'Peking' vs 'Beijing'

Ken Brown k.brown at ccs.bbk.ac.uk
Fri Apr 11 05:36:26 PDT 2003


Harmon Seaver wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 06:17:34PM +0100, Jim Dixon wrote:
> > On Wed, 9 Apr 2003, Harmon Seaver wrote:
> >
> > >    The Japanese actually have three written languages -- hiragana, katakana and
> > > kanji -- and everybody pretty much uses them all, often at the same time.
> >
> > These aren't languages.  The first two are alphabets - or rather
> > syllabaries.  They go "ka ki ku ke ko ...", that is, there is a character
> 
>    Ah yes, you're right, I mispoke.
> Alphabets, scripts, whatever, it is pretty amazing. US kids have enough trouble
> learning to read in one alphabet.

Aha, Zee Freudian Slip!  Just as you confused translation and
transliteration before! You obvuiously have some deep psychological
confounding of language with the representation of language!  

<psychobabbler exits stage left>

Japanese literacy rates are higher than ours, even thought hey have such
an apparently complex set of scripts.

Every now and again one reads reports of a "dyslexic" English speaker
who learns Chinese or Japanese and finds them easier than English. There
was at least one man who went to Japan with his parents when he was in
his teens, almost unable to read English, learned to read Kanji, and
then then found himself able to read in English.

I suspect that there is more than one strategy used by learning readers
and that most people find alphabets (or syllabaries) simpler to get to
grips with but some, for whatever reason, find Chinese-style symbols
simpler.

Japanese of course uses both so maybe it is possible for someone who
finds one system harder than the other to get a boost by concentrating
on the other. I don't know, as I know no language other than English.

Skilled readers of English *don't* sound out the letters of familiar
words in their heads. We recognise words and syllables by their shape,
treating each word as if it was a Chinese character. Phonetic approaches
are only used for unfamiliar or foreign words. Maybe there is some
reason why that "dyslexic" man didn't make the jump from reading letters
to reading whole words in English, but once Kanji had got him used to
the idea he could transfer it back.

When I was a kid the fashion in teaching to read was the "look and say"
method - the teacher held up flash cards with pictures and got the kids
to say the word. There was no attempt made to start with phonetics or
even the alphabet. Today the fashion has swung back the other way.   

Interesting aside - ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs are actually written in
a very similar style to Japanese, mixing up a proto-alphabet and a
syllabary (based on the first sound of the name of the object depicted) 
with "determinatives", heiroglyphs which represent the whole word.   If
we wrote English like that (which we sometimes do in kid's puzzles) the
name "Harmon Seaver" might be written as pictures of a wound, something
lying on a table, waves of the sea, a violet, an eagle, a rabbit, and a
picture of a man sitting down as the determinative.     I wouldn't want
to say how we'd write "Jim Dixon" except that if you look at a grammar
or dictionary of Ancient Egyptian some of those hieroglyphs were pretty
explicit.





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