pull down to refresh
21 sats \ 3 replies \ @Bitman 19 Nov 2023 \ parent \ on: First "adult" book you read voluntarily? meta
Phew, the difference between length of the poem's English translation and the original Chinese really is apparent.
I'm trying to imagine how a written language whose characters are glyphs could change a reader's experience.
For instance, would reading a poem written by a bilingual English/Chinese speaker be enhanced when it is written in Chinese (over that same bilingual author's English version)?
However, could there be a negative in that both reader and writer need to know the same pallette of traditional or simplified characters in order to fully benefit?
Though this might be no different from an English speaker utilizing an English dictionary when confronted with an unfamiliar word though.
I'm really finding the whole concept of Chinese characters really fascinating.
For glyph character languages, I think visually, because every character is the same size and every character is a syllable, it becomes easier to see when a line has more or less characters, or if a line has more or less syllables. That is especially apparent if each line is separated by a line break, where you can just look at a poem and see if each line has the same number of syllables. Compared that to English, I have to read each line to verify the same thing. Also, visually, it looks more uniform with each line being the same length for glyph languages.
Another thing I find interesting is rhyming. When you rhyme in English, you rhyme the last syllable; but when you rhyme in Chinese, you not only rhyme the last syllable, but you also rhyme the tone, because Chinese is a tonal language. As a result, dialects with more tones (i.e. Cantonese with 9 tones) becomes harder to rhyme than dialects with less tones (i.e. Mandarin with 4 tones).
In terms of traditional or simplified characters, stick with the traditional set. To me, traditional characters is the standard and the truth. Simplified characters is just an abomination created by the dictatorial CCP to try to central plan language with their hubris. The CCP successfully created a character set that had shed the traditional wisdom and history, where the characters evolved over time from pictograms; just like how they shed the traditional wisdom and history of Confucianism.
reply
Linguistics seems to be a really wide subject doesn't it.
Thanks for sharing your knowledge. It's great for me to expand (and really appreciate) my world - and also the world of others...
Thanks for taking me down this fascinating rabbit hole gnilma 😃
reply
Yes, it is truly fascinating. I'm simply scratching the surface, as linguistics is such a deep rabbit hole that it deserves and has its own university program in almost every university.
It was fun going down this rabbit hole with you. Thank you for your responses and insight.
reply