Phonetically correct

[Funky Ghost]

 

[ThudThudThud]

Far canal.

 

[5StringBlues]

wow what happened to blast? Banned suddenly?

 

[Double E]

wow what happened to blast? Banned suddenly?

He was formerly banned under his other username and resurfaced with a new identity... apparently a no-no.

 

[5StringBlues]

Oy.....


what shall we do with this thread then?

 

[Pilgrim]

"poot"

Can't get much closer than that.

 

[Double E]

Oy.....


what shall we do with this thread then?

Keep it going... why not?

Kinda funny though, he had his former nickname in his signature. If he'd kept a lid on it, he would probably not have been re-banned.

 

[5StringBlues]

There ain't a mome rath alive whut can outgrabe me!

 

[HaphAsSard]

a question I've had for a long time.
Is there anything like phonetics in languages such as Chinese or Japanese that are purely symbols

As far as I've read on the subject, no writing system could survive being purely semantic: there has to be some degree of phonetic encoding.
A tiny percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms, that is to say they are stylised little pictures of the object described (their early - XV century b.C. - forms were, well, better pictures - the character for "eye" was clearly a drawing of a tiny eye, and so on). Another small subset is that of ideograms proper (such as a tiny arrow pointing up for "above", or the two characters for "woman" and "child" combined to signify "love", for example).
The vast majority of Chinese characters do not belong to these first two categories, but instead conform to the following pattern:
-a part of the character roughly indicates the general area of meaning. The sign for "cypress" will have a simplified "tree" symbol as one of its elements;
-another simplified character, however, will likely be there inside our symbol, whose meaning has nothing to do whatsoever with it. What is it there for? To signal that the pronunciation of our complex symbol is similar to the one of this other character incorporated into it. It's only a rough guide to its pronunciation: the reader of Chinese (in the time and place where the complex symbol was invented, which might be III-century CE Henan, for example, and sometimes very different from today's pronunciation), would see the unrelated symbol, (let's say) one that means "loud", and understand that this tree-related symbol stands for something pronounced kinda like the word "loud", and then, in a split second, understand that it's "cypress" they were talking about, because "cypress" happens/happened to sound similar to "loud" in this dialect.
As reviewers of Invalid Link Removed on the topic tend to summarise (it's not actually in the book itself), the Chinese writing system is not a good ideographic script but actually a lousy phonetic one.

Japanese has a very complex mixed system, with Chinese characters representing whole words or parts of them, and locally-developed, but ultimately Chinese-derived, phonetic (syllabic, to be precise) characters that represent some other words, parts of words (like, but not limited to, verbal and adjectival inflection) and grammatical particles like adverbs or (the local counterpart of our) prepositions and such.
The use of Chinese characters in the Japanese system (as only a part of it albeit an important one as sketched above) is more purely semantic, non-phonetic than the use of the same characters in written Chinese itself, because the phonetic part that many of them include, as described above, is mostly useless to Japanese readers: chances are the Japanese word for "loud" is pronounced very differently from "cypress", so if you see the character for the latter word and don't know its meaning you're on your own as far as pronunciation - you only know it's got something to do with trees. In other words, Chinese characters in Japanese simply have to be learned by heart. A complicating element, but one that seems to somehow work for them, is the fact that, for example, the symbol for "write" is used equally to represent "writ-ing" , "graph-ic" and "scribe": a Chinese character is described as having different "readings" depending on context, because it stands for different words or word roots, some of which are ultimately indigenous and others that were imported, in (spoken) words borrowed from Chinese - there are many of them, and more are created, in the same way as we invent new technical or scientific terms from Greek or Latin building blocks.

An interesting tidbit: Japanese kids start with their syllabic script(s - there are actually two of them), which they use for every word at first, and only later do they begin stuffing their heads with more and more Chinese characters, and learn the "adult" written forms of Japanese words which involve their use. The compulsory list of characters students have to know when they leave school is of around two thousands of them, the most common in the written language (you do need many more to do qualified jobs). Chinese pupils instead actually learn the Latin alphabet first, and use it for their own language while they gradually learn their national characters.

EDITS
[I'd forgotten to add a link to the book I alluded to fixed]
[Also, all examples are made up!]

PERHAPS MORE IMPORTANTLY -
@Gravedigger Dav. I don't know if you're gonna find the above any interesting, or stated clearly enough for that matter, but I now feel you may have meant something to the effect of: how do those written languages encode sound when necessary? How do people mock dialects, spell out words, make up new ones, render foreign names? Well, Chinese manages some way I have no clue about, with some specific uses of some of its usual characters. Punctuation, and the fact that a sequence of symbols reads as gibberish if interpreted semantically, are probably enough to signal that at those specific points of a text a given character is there to indicate a sound and not its inherent meaning. As regards Japanese, and how it copes with the task of representing buzzes and whooshes and spell-outs, it has its syllabic symbols for that, as briefly mentioned above.

 

[slobake]

It seems you have misunderstood me and my reasons for posting.

So what are your reasons? On a related topic there are ways to communicate that invite discussion and there are ways to end discussions.
For instance knowing your audience is important, if you use terms that your audience doesn't understand you will lose them. There are ways to say things that those without expertise will understand but still can intrigue the experts.
Also short terse statements like "I'm afraid not" do nothing to encourage further conversations.
Maybe it is a cultural thing.

 

[D M C]

As far as I've read on the subject, no writing system could survive being purely semantic: there has to be some degree of phonetic encoding.
A tiny percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms, that is to say they are stylised little pictures of the object described (their early - XV century b.C. - forms were, well, better pictures - the character for "eye" was clearly a drawing of a tiny eye, and so on). Another small subset is that of ideograms proper (such as a tiny arrow pointing up for "above", or the two characters for "woman" and "child" combined to signify "love", for example).
The vast majority of Chinese characters do not belong to these first two categories, but instead conform to the following pattern:
-a part of the character roughly indicates the general area of meaning. The sign for "cypress" will have a simplified "tree" symbol as one of its elements;
-another simplified character, however, will likely be there inside our symbol, whose meaning has nothing to do whatsoever with it. What is it there for? To signal that the pronunciation of our complex symbol is similar to the one of this other character incorporated into it. It's only a rough guide to its pronunciation: the reader of Chinese (in the time and place where the complex symbol was invented, which might be III-century CE Henan, for example, and sometimes very different from today's pronunciation), would see the unrelated symbol, (let's say) one that means "loud", and understand that this tree-related symbol stands for something pronounced kinda like the word "loud", and then, in a split second, understand that it's "cypress" they were talking about, because "cypress" happens/happened to sound similar to "loud" in this dialect.
As reviewers of Invalid Link Removed on the topic tend to summarise (it's not actually in the book itself), the Chinese writing system is not a good ideographic script but actually a lousy phonetic one.

Japanese has a very complex mixed system, with Chinese characters representing whole words or parts of them, and locally-developed, but ultimately Chinese-derived, phonetic (syllabic, to be precise) characters that represent some other words, parts of words (like, but not limited to, verbal and adjectival inflection) and grammatical particles like adverbs or (the local counterpart of our) prepositions and such.
The use of Chinese characters in the Japanese system (as only a part of it albeit an important one as sketched above) is more purely semantic, non-phonetic than the use of the same characters in written Chinese itself, because the phonetic part that many of them include, as described above, is mostly useless to Japanese readers: chances are the Japanese word for "loud" is pronounced very differently from "cypress", so if you see the character for the latter word and don't know its meaning you're on your own as far as pronunciation - you only know it's got something to do with trees. In other words, Chinese characters in Japanese simply have to be learned by heart. A complicating element, but one that seems to somehow work for them, is the fact that, for example, the symbol for "write" is used equally to represent "writ-ing" , "graph-ic" and "scribe": a Chinese character is described as having different "readings" depending on context, because it stands for different words or word roots, some of which are ultimately indigenous and others that were imported, in (spoken) words borrowed from Chinese - there are many of them, and more are created, in the same way as we invent new technical or scientific terms from Greek or Latin building blocks.

An interesting tidbit: Japanese kids start with their syllabic script(s - there are actually two of them), which they use for every word at first, and only later do they begin stuffing their heads with more and more Chinese characters, and learn the "adult" written forms of Japanese words which involve their use. The compulsory list of characters students have to know when they leave school is of around two thousands of them, the most common in the written language (you do need many more to do qualified jobs). Chinese pupils instead actually learn the Latin alphabet first, and use it for their own language while they gradually learn their national characters.

[EDIT: I'd forgotten to add a link to the book I alluded to.
Also, all examples are made up!]

Since Chinese pictograms are not phonetic - are representative of objects, actions, and to some degree abstractions - is it possible to represent the pronunciation of foreign words using the Chinese characters? From what you've described, it would seem unlikely that one could as one can in western writing wherein the letters that make up the word represent, more or less, a sound associated with the word, pronunciation notwithstanding. Whereas the Chinese character will always be associated with a concept, it can't have a meaning that isn't associated with that concept. No?

 

[Bettyboo]

Language itself is cultural convention, so I'm not claiming the connotation is "innate" or inherent. It's still cultural. But the thing about the string of words with gr- I listed is that they DON'T derive from a shared root word. Rather, within the proto-Germanic culture that lies behind English, there really does seem to have been an intuitive association of "gr-" with these kinds of harsh, dark meanings. I wouldn't assume that a Chinese or Armenian speaker would have the same associations.

Obviously I wouldn't say the same is true of all words. The thing about "devil" is that no part of the word resonates with words with similar overtones. "Level" doesn't have the same dark associations, neither does "denim."

Another curiosity - nearly every language, even in unrelated language families, has similar words for mother and father, based on ma- or da- or pa-/fa-. It's not hard to understand why, those are some of the first sounds a baby's mouth can form and eager parents rapidly teach the child to associate the sounds with themselves. What's funny, though, is that in the Georgian language, the referents are reversed from the rest of the world - Father is "mama" and mother is "deda."

Yeah, that all makes sense. Cultural conventions are very powerful, and our embodied minds, especially during childhood, do frame many choices, hence the ma/pa sounds.

I'd like to point out, again, that bouba and kiki are terrible examples because they are so similar to the words they are supposed to represent in construction, vowel sounds, vowel placement, connotative words, the list goes on - a poorly designed experiment. At a neurological level, our neuron networks make 'best fit' guesses then pass the results upstream to another neuron network that sums the results through multiple stages; maybe 3-5 linked to the eyes (or ears if it's sound), then another 5+ steps in the mid and higher brain levels before coming into consciousness.

 

[HaphAsSard]

Since Chinese pictograms are not phonetic - are representative of objects, actions, and to some degree abstractions - is it possible to represent the pronunciation of foreign words using the Chinese characters? From what you've described, it would seem unlikely that one could as one can in western writing wherein the letters that make up the word represent, more or less, a sound associated with the word, pronunciation notwithstanding. Whereas the Chinese character will always be associated with a concept, it can't have a meaning that isn't associated with that concept. No?

Sorry, I did address that topic but only in my nth edit. They do use their characters to only represent sound if needed, though I have no idea how exactly. It probably involves a limited subset of characters, the occurrence of which in seemingly meaningless chunks of text is probably enough for the reader to switch to phonetic mode, in other words to temporarily stop reading them as representing each a whole word, but instead each a sound. Or syllable? Dunno.

 

[Killed_by_Death]

beatnik

 

[S-Bigbottom]

You know back in my day whensomethingwaswrittenthespacebarwasnotinventedyetsothewordswouldjuststringalongintoonegiantwordlineuntiltheendwhentherewasaperiod.
Thenthenextlinewouldstartwithinthesamemanner.Thisistheoriginofdonotcrosstheline,ifyoudidyouarelostinallyourstoryandlikeaboardgameyouneedtogobacktostart. 'Twasaveryfrustratingtimeforthenewreader.Thentheintroductionoftheemojiscameinandreallyhelpedwithcomunicationwithalleducationalbackgroundswithahereandathere,hereathereaeverywhereaOldMacDonaldhadafarmeieio,andonthatfarmhehadaeieio,withahere,andathere,hereathereaeverywhereaOldMacDonaldhadafarmeieiooooooooooo.
Then the space bar was invented and all was well.

 

[HaphAsSard]

Yeah, that all makes sense. Cultural conventions are very powerful, and our embodied minds, especially during childhood, do frame many choices, hence the ma/pa sounds.

I'd like to point out, again, that bouba and kiki are terrible examples because they are so similar to the words they are supposed to represent in construction, vowel sounds, vowel placement, connotative words, the list goes on - a poorly designed experiment. At a neurological level, our neuron networks make 'best fit' guesses then pass the results upstream to another neuron network that sums the results through multiple stages; maybe 3-5 linked to the eyes (or ears if it's sound), then another 5+ steps in the mid and higher brain levels before coming into consciousness.

I think you might be missing the point. The bouba-kiki experiment gives similar results for speakers of manifold and sundry languages. OK, Eng. "spiky" has an "i" and Eng. "round" has "ou", but do all the corresponding words in all the languages, speakers of which agree in the experiment? The logical question would be, if interference from actual words is assumed, why words in different languages tend to use back and low vowels for words referencing round objects and high front vowels for spiky ones in the first place. It may have something to do with the articulation and acoustics of the specific sounds themselves having a signifying potential in the minds of speakers-as-language recreators: "ee" /i/ is a narrow and stridulous vowel, so words with those meanings tend to have that vowel cross-linguistically. But complete randomness this is not. Same thing for mama-papa. It's not enough to notice how they're perfectly formed baby talk sequences (open vowel, labial consonants, syllable reduplication): the real question is why it's mostly the first that ends up being used for "mother" in languages (not all of them, as mentioned: beside the example of Georgian, which has inversion of the two terms, there is also Japanese haha "mother", historically pronounced *papa and likely a familiar/child language term of address). There is some literature on the topic, with very interesting attempts at explanation.

 

[middlebit]

So what are your reasons? On a related topic there are ways to communicate that invite discussion and there are ways to end discussions.
For instance knowing your audience is important, if you use terms that your audience doesn't understand you will lose them. There are ways to say things that those without expertise will understand but still can intrigue the experts.
Also short terse statements like "I'm afraid not" do nothing to encourage further conversations.
Maybe it is a cultural thing.

This has been addressed in an earlier post, and this thread has been derailed enough.

 

[5StringBlues]

Meh.

 

[Gravedigger Dav]

As far as I've read on the subject, no writing system could survive being purely semantic: there has to be some degree of phonetic encoding.
A tiny percentage of Chinese characters are pictograms, that is to say they are stylised little pictures of the object described (their early - XV century b.C. - forms were, well, better pictures - the character for "eye" was clearly a drawing of a tiny eye, and so on). Another small subset is that of ideograms proper (such as a tiny arrow pointing up for "above", or the two characters for "woman" and "child" combined to signify "love", for example).
The vast majority of Chinese characters do not belong to these first two categories, but instead conform to the following pattern:
-a part of the character roughly indicates the general area of meaning. The sign for "cypress" will have a simplified "tree" symbol as one of its elements;
-another simplified character, however, will likely be there inside our symbol, whose meaning has nothing to do whatsoever with it. What is it there for? To signal that the pronunciation of our complex symbol is similar to the one of this other character incorporated into it. It's only a rough guide to its pronunciation: the reader of Chinese (in the time and place where the complex symbol was invented, which might be III-century CE Henan, for example, and sometimes very different from today's pronunciation), would see the unrelated symbol, (let's say) one that means "loud", and understand that this tree-related symbol stands for something pronounced kinda like the word "loud", and then, in a split second, understand that it's "cypress" they were talking about, because "cypress" happens/happened to sound similar to "loud" in this dialect.
As reviewers of Invalid Link Removed on the topic tend to summarise (it's not actually in the book itself), the Chinese writing system is not a good ideographic script but actually a lousy phonetic one.

Japanese has a very complex mixed system, with Chinese characters representing whole words or parts of them, and locally-developed, but ultimately Chinese-derived, phonetic (syllabic, to be precise) characters that represent some other words, parts of words (like, but not limited to, verbal and adjectival inflection) and grammatical particles like adverbs or (the local counterpart of our) prepositions and such.
The use of Chinese characters in the Japanese system (as only a part of it albeit an important one as sketched above) is more purely semantic, non-phonetic than the use of the same characters in written Chinese itself, because the phonetic part that many of them include, as described above, is mostly useless to Japanese readers: chances are the Japanese word for "loud" is pronounced very differently from "cypress", so if you see the character for the latter word and don't know its meaning you're on your own as far as pronunciation - you only know it's got something to do with trees. In other words, Chinese characters in Japanese simply have to be learned by heart. A complicating element, but one that seems to somehow work for them, is the fact that, for example, the symbol for "write" is used equally to represent "writ-ing" , "graph-ic" and "scribe": a Chinese character is described as having different "readings" depending on context, because it stands for different words or word roots, some of which are ultimately indigenous and others that were imported, in (spoken) words borrowed from Chinese - there are many of them, and more are created, in the same way as we invent new technical or scientific terms from Greek or Latin building blocks.

An interesting tidbit: Japanese kids start with their syllabic script(s - there are actually two of them), which they use for every word at first, and only later do they begin stuffing their heads with more and more Chinese characters, and learn the "adult" written forms of Japanese words which involve their use. The compulsory list of characters students have to know when they leave school is of around two thousands of them, the most common in the written language (you do need many more to do qualified jobs). Chinese pupils instead actually learn the Latin alphabet first, and use it for their own language while they gradually learn their national characters.

EDITS
[I'd forgotten to add a link to the book I alluded to fixed]
[Also, all examples are made up!]

PERHAPS MORE IMPORTANTLY -
@Gravedigger Dav. I don't know if you're gonna find the above any interesting, or stated clearly enough for that matter, but I now feel you may have meant something to the effect of: how do those written languages encode sound when necessary? How do people mock dialects, spell out words, make up new ones, render foreign names? Well, Chinese manages some way I have no clue about, with some specific uses of some of its usual characters. Punctuation, and the fact that a sequence of symbols reads as gibberish if interpreted semantically, are probably enough to signal that at those specific points of a text a given character is there to indicate a sound and not its inherent meaning. As regards Japanese, and how it copes with the task of representing buzzes and whooshes and spell-outs, it has its syllabic symbols for that, as briefly mentioned above.

Very interesting and informative. Thank you.

 

[Immigrant]

He was formerly banned under his other username and resurfaced with a new identity... apparently a no-no.

That's it. Talk about holding a grudge!

I don't know what he did to get banned a couple of years ago, but it's related to that "purge" thing that people bring up occasionally. It looks like he had been here for months, mostly participating on the musical side of this forum. That's too bad. Besides being a really nice guy, he probably gigged and recorded more than 99% of us and likely had good stuff to add to the forum.

RIP Baba