphabet is a pain in the ass to read, but no one attributes that to the Cyrillic alphabet being fundamentally incompatible with English.

>Japan has carried on a deep reflection on the simplification of its writing system.
>3 fucking writing systems
Lol, OK.

>You don't look at the symbols and get the meaning after subvocalizing, you just extract the meaning from the symbols directly.
that's not how it works

generally each character is associated with a sound, so you subvocalize when reading characters too.

the individual components have their own meanings but you can't guess what the word means based on them. for instance this character 案. it's a "woman" sitting on a "tree" underneath a "roof". good luck guessing what that means without a dictionary or translator, I invite you to try.

This.

There are fewer kanji in common usage and what readings they can be used for is reduced (at least if you're going by the jouyou kanji, which newspapers and whatnot usually do though serious literature doesn't necessarily) and some of the characters are simplified. Also the kana spelling is more phonetic than it used to be.

There's no fucking evidence because it's horseshit [1]. Japanese is one of the fastest languages and Chinese is one of the slowest and they both use logographs.

[1] content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2091477,00.html

>Japanese managed to develop a script that is phonetical and easier to learn
Would someone really do that? Make a claim on the Internet about something they know nothing about?

They're not wrong. Kana are phonetic and easy to learn. It's just they're used alongside kanji, which decidedly aren't.

This is all about the information density of the _spoken_ languages, which would be exactly the same if they were all written in hieroglyphs.

*even if they were

Nobody on the internet knows anything about language, and they understand Asian languages even less. But they'll be damned if they let that stop them from declaring which is best.

I think in English but do math in Chinese. Having every number be one syllable considerably speeds up basic arithmetic, which snowballs into everything else being faster.

This is especially the case for multiplication, which also affects integer division.

note that all of my experience in logographic alphabets is in mandarin

>do you think logographic writing will ever make a comeback?
I hope not desu, in theory it is more efficient but in practice it faces many of the same problems of non-logographic words. This is especially true when new words need to be invented. You either have to create some strange compound (I.E. bike is 自行车, which could be loosely translated as self-travel vehicle) or try to replicate the sound using existing characters. In chinese, this is typically indicated through a mouth radical in front of a character with the pronunciation you want. Many words in Chinese are also multi syllibaic and therefore use multiple characters, or use characters with obscenely high amount of strokes, though the simplified alphabet helps mitigate this. Coming from this as a non-native speaker, I can also say that learning vocabulary in a logographic language can be a bitch, as you have to remember both the character and the pronunciation, and the tone too in the case of Mandarin. In a non-logographic language you would generally get a reasonable clue to the pronunciation, but in a logographic language you will get very little indication.

You don't have to make a new symbol. Most Chinese words are two and three characters long, which means they're two or three syllables long.

They didn't make a new symbol for 'computer'. They just us the symbols for 'electric' and 'brain', and now when they're side by side that means computer.

btw, and fyi, that's actually why I think it's a bad idea to begin Chinese by learning characters. Most people start by learning individual Characters despite most words being two or three characters long. It's a better use of time to quickly build a base vocabulary using pinyin, and then studying Character combinations for the words you already know. Since each character always represents one syllable, it's much easier to remember characters after you already know how the word is supposed to sound, as you'll see the same characters used in multiple words.

The reason Pinyin doesn't work is because Pinyin itself is bad and ill suited for Chinese. A real phonetic solution would be like the Korean Hangul, which was made from the ground up for Korean sounds. China's government simply needs to make a sound based script based on Chinese sounds and force it's people to adopt it.

What's wrong with pinyin? It represents the phonemic distinctions of Mandarin without ambiguity. (Although if you're looking for a ground-up solution for representing Mandarin, you might look at Zhuyin Fuhao/Bopomofo.)

ask someone that's about to grad with a chinese languages major japanese minor.

my chinese is significant more fluent, but my japanese is like middle-school tier.

ask me anything about hanzi, hiragana, katakana, japanese kanjia.

Do you think you are native speaker good?

After learning chinese, did you start using 乘法口诀 when doing math.