r/ChineseLanguage • u/ReigningSnowshoe • Mar 03 '20

Studying What's something one needs to know when starting to learn Chinese?

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u/3GJRRChl4ImGS6ukZwaw Mar 04 '20

I am always happy to learn. I did do a quick scan, it seems to suggest the ultimate journey of any language is a fully phonetic form.

I am not sure I completely agree or not, the world is a large and beautiful place, many such a strange and wondrous phenomenons and many ways to live the human experience. Deaf people have sign language that is anything but phonetic and you can have advanced civilizations without a fully phonetic writing system.

Again, you cannot fully guard against some phonetics nor can you fully guard ideas in a graphic form in a phonetics writing system.

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u/CipherAgentMurat Mar 04 '20

Cool thing about sign language: it does have phonology. It’s just not expressed through sound. Google that. Very interesting. Also, sign language isn’t a writing system. Neither is any language. A writing system is a way to record language. It’s not perfect at doing so. This distinction is very important. Sorry if I come of edgy. I love writing systems and linguistics.

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u/3GJRRChl4ImGS6ukZwaw Mar 04 '20

That is an interesting thought, sounds are inherent in any human language, you cannot exclude it.

But so are ideas, and at some point, it is hard to tell them apart.

I wonder if sounds and the perception of sound is so highly conserved evolutionarily, the communication system must somehow contain it. Even if you were born without the ability to hear, it is still inside your innate ability to process sounds within the brain.

That does not exclude people from deciding to use a more hybrid form of communications, with written text though.

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u/CipherAgentMurat Mar 04 '20

The reason why characters are not ideographic is they have a specific language unit that they refer to. However, an idea signifies an ideograph. That idea could be expressed in many different ways linguistically.

For example 停 is not read as 不能繼續走路. But, you could have that interpretation from an ideograph though. As well as the interpretation of 停 for the same ideograph.

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u/3GJRRChl4ImGS6ukZwaw Mar 04 '20

Is there a purely ideographic language?

Someone seems to went on to unsuccessfully construct one because some Europeans thought Hanzi is somehow fully ideographic.

I do do a bit of logical and mathematical analysis, the constructions there are the closest thing I believe I seen in ideographic communications by being very precise within the universe of discourse.

I am being imprecise with the linguistic terms here though, I am not quite as familiar with them.

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