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Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - erlog - 2011-04-04
darkauras Wrote:How about taking a look at another language?You are talking about English here, right?
This language requires learners to memorize over twenty abstracts squiggly shapes. Not too many, cool, but there's a catch. Each of those squiggles stands for a different sound, but depending on the context the sounds can be completely different from the "standard" sound assigned to the squiggle. Not only that but there are actually four forms of the squiggles, a normal form used most of the time, a fancy form used only at special times, and an archaic form of both that is rarely used but still needs to be known. Once you memorize the squiggles that still doesn't mean you're ready to read or even understand the language. Now you need to start putting the squiggles together, following rules that...may or may not actually apply. Depending on how the squiggles go together their sounds may change, or even if they make a sound at all. Most squiggle combination need at least four or five squiggles, and one of the longest needs 30, getting even one squiggle wrong can render your combination incomprehensible. And to be able to read fluently you need to know between 10-15,000 squiggle combination, and just because you can "sound out" a squiggle combination doesn't mean you read it right, nor does it mean you know what it means. Once you've memorized your 10,000 combinations, you still have to learn what order those combinations go in in order to make something that can actually be read.
Fun! XD
Another ridiculous thing you're kind of bringing up is the bias towards "sounding things out," as if it's a patently useful technique that crosses language barriers. It's only useful in languages where the written form is primarily a transcription of syllables from speech.
Yes, it's hard to sound things out in Japanese, but it's not a useful strategy in Japanese. You don't have to "sound things out" in order to understand them, you just understand them. That's one of the benefits of kanji. So from a functional standpoint, a lot of English speakers, are going off on a tangent based on what they assume are important pieces of language.
Why is phonics more important than semantic meaning? That's essentially what some are saying. They're making a huge assumption that written language must exist in order to transcribe the syllables of speech. That's how English tends to work(not always, but mostly), but that's not how Japanese works. Written Japanese exists to efficiently carry meaning, not necessarily sound.
They're adhering to a kind of sound-chauvinism that seems entirely based in their being brought up in a Western society that tends to use the alphabet. I have no doubt their ideas about language would be different were they brought up in a different society.
This is the thing I find most troubling about all these arguments about how kanji aren't necessary. They're looking at the Japanese language in a way that is motivated by incorrect assumptions about what language is or ought to be instead of looking at what/how people actually use language.
Still, none of the anti-kanji, people have answered my question: The Japanese already have a phonetic alphabet, hiragana. If kanji are such a chore then why haven't they fallen away naturally? You can transcribe spoken Japanese in hiragana fine. If sound is the be-all end-all of language then why do the Japanese continue to want to wring more semantic meaning out of their written communication through the use of kanji?
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - vonPeterhof - 2011-04-04
erlog Wrote:I am confused by your response. Wasn't darkauras (this thread's OP) arguing on your side? You do realise that by "another language" they meant English, right?darkauras Wrote:How about taking a look at another language?...You're making a whole host of assumptions here that stem primarily from your native language. You keep talking about "sounding things out," as if it's a patently useful technique that crosses language barriers. It's only useful in languages where the written form is primarily a transcription of syllables from speech.
Yes, it's hard to sound things out in Japanese, but it's not a useful strategy in Japanese. You don't have to "sound things out" in order to understand them, you just understand them. That's one of the benefits of kanji. You don't need to sound stuff out because the meaning is already evident. Sound doesn't have to enter into it. So from a functional standpoint you're going off on a tangent based on what you assume are important pieces of language.
Why is phonics more important than semantic meaning? That's essentially what you're saying in your post. You're making a huge assumption that written language must exist in order to transcribe the syllables of speech. That's how English tends to work(not always, but mostly), but that's not how Japanese works. Written Japanese exists to efficiently carry meaning, not necessarily sound.
You're adhering to a kind of sound-chauvinism that is entirely based in your being brought up in a Western society that tends to use the alphabet. I have no doubt your ideas about language would be different were you brought up in a different society.
This is the thing I find most troubling about all these arguments about how kanji aren't necessary. They're looking at the Japanese language in a way that is motivated by incorrect assumptions about what language is or ought to be instead of looking at what/how people actually use language.
Still, none of the anti-kanji, people have answered my question: The Japanese already have a phonetic alphabet, hiragana. If kanji are such a chore then why haven't they fallen away naturally? You can transcribe spoken Japanese in hiragana fine. If sound is the be-all end-all of language then why do the Japanese continue to want to wring more semantic meaning out of their written communication through the use of kanji?
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - erlog - 2011-04-04
I've edited the post to not be attacking darkauras specifically since, as you've pointed out, he was talking about English. I still think my main points about sound-chauvinism still stand up, though.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - jcdietz03 - 2011-04-04
What is the 30-second explanation that covers:
Hiragana is always the same sound, no meaning, and used to specify pronunciation (how words sound)
Kanji is sometimes (often?) the same meaning and almost never the same sound
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - KMDES - 2011-04-04
jcdietz03 Wrote:What is the 30-second explanation that covers:Kanji is frequently the same sound, with sometimes being a different sound, the sound changes in usage between such things as stand alone or compound uses. It's definitely not that kanji never use the same sound. Even a radical in a kanji can depict the sound used for the kanji.
Hiragana is always the same sound, no meaning, and used to specify pronunciation (how words sound)
Kanji is sometimes (often?) the same meaning and almost never the same sound
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nest0r - 2011-04-04
Phonocentrism is the word, via Derrida in the '70s. ;p Responding to Saussure, it seems, though Kojin Karatani performed an almost Zizekian rehabilitation and wrote a piece stating how Saussure was actually critiquing phonocentrism.
Through both nativist ideologies, the nature of speech and writing systems when it comes to reforms, re: adapting their own speech to writing systems and refining metalinguistic awareness, the desire for orthographic change as a means of severing with the past, and the importation of alphabet-based Western linguistic concepts, it definitely took hold in Japan among various groups. (Summarizing various surveys here including Gottlieb and Ueda.)
It's a lingering rhetorical vestige of decades past when it comes to its presence in linguistics. In practice, linguistics that uses computational modeling, brain scans, controlled studies, corpora analysis, etc., i.e. evidence-based disciplines and theories such as evolutionary linguistics and applied linguistics, treat and focus on speech and writing as simply different as part of multimodal cognitive operations (including a growing emphasis on gesture and vision), interacting as discursive ‘text’/signs as part of the co-evolution process of brain/language/environment with a multiplicity of literacies and forms. Speech is primary in the sense of coming long before writing, not primary as in dominant as language is used. The primary purpose of language, and writing, is to communicate information, not sound.
Though developments have occurred for decades, it's really only been the past 15 years or so that understanding of how kanji is processed with more visual→semantic processes in parallel or even prior to phonological activations has taken off, with kana and ローマ字 being processed through the orthographic-phonological routes with variations thereof. This doesn't take away from the necessity or utility of phonographs in keeping speech and writing bridged and utilizing all the brain has to offer, especially since depending on script, reading style, and how you've learned the script, phonological activation is likely always present on some level, even subliminally (research in recent years shows a similar principle for orthographic activation in speech processing [in addition to the effects on speech perception]); it just shows how the options of orthographies into new cognitive processing expand beyond what was thought when phonocentrism was in vogue.
Learning to read rewires the brain and how we use language overall, it's quite amazing for a kludgy invention. All great civilizations were enabled through literacy to transmit information in a more stable way. Even the Inca. ;p
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Eikyu - 2011-04-04
Nestor Wrote:It makes a lot of sense, I'm surprised it's not more popular as it obviates the need for thinking in terms of binary oppositions, really, with articulatory components integrated into the visuospatial representations more literally.What binary opposition are you referring to?
Edit:
Nestor Wrote:Learning to read rewires the brain and how we use language overall, it's quite amazing for a kludgy invention.You've said that non-phonocentrism is a mainstream view among linguists, but all the refs I can find point to Derrida and deconstruction. Do you have a link to a linguistics paper/book discussing the issue? I'm not sure how deeply writing affects our way of thinking about language.
And
Wikipedia Wrote:In April, 1946, Naoya Shiga published an article in the magazine Kaizō titled kokugo mondai (国語問題 the national language problem?), which suggested that the Japanese language should be eradicated in favour of French, which he considered to be the most beautiful language in the world.That sounds like the perfect solution !
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - darkauras - 2011-04-04
erlog Wrote:Yes, I was talking about English.darkauras Wrote:How about taking a look at another language?You are talking about English here, right?
This language requires learners to memorize over twenty abstracts squiggly shapes. Not too many, cool, but there's a catch. Each of those squiggles stands for a different sound, but depending on the context the sounds can be completely different from the "standard" sound assigned to the squiggle. Not only that but there are actually four forms of the squiggles, a normal form used most of the time, a fancy form used only at special times, and an archaic form of both that is rarely used but still needs to be known. Once you memorize the squiggles that still doesn't mean you're ready to read or even understand the language. Now you need to start putting the squiggles together, following rules that...may or may not actually apply. Depending on how the squiggles go together their sounds may change, or even if they make a sound at all. Most squiggle combination need at least four or five squiggles, and one of the longest needs 30, getting even one squiggle wrong can render your combination incomprehensible. And to be able to read fluently you need to know between 10-15,000 squiggle combination, and just because you can "sound out" a squiggle combination doesn't mean you read it right, nor does it mean you know what it means. Once you've memorized your 10,000 combinations, you still have to learn what order those combinations go in in order to make something that can actually be read.
Fun! XD
Another ridiculous thing you're kind of bringing up is the bias towards "sounding things out," as if it's a patently useful technique that crosses language barriers. It's only useful in languages where the written form is primarily a transcription of syllables from speech.
Yes, it's hard to sound things out in Japanese, but it's not a useful strategy in Japanese. You don't have to "sound things out" in order to understand them, you just understand them. That's one of the benefits of kanji. So from a functional standpoint, a lot of English speakers, are going off on a tangent based on what they assume are important pieces of language.
Why is phonics more important than semantic meaning? That's essentially what some are saying. They're making a huge assumption that written language must exist in order to transcribe the syllables of speech. That's how English tends to work(not always, but mostly), but that's not how Japanese works. Written Japanese exists to efficiently carry meaning, not necessarily sound.
They're adhering to a kind of sound-chauvinism that seems entirely based in their being brought up in a Western society that tends to use the alphabet. I have no doubt their ideas about language would be different were they brought up in a different society.
This is the thing I find most troubling about all these arguments about how kanji aren't necessary. They're looking at the Japanese language in a way that is motivated by incorrect assumptions about what language is or ought to be instead of looking at what/how people actually use language.
Still, none of the anti-kanji, people have answered my question: The Japanese already have a phonetic alphabet, hiragana. If kanji are such a chore then why haven't they fallen away naturally? You can transcribe spoken Japanese in hiragana fine. If sound is the be-all end-all of language then why do the Japanese continue to want to wring more semantic meaning out of their written communication through the use of kanji?
I wasn't trying to compare the phonetic system of English and the "sound it out method" we were taught in school with Japanese and the kanji system directly, rather I was trying to point out that Japanese doesn't have a monopoly on being a difficult language to learn to read. How many native English speakers are barely literate? How many can't spell to save their lives? The numbers are ridiculous. Saying we should get rid of kanji because they're "hard" is a lazy excuse. Every language is hard, if they weren't people would be learning them right and left. I wasn't saying that we should be able to "sound things out" in Japanese, but rather that, even in English, which is a phonetic language, sounding words out doesn't always work.
I was being kind of sarcastic...
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nest0r - 2011-04-04
Eikyu Wrote:As I said, it's more a rhetorical vestige that doesn't really come up in practice except to make such points in themselves. Here are a few examples relevant to speech and writing:Nestor Wrote:It makes a lot of sense, I'm surprised it's not more popular as it obviates the need for thinking in terms of binary oppositions, really, with articulatory components integrated into the visuospatial representations more literally.What binary opposition are you referring to?
Edit:
Nestor Wrote:Learning to read rewires the brain and how we use language overall, it's quite amazing for a kludgy invention.You've said that non-phonocentrism is a mainstream view among linguists, but all the refs I can find point to Derrida and deconstruction. Do you have a link to a linguistics paper/book discussing the issue? I'm not sure how deeply writing affects our way of thinking about language.
AndWikipedia Wrote:In April, 1946, Naoya Shiga published an article in the magazine Kaizō titled kokugo mondai (国語問題 the national language problem?), which suggested that the Japanese language should be eradicated in favour of French, which he considered to be the most beautiful language in the world.That sounds like the perfect solution !
Presentation in language: rethinking speech and writing
The written language bias in linguistics
Language and the Internet
This also talks a bit about the changing/dominant paradigms (that writing is not merely speech written down's been around awhile, in part thanks to M.A.K. Halliday: Literacy and language analysis
Systemic functional linguistics and grammar and cognitive linguistics has long dealt with language as a system of texts/signs rather than as speech, whereas unfortunately the dominant view in generative grammar or whathaveyou (which ends up being equated with linguistics as a whole in often-obsolete intro texts) is treating speech as primary and ends up performing prescriptive wankery with little relevance to usage. This tends to rely on assumptions about universals and innatism of language, and, as you can see through surveys such as at Babel's Dawn using a paper by Evans & Levinson as a launch point (a brilliant blog (see also Chater & Christiansen, and Michael Tomasello, or Simon Kirby from the computational linguistics view.. I believe a lot of this is contained here) on the origins of speech and language, also see the kinds of papers presented recently at conferences (overviews), including focusing on semantics over syntax), while speech is dealt with because of its evolutionary primacy and interactional properties, such assumptions are no longer a widely held belief in contemporary evolutionary linguistics, and in fact, Chomsky himself and various figures that have been attached to him have modified their views over the years so that what they consider universal is not unimodal and intrinsic, but involves recursion and modularity interacting with the environment. Language is considered a ‘complex adaptive system.’ When speech is referenced, it is to get at the deeper linguistic processes and analyze evolution of language across periods of time predating writing.
Also: http://applij.oxfordjournals.org/content/27/4/729.full
And did I mention Hopper and emergence? Anyway.
Now the evolutionary/cognitive science looks at the role of gesture and sight and sound interacting to comprise meaning in a system. Issues are of refining the interactions of modality, neural paths, etc. Embodied cognition (previously linked to Wilson on sensorimotor/visuospatial processes of articulating language in working memory) see also Susan Goldin-Meadow), multisensory learning, and most recently the neural underpinnings of reading and how it interacts with speech/gesture. In fact, rather than arguing for the primacy of speech, innatist views (e.g. Jackendoff) tend to speculate on amodality, abstractions in the brain, rather than saying the inbuilt apparatus for speaking is itself a demonstration that speech is language. So really, I can't think of anywhere that treats spoken language as ‘real language’ in itself, unaffected by or subverting writing as a system, with that which is not sound merely representative of sound. Either the physiological basis is amodal, or it's multimodal. And as language is an emergent system, then the environmental aspect is going to be both written and spoken, and I'd argue that if they're not equal/incomparable, then writing is dominant because language is for making meaning and communicating it (re: effects of reading exposure on vocabulary and lexical access/density), and writing's stability across time causes it to subsume and organize spoken language. Only when evolutionary linguistics, applied linguistics, and the cognitive science of reading meet will we have a complete picture, as each is concerned with its own stuff. It doesn't fit the models of language to look only at the properties for producing speech on the biological end, one component of a process that goes deeper than that, and using that to make claims about all language itself as a co-evolved system.
Every day I find some new paper on language that demonstrates this focus. Evolutionary linguistics does not treat speech as language in itself. I just found this, for example:
Visual motion aftereffect from understanding motion language (speaks to the importance of vision and motion in listening, re: embodied cognition, e.g. “The findings support a view of cognition in which language comprehension is intimately linked to and dynamically interacts with perception and action. Within this embodied cognition framework, higher-level cognitive processing is grounded in an individual’s perceptuomotor system and their unique interactions with the environment, so variability across individuals becomes an important signal to explain.”
Neurophysiological origin of human brain asymmetry for speech and language - “Our results support theories of language lateralization that posit a major role for intrinsic, hardwired perceptuomotor processing in syllabic parsing and are compatible both with the evolutionary view that speech arose from a combination of syllable-sized vocalizations and meaningful hand gestures and with developmental observations suggesting phonemic analysis is a developmentally acquired process.”
How Learning to Read Changes the Cortical Networks for Vision and Language
Pasting this as it's relevant to recent comments I made: “Conclusion. Literacy, whether acquired in childhood or through adult classes, enhances brain responses in at least three distinct ways. First, it boosts the organization of visual cortices, particularly by inducing an enhanced response to the known script at the VWFA site in left occipito-temporal cortex and by augmenting early visual responses in occipital cortex, in a partially retinotopic manner. Second, literacy allows virtually the entire left-hemispheric spoken language network to be activated by written sentences. Thus reading, a late cultural invention, approaches the efficiency of the human species’ most evolved communication channel, namely speech. Third, literacy refines spoken language processing by enhancing a phonological region, the planum temporale, and by making an orthographic code available in a top-down manner.”
In addition to linguistics that deals with writing and speech differently, the neuroscience looking at reading, here's some bits about the ‘literacy hypothesis’ (for early, seminal talk of the differences between the language of oral and literate cultures, see Walter Ong's ‘Orality and Literacy’):
The literacy hypothesis and cognitive development
Language, Literacy and Mind: The Literacy Hypothesis
You can see iterations of this in other scholarship on writing systems and how they developed.
Other notions in linguistics involves the indexical, self-contained nature of writing which can refer to itself as it performs its discursive functions. (See the works of Charles Bazerman (and M. A. K. Halliday), often tied to corpus liguistics and its spoken/written distinctions.)
With all of the studies showing the differences in logographs and phonographs (here's another, this time talking about its effects on picture recognition: Words and pictures: An electrophysiological investigation of domain specific processing in native Chinese and English speakers) in light of research on language in the brain as a general, including ideas of chunking and working memory and the differing roles of the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, executive modulation, and sensorimotor encoding for articulatory rehearsal and lexical access, the way the eye processes text, the multimodal cognitive faculty arising through speech, sign, and writing, which linguistics shows to have their own interacting, unique properties, then it should be that forming orthographic ideals and pedagogies of literacy are shaped around the best ways to process orthographic shapes for lexicogrammatical activations, e.g. balancing iconicity for grapheme-morpheme and simplicity for grapheme-articulatory processes, and looking at usage differences of the mediums such as multiple literacies in discourse analysis, and how learning works for pedagogical purposes, such as utilizing multimedia learning, and spaced retrieval, where enhancements come from visuospatial/sensorimotor combinations in augmenting the phonological.
Hmm, did I miss anything? Perhaps relating metalinguistics and working memory to metacognition and its relevance to study? Perhaps add why I think this is important for self-study, re: affective neuroscience/learning and the psychology of flow (Csikszentmihalyi) vs. unscientific tearing down of the writing system forum members are studying. Oh, and the binary opposition thing was me riffing on how per the above, I was always speculating on logo/phono elements interacting so that phonology and also function words can be enhanced with phonographs, letting the meaning making come through the morphographs, and how neat it would be if the articulatory components actually comprised the morphographs (such as in viewing SignWriting words, due to their iconicity, forming dynamically decomposable/recombining wholes through constituents that are themselves multimodal, being visual, spatial, gestural, and phonological).
Anyway, I could go on, but I would end up having to re-read my previous posts and links.
Here's a couple of them anyway. ;p
http://onthehuman.org/2010/02/on-the-human-rethinking-the-natural-selection-of-human-language/ (He talks about relaxed selection here and again here: “Surprisingly, the relaxation of selection at the organism level may have been a source of many complex synergistic features of the human language capacity, and may help explain why so much language information is “inherited” socially.”)
Rationality and the literate mind (on writing restructuring consciousness)
For intersections of the problems of focusing on phonology too much, especially with logographic languages, see the work of Mary Flaherty, such as: An Investigation of the Stroop Effect Among Deaf Signers in English and Japanese: “There may well be an affinity between logographic script and sign (Flaherty, 1998, 2003), as was shown in the reduced Stroop effect for deaf signers reading Japanese relative to deaf signers reading English... Some of the important questions include... How would incorporating some sort of logographic visual scripts to bridge the gap between phonologically based script and a visual language work in the classroom?”
Also for similar dangers for a similar group of readers with regards to phonocentrism in reading pedagogy: Phonology and Reading: A Response to Wang, Trezek, Luckner, and Paul or The Role of Phonology in the Word Decoding Skills of Poor Readers - “It is suggested that in prelingually deafened readers, but maybe also in dyslectic readers, teachers should foster the development of orthographic knowledge as the basis for proficient reading without making such development contingent on the processing of the phonology of written words.”
Or Mairead McSweeney: “The fact that congenitally profoundly deaf readers can perform spoken language phonological tasks at an above-chance level suggests that they gain knowledge about phonological structure from modalities other than audition. Information may be derived from visual input in the form of orthography... Such studies suggest that phonological representations may best be thought of as supramodal or amodal.”
Some of that goes into memory span and logographic systems (Deaf Signers Who Know Japanese Remember Words and Numbers More Effectively Than Deaf Signers Who Know English, but the flexibility of memory span and its trainable/cultural dependence (relevant to Chinese/Japanese and the costs of phonological excess) can be seen here: “In summary, the "magical number 7," which is so often heralded as a fixed parameter of human memory, is not a universal constant. It is merely the standard value for digit span in one special population of Homo sapiens on which more than 90% of psychological studies happen to be focused, the American college undergraduate! Digit span is a culture- and training-dependent value, and cannot be taken to index a fixed biological memory size parameter. Its variations from culture to culture suggest that Asian numerical notations, such as Chinese, are more easily memorized than our Western systems of numerals because they are more compact.” Further tangent from same book: “Memory span, indeed, is not an invariant biological parameter such as blood group that can be measured independently of all cultural factors. It varies considerably with the meaning of the items to be stored.”
Reading should not be forced into only representing speech. Writing is language also. They both variably use the same modalities which are underpinned by more general cognitive processes, co-evolving with culture, highly dependent on language use, both written and spoken.
And in case I missed it, these are arguments against looking at things in terms of speech vs. writing, as taking the fundamental evolutionary aspects of communicating language as the ends rather than a means. All writing systems probably should have some phonetic component because we have onboard means of articulating language this way, but that's just the tip of the iceberg, language and writing itself go well beyond this.
Also on multiple literacies in Japanese, see Reading Japan Cool: Patterns of Manga Literacy and Discourse, and tangentially, Digital Youth, and recently I found this (another tangent ;p): Subversive script and novel graphs in Japanese girls’ culture
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Eikyu - 2011-04-05
I wasn't really expecting this. I said "Do you have a link...", notice the use of the singular here.
Well thanks anyway for compiling this huge list.I haven't had the time to read through your post yet, but I noticed this sentence in one summary:"Thus reading, a late cultural invention, approaches the efficiency of the human species’ most evolved communication channel, namely speech." It does suggest that speech is the primary form of language with writing coming in at a second best, maybe because it's just an extension or secondary application of the speech faculties.
I also found this bit on wikipedia: "Writing, Socrates argues, is inhuman. It attempts to turn living thoughts dwelling in the human mind into mere objects in the physical world. By causing people to rely on what is written rather than what they are able to think, it weakens the powers of the mind and of memory. True knowledge can only emerge from a relationship between active human minds. And unlike a person, a text can’t respond to a question; it will just keep saying the same thing over and over again, no matter how often it is refuted." from Walter Ong
So writing might be a secondary form of language less efficient and less natural than speech.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Thora - 2011-04-05
If I were still a student, here's what I would do:
1. Pick a term paper topic that might interest Nest0r.
2. Start a thread and try to entice Nest0r.
3. Get a Smartypants to call Nest0r's ideas nonsense and quackery.
4. Get a Friendly to ask Nest0r for clarification.
5. Get a coffee.
6. Viola! Term paper researched!
[7. If you're really pressed for time and need to plagiarize, consider throwing in a few periods.] ;-)
btw, Nest0r, (just to be clear) that was my tone deaf, socially inept way of paying a backhanded compliment to you and expressing appreciation for your considerable efforts. :-)
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nest0r - 2011-04-05
@Thora - hehe. I was tempted to read #4 cynically, re: grey vampires: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/archives/011182.html ;p (... “Another tactic - particularly effective at wasting time and energy this one - is the claim that all they want is a few clarifications, as if they are just on the brink of being persuaded, when in fact the real aim is to lure you into the swamp of sceptical inertia and mild depression in which they languish.”)
@Eikyu - That quote is not what Ong wrote, Ong paraphrased such ancient thinkers in order to make the argument of how wrong they were, such as:
“The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers”.
By ‘most evolved’ and ‘efficiency’ in the other paper they are speaking of the fact that, well, speech is evolved, writing is learned. As media, that is. Speech is not language, however. Language evolves through both. Thus this references the physiological basis of spoken vs. written language with its own properties for processing (and which is changed by literacy), not that because writing must be learned and has its own properties that speech is closer to ‘real’ language on a ranking scale of ‘best.’ Writing is an extension of cognitive faculties that speech also uses, that evolved to use first, and is in that sense an expansion/extension of speech, yes, but this is a maximalization of communication, thus ‘just an extension’ would be an improper framing, I think. If anything, the paper's points are to demonstrate how much ‘more’ writing is than previously thought. Also, the ‘efficiency’ is related to activating specific cognitive aspects associated with speech during reading, not overall linguistic efficiency.
A bit more:
“One weakness in Plato’s position was that, to make his objections effective, he put them into writing, just as one weakness in anti-print positions is that their proponents, to make their objections more effective, put the objections into print. The same weakness in anti-computer positions is that, to make them effective, their proponents articulate them in articles or books printed from tapes composed on computer terminals. Writing and print and the computer are all ways of technologizing the word.
Once the word is technologized, there is no effective way to criticize what technology has done with it without the aid of the highest technology available. Moreover, the new technology is not merely used to convey the critique: in fact, it brought the critique into existence. Plato’s philosophically analytic thought, as has been seen (Havelock 1963), including his critique of writing, was possible only because of the effects that writing was beginning to have on mental processes.
In fact, as Havelock has beautifully shown (1963), Plato’s entire epistemology was unwittingly a programmed rejection of the old oral, mobile, warm, personally interactive lifeworld of oral culture (represented by the poets, whom he would not allow in his Republic). The term idea, form, is visually based, coming from the same root as the Latin video, to see, and such English derivatives as vision, visible, or videotape. Platonic form was form conceived of by analogy with visible form. The Platonic ideas are voiceless, immobile, devoid of all warmth, not interactive but isolated, not part of the human lifeworld at all but utterly above and beyond it. Plato of course was not at all fully aware of the unconscious forces at work in his psyche to produce this reaction, or overreaction, of the literate person to lingering, retardant orality.
Such considerations alert us to the paradoxes that beset the relationships between the original spoken word and all its technological transformations. The reason for the tantalizing involutions here is obviously that intelligence is relentlessly reflexive, so that even the external tools that it uses to implement its workings become ‘internalized’, that is, part of its own reflexive process.” - Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 79-80
Anyway, I don't agree with everything Ong says with regards to literacy, his work is early and seminal but I think is most of value with regards to perspectives on primary oral cultures vs. literate cultures, in general.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - vinniram - 2011-04-05
I think 漢字 are beautiful and I'm glad all those "let's get rid of kanji" people before and after WWII quickly shut up. I'm glad they're increasing the 常用漢字 list as well, about time.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - pm215 - 2011-04-05
nestor Wrote:<huge brain dump>
Eikyu Wrote:I wasn't really expecting this....you haven't been around here very long, have you? :-)
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Eikyu - 2011-04-05
The upside is that due to Nestor's links I somehow find myself reading about how women’s tears contain a chemical signal that reduces sexual desire in men.
http://jenapincott.wordpress.com/2011/03/08/do-baby-tears-have-mind-control-properties/
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Stansfield123 - 2011-05-09
Maybe instead of switching to writing Japanese in Hiragana or Romaji, the Japanese should just dump their language and switch to English. In fact, the whole world should switch to English. That would make things the simplest.
Since the only reasons why people suggest getting rid of Kanji is to simplify and "integrate better" with the world by helping communication, I don't see how that suggestion is significantly different from just throwing away the language. The only difference is in the degree of the change.
But if you the proponents of romaji-zation believe that the direction of the change (giving up something that's been in place for many centuries, for the sake of simplifying and integrating with the world) is good, then you should also believe in the logical extreme of that suggestion.
Besides, it wouldn't make all that much of a difference to take that extra plunge. Culture is mostly written, not spoken or drawn, so giving up Kanji would already mean abandoning most of traditional Japanese culture (a culture that's older and richer than most). What difference does it make if they throw in the spoken language as well, right fellas?
I'm sorry, but giving up Kanji is a stupid suggestion. It's not even close to a balanced debate with valid arguments on both sides. [edit] I guess saying it's theoretically possible to create a functional writing system with the Roman alphabet might be making some sense, but not saying it should actually be done.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - zigmonty - 2011-05-10
Stansfield123 Wrote:Since the only reasons why people suggest getting rid of Kanji is to simplify and "integrate better" with the world by helping communication, I don't see how that suggestion is significantly different from just throwing away the language. The only difference is in the degree of the change.I believe that's known as a "straw man argument". Because they're not willing to abandon language all together and communicate by banging two sticks together, they shouldn't change it at all?
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nest0r - 2011-05-10
It's not really a straw man argument. Essentially that's what people promoting the abolishment of kanji are doing. Going for an unworkable, illogical, and inferior top-down extreme based on principles derived from delusions of alphabetical/phonocentric Western linguistic superiority that follows the logic, as ironically paraphrased by Jun Yamada decades ago: “If pigs had feathers, and wings, and claws, and walked on 2 feet, etc., then there would be no difference between pigs and chickens.”
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nadiatims - 2011-05-10
TASK:
Imagine you were part of a team, tasked with creating a writing system for a language which doesn't have one. Certain practical considerations:
-It needs to be quickly learnable.
-It needs to be easy to integrate with a high number of existing technologies.
-It needs to be easily legible even small sizes and low resolutions.
other considerations:
-Easy to learn for a large number of non-native speakers (including potential alien visitors)
-characters should be describable using a low bit count
-Easy to write
-uses less ink (eco ftw)
-Flexibility for writing other languages
-Flexibility for language growth, new words, phonemic changes etc.
-economical use of space balanced against complexity.
Please describe your suggested system and explain why you made those choices.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - NoSleepTilFluent - 2011-05-10
Brail - No ink needed, What if the aliens don't have eyes, low bit count its just a couple of dots for those not vision impaired. Easy to learn for non native speakers aka people that go blind.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nadiatims - 2011-05-10
nice! never thought of brail. I think when written with a pen though it's probably quite slow, and I imagine there are some limits to its flexibility for extra characters, punctuation/symbols etc (each character is just six dots right). I also wonder about it's legibility. Remember for most people (humans at least) reading via the eyes is still likely to remain the preferred method for a number of reasons, frees up the hands, readable at a distance etc.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Kuma01 - 2011-05-10
Well, I for one think kanji are terribly inefficient, because imo it makes the language less organic. Kanji obviously have no phonetic value, so you either need to be familiar with the most common compounds in which they appear and/or their individual readings. So basically you're trying to remember a pictogram, the readings and the meaning of the words in which the kanji occur. That's a lot more memorization then you'd need with a language that uses the alphabet. Also, since you can't just go around inventing new kanji or using them differently it means the language will be more stagnant and less likely to evolve over time. Imo the reason the Japanese are so terrible at foreign languages is partly because of their writing system. Then again, inefficient as they may be, there's really no point to discussing this because if you want to learn Japanese there's no getting around them.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Jarvik7 - 2011-05-10
Kuma01 Wrote:Well, I for one think kanji are terribly inefficient, because imo it makes the language less organic. Kanji obviously have no phonetic value, so you either need to be familiar with the most common compounds in which they appear and/or their individual readings. So basically you're trying to remember a pictogram, the readings and the meaning of the words in which the kanji occur. That's a lot more memorization then you'd need with a language that uses the alphabet. Also, since you can't just go around inventing new kanji or using them differently it means the language will be more stagnant and less likely to evolve over time. Imo the reason the Japanese are so terrible at foreign languages is partly because of their writing system. Then again, inefficient as they may be, there's really no point to discussing this because if you want to learn Japanese there's no getting around them.Looks like you've still got a lot to learn about kanji and Japanese
In brief:
-Kanji do have phonetic markers which are about as accurate for guessing pronunciation as letters are in a non phonemic language like English.
-Kanji aren't pictograms without intrinsic meaning anymore than a word written with letters is.
-The upfront learning of many characters is comparable to learning of morphemes in non-kanji/hanzi languages. There is roughly equal effort required but it is at different times
-Kanji are infact more efficient in the long run. For example, the meanings of Japanese medical terminology are immediately apparent even if one has never heard of the disease before, while in English one would have to know Latin/Greek: Encephalitis vs 脳炎, Pneumonia vs 肺炎, Hepatitis vs 肝炎, Gastritis vs 胃炎, Myositis vs 筋炎 (yes I recently had my yearly physical).. Time spent upfront learning characters saves time later learning vocabulary.
-Kanji can be used differently with no issue, as new words are coined all the time. It is like saying the limited number of morphemes in English will cause stagnation since morphemes cannot be used in new ways. Nonsense.
-New kanji can indeed be invented. How do you think all the kanji to date came to be? Whether new kanji will be invented or not is a social issue and not a language one.
-Assuming that Japanese are worse than average at learning foreign languages (which there is no proof of), the most obvious explanation would be the fact that Japanese is not related to any other languages in major use. It is much easier for an English speaker to learn French for example due to the large overlap of vocabulary.
-The opposite could be said in that the reason westerners are so bad at learning Chinese/Japanese is because the alphabet is holding them back. Be less culturally self-centered. Different is not worse.
Your last point is indeed valid though. Anyone who thinks learning kanji is stupid are themselves stupid, as it is a simple requirement of being literate.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - nadiatims - 2011-05-10
The complexity of kanji is a non issue for me now since I'm long since literate, but my point in this thread has always just been that the system of writing used in Japan today is far more complex than is strictly necessary and therefore does not seem like an elegant solution. I realise that in some ways there may be extra functionality afforded by the japanese system, but to me the benefits of using some other less character heavy solution win out in the end. I'm also not saying the roman (or other) alphabet is perfect either. I worked out before that English could be written using just 18 letters and 3 diacritics, thats a whole 8 redundant letters.
Jarvik7, what would be your answer to the hypothetical question I posted above.
Next time someone tells you Kanji is stupid to learn... - Jarvik7 - 2011-05-10
nadiatims Wrote:TASK:Your premise is flawed from the start because of #1, and many of the other conditions are just a roundabout way of describing Latin/Cyrillic.
1-It needs to be quickly learnable.
2-It needs to be easy to integrate with a high number of existing technologies.
3-It needs to be easily legible even small sizes and low resolutions.
Please describe your suggested system and explain why you made those choices.
There should be no requirement to master the entire writing system in a short time. That is a fallacy caused by being raised on a western writing system where characters have no meaning. Putting complexity in the writing system is not inherently inferior to putting complexity into the morphology.
The biggest flaw of kanji is the difficulty of writing them, but that is both caused by and made increasingly insignificant by technology. Then again, many English natives have trouble spelling correctly, which is the exact same issue.
Personally I think that Japanese writing is pretty close to the ideal for the Japanese language. I think katakana should go away and loan words should just use Latin letters though. Kanji could be somewhat simplified (or rather, made more consistent.. PRC style kanji would make me sick) as well.
..but to answer your question, IPA fills most of the conditions, but it would have to be extended to an infinite number of characters to cover all possible phonemes in alien languages, making it worse than meaning-based writing like kanji/hanzi in practice. So my answer is hanzi. There is no real reason why writing needs to transcribe pronunciation and meaning based writing makes it universally compatible with even martian languages that contain phonemes unpronounceable by human tongues.
Obviously it loses out on the aspects such as visual complexity per character (for machine readability etc), but that is an issue for technology to solve.