Language vs. script in "Chinese"

[thnidu]

Language vs. script
by Victor Mair on Language Log

Many of the debates over Chinese language issues that keep coming up on Language Log and elsewhere may be attributed to a small number of basic misunderstandings and disagreements concerning the relationship between speech and writing.

All too often, people think that the Chinese characters (hànzì 汉字

Comments

[ravenclaw_eric]

I agree that Chinese is a language family, not a single language. I've noticed that when I've run across material written in Cantonese, I can make neither head nor tail of it, but I can often puzzle it out when it's in Mandarin.

At least as long as they aren't using those verkakte "simplified" characters. Having trained on the traditional characters, I dislike the simplified versions, not least because I often can't puzzle out which radical I should look under to look them up in the dictionary.

[browngirl]

I was just wondering about this! *makes a note*

[kjn]

I agree that there is no single Chinese language, but I disagree on the distinction the author makes between language and script. I'd say language can be carried by any of sound, gestures, pictograms, letters, or other symbols.

[thnidu]

Yes, language can be carried, or conveyed, by various types of symbol, but the horse is not the rider. Any Japanese word can be written in katakana or hiragana, and any Mandarin word in pinyin, but those cannot distinguish homophones. I've just counted* 32 different hanzi pronounced zhì, all with different definitions- and that's just the ones that can be used by themselves as words, excluding the many that are used only as part of a multi-character word. Our chaotic English spelling often avoids such confusions (sleigh / slay, to / too / two), but it also creates them. I see increasingly often the use of "lead" /lɛd/ as the past tense of "lead" /liːd/, instead of the correct spelling "led", due to confusion between the past tense "lead" and the homophonous metal "lead", both /lɛd/. And no script can adequately convey all the subtle distinctions of prosody.

And, as Victor points out in the part of the post that I quoted,Moreover, many of the morphemes of these languages (often the most frequently occurring ones) cannot even be

[kjn]

Yup, I'm all for that language is distinct from script, but it's just as much distinct from sounds, which is a point I think the article fails to make. But it's interesting to note that written Chinese is far less suited to several of the languages/dialects spoken in China than the impression one often gets from the outside.

[thnidu]

Oh yes