I don't claim to be a master of any language (except Wog-ese), but I have a suggestion for the crafters of Chinese.
It seems to me that over the course of 2,000-3,000 years (or more?) that the modern Chinese language has evolved, that someone along the line could have thought to put phonetic indicators somewhere in the written characters. But no, that "minor" detail seems to have gotten past thousands (millions?) of scholars.
Instead, they choose characters from a completely different language/alphabet to indicate the sounds. And although they have chosen Roman characters for this system (Pinyin), they chose several characters completely arbitrarily. Perhaps, if you were to choose letters from another language, you might check with native speakers of that language to find characters or character combinations that more accurately represent the sound you wish to convey?
So now, not only do I have to try to memorize what are essentially pictograms in which I can't mentally merge the original concept with the current meaning, but also I must learn to match sounds with Romanized letter combinations that often make little sense -- and then somehow pair said sound with said Chinese character, despite the lack of any real link between sound and image.
Thus, I propose: Add phonetic markers to your symbols, dammit!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Alright, I get it. Chinese is doubly difficult to learn because learning to read and learning to speak are almost entirely unrelated.
Please focus more on this Wog-ese. I didn't test out of it at Morris, and the years have faded what little vocabulary and grammar instruction I'd picked up during childhood. Something about "zeeble zorp" and "Leia...ptoo ptoo...blam, blam...bewwww bewww...Luke!"
Post a Comment