27-06-2026, 05:52 AM
皇
It is true that printed there, without context, I cannot say how that is pronounced. (I can tell you I heard "인" in my head, but that's not actually at all likely in the 21st century.) This is less impressive than it may first seem. How would you read "vice versa"? What language is it in? It turns out that reading an alphabetic language relies a good deal on context and convention, and one of those contexts is what language you're reading in. It is certainly interesting that Chinese orthography admits a great many more such undistinguished words between languages, but this is just a consequence of not directly representing any phonology.
Any familiarity with a character dictionary will quickly dispel the idea that they have no string of sounds associated with them. I've been making ample use of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and we see 人 has two etymologies, and hence two readings. Closer inspection will reveal that Wiktiionary is kind of a mess because though it says "Chinese", Etymology 2 is not available outside of a group of Min languages. You'll also see it gives the various denotations, which are listed separate from the reading, unlabeled in Mandarin and gives specific attestations in other languages with clear lables. What you cannot see are the gaps in the various languages and where the Mandarin isn't available in non-Mandarin languages. I would pay to read the oral history of how all these compromises got made, but that's not the point here. The point is you can see a number of interesting things that contradict the idea that there is some stable oversoul of ideas captured by the characters:
Rene, the kind of character you bring up illustrates this nicely. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. still exist and can still be used to guess (with all the uncertainty "guess" implies) the reading of a character. The essay linked by igajkgko dates the phonetic indicators to before the Late Shang, many hundreds of years before the Shennong Bencao Jing is supposed to have been written; my kanji textbook, printed in the 21st Century, still marks which characters have them and where. The characters have stood for sounds for a long, long time. Jorge, what you are discovering when you note that the same words tend to be in the same phonetic series is that the series are reflexes of each other.
Once you accept characters represent words and look at how they are used, you see a fully fledged language family. Now, for the most part you won't actually see this in writing. It is already in evidence that most new writing is done in Standard Chinese, which is what most people in the West mean when they say "Mandarin", and that prior to the 20th Century it was Classical Chinese. These are fully fledged languages which must be acquired through education. There are interesting things to be said about the standard practice of giving Mandarin Cantonese readings in Guangzhou, but they aren't all that different or all that much more interesting than You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the Latin West.
To keep this on thread, let me briefly reiterate: Since Classical Chinese is not the vernacular of the 1400s, and since we are assuming that The Author avoided learning it the fact that it is an independent language implies one of two things:
(26-06-2026, 08:13 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The hanzi 人 does not represent any specific string of sounds.The way this is true cannot bear the load resting on it.
It is true that printed there, without context, I cannot say how that is pronounced. (I can tell you I heard "인" in my head, but that's not actually at all likely in the 21st century.) This is less impressive than it may first seem. How would you read "vice versa"? What language is it in? It turns out that reading an alphabetic language relies a good deal on context and convention, and one of those contexts is what language you're reading in. It is certainly interesting that Chinese orthography admits a great many more such undistinguished words between languages, but this is just a consequence of not directly representing any phonology.
Any familiarity with a character dictionary will quickly dispel the idea that they have no string of sounds associated with them. I've been making ample use of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., and we see 人 has two etymologies, and hence two readings. Closer inspection will reveal that Wiktiionary is kind of a mess because though it says "Chinese", Etymology 2 is not available outside of a group of Min languages. You'll also see it gives the various denotations, which are listed separate from the reading, unlabeled in Mandarin and gives specific attestations in other languages with clear lables. What you cannot see are the gaps in the various languages and where the Mandarin isn't available in non-Mandarin languages. I would pay to read the oral history of how all these compromises got made, but that's not the point here. The point is you can see a number of interesting things that contradict the idea that there is some stable oversoul of ideas captured by the characters:
- In Cantonese it is used as an impersonal pronoun
- It is a plural marker in Hakka (but only for people)
- It has a dedicated Beijing Mandarin use that is not found in Standard Chinese (e.g. it is probably slang)
- In Taishanese it means paternal grandmother
- Some Min languages use non-homophonic 儂 instead of 人, though it seems the Taiwanese government encourages the unusual measure of simply writing that as 人
- 儂 has no listed meaning in Mandarin or Standard Chinese
Rene, the kind of character you bring up illustrates this nicely. The You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. still exist and can still be used to guess (with all the uncertainty "guess" implies) the reading of a character. The essay linked by igajkgko dates the phonetic indicators to before the Late Shang, many hundreds of years before the Shennong Bencao Jing is supposed to have been written; my kanji textbook, printed in the 21st Century, still marks which characters have them and where. The characters have stood for sounds for a long, long time. Jorge, what you are discovering when you note that the same words tend to be in the same phonetic series is that the series are reflexes of each other.
Once you accept characters represent words and look at how they are used, you see a fully fledged language family. Now, for the most part you won't actually see this in writing. It is already in evidence that most new writing is done in Standard Chinese, which is what most people in the West mean when they say "Mandarin", and that prior to the 20th Century it was Classical Chinese. These are fully fledged languages which must be acquired through education. There are interesting things to be said about the standard practice of giving Mandarin Cantonese readings in Guangzhou, but they aren't all that different or all that much more interesting than You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in the Latin West.
To keep this on thread, let me briefly reiterate: Since Classical Chinese is not the vernacular of the 1400s, and since we are assuming that The Author avoided learning it the fact that it is an independent language implies one of two things:
- The Author was unequipped to parse the manuscript, even if he had a phonetic translation
- The Dictator translated the base text and the identification must account for the fact that the base text would be substantially different from the one Jorge used to make the identification
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