The 'Chinese' Theory: For and Against

[Jorge_Stolfi]

So, I at least now understand where the misunderstanding is. To use the Suassarian formulation, Chinese characters are not the signified, they are the signifier. So in any given language it's not that a character represents the lexeme of "house, home, dwelling, abode" it's that it represents one morpheme. ... And if the passage is Latin, not English, they will probably scoff at the idea that it says "house" even if the reading exists in an an English character dictionary and they are correct because only an idiot would think a Latin passage had the signifier "house". ...

Sorry, but you still are hopelessly confused about the situation.

In most scripts, indeed the glyphs (or digraphs, trigraphs, etc) represent sounds, and then combinations of sounds represent concepts.   That is because most scripts (even English!) are basically phonetic.  And both steps are different for each language.

But that is not true for the Chinese script -- because it is not phonetic!  In Chinese writing, each symbol (or pair of symbols) represents directly a concept.  Each symbol also represents a sound; but it represents a different sound for the speakers of different languages, while the concept is essentially the same for all Sinitic languages (and even, to some extent, for some non-Sinitic ones). 

       

In every language, the mapping between sounds and concepts is a table with 50'000 or more entries, which is mostly learned at home in infancy, before age 10 or so.  That table of course is different for each language.

In the case of phonetic scripts, the mapping from glyphs to sounds is relatively simple and is learned in the first year of grammar school. (Except perhaps for English, where one must memorize the pronunciation of every word, even though the script is still mostly phonetic.)

In the case of the Chinese script, in contrast, learning the mappings from glyphs to sounds and from glyphs to concepts requires memorizing another table with 5'000 entries or so. That learning normally takes on the order of 10 years at school.  (In theory one would have to learn only one of the two mappings, but in practice details like homophones and synonyms mean that the two tables must be learned together.)  Again, while the mapping from glyphs to sounds is different for each language, the mapping from glyphs to concepts is very much the same for all Sinitic languages.

This common writing system is a big advantage for communication.  Proper translation between spoken or written Turkish and spoken or written Lithuanian must go through the concepts; and since concepts live only in one's head, if the two persons who need to communicate know only their respective languages, the translation requires a third person who is fluent on both languages.

Whereas for translation between Mandarin and Cantonese there is the option of going through the glyphs rather than the concepts.   That is, the monolingual Mandarin speaker writes the message hanzi, and the monolingual Cantonese speaker reads that message -- without the need for an interpreter.

And this advantage exists also with other ideographic scripts used in the West, such as Arabic (or Roman) numerals, chemical formulas, and metric units.  The Finnish shopkeeper who must tell the price of a stuffed reindeer to a Maltese tourist can either use the services of a guide who knows both languages, or write the price on a slip of paper and show it to the tourist.  But only the first option is available when he must warn the tourist to not try to fly off a roof riding on that souvenir. 

For instance, all of "maison", "domus", and "casa" would have different characters, and all those characters would be in all three of French, Latin, and Spanish because all three of those morphemes exist in each language.

"Morpheme" here is the wrong term.  A morpheme is a part of a word that has an identifiable meaning, even if fuzzy and vague.  In "antifungals" the "anti-" is a morpheme with the general sense of "contrary opposite", "-fung-" is a morpheme (the "root" one) with the vague meaning "fungus", "-al-" is a morpheme with the vague meaning "related to", and "-s" is a morpheme that indicates plural nouns.  Whereas "antifungals", "an", "tifu", "fun", and "gals"  are not morphemes. (Even though "fun" elsewhere has a meaning, the "fun" in "antifungals" does not.)

an English speaker would have "house" available as a reading on some Romance word---probably the character for <domus> thinking about the history of Latin in England [...] And if the passage is Latin, not English, they will probably scoff at the idea that it says "house" even if the reading exists in an an English character dictionary and they are correct because only an idiot would think a Latin passage had the signifier "house".

No, no, no.  

Caesar may have though of the sentence in Latin, but what he wrote in ideograms was not Latin. That written sentence still had a bit of the Latin syntax (the specific word order),but no Latin words at all.  The drawing of a house did not represent the word "domus"; it represented the concept of a house.

an English speaker educated in Latin logographs for writing English but not Latin would have some clues....

domicile military regent fenestra  rotund   have

That reading would be totally silly for a number of reasons.  First, the English native would almost certainly not know Latin.  He would not even know that whoever wrote that sentence first thought of it as Latin. Even if he knew, he would not know which English words are derived from Latin words --- that "house" does not but "domicile" does, etc..

And the Martians did not know any of that either.  They knew English; so, for the exercise to make any sense, the native would have to read the symbols in English.

And, finally, that reading above would be wrong, because it would not mean what the sentence was supposed to mean.  The concept of "domicile" is not quite the same as house, a "regent" is definitely not a king, "fenestra" is not an English word, "rotund" means plump or fat rather than round...  Caesar did not mean the regent's soldier, or that the window should eat less and do some exercise...

And so I must insist: THE ETYMOLOGY OF A WORD IS ABSOLUTELY TOTALLY UTTERLY IRRELEVANT TO ANYONE IN ANY SITUATION except to linguists studying the history of languages.  Apologies for shouting...

All the best, --stolfi