The fundamental gap between written Chinese and English

The fundamental gap between written Chinese and English

The fundamental gap between written Chinese and English is the number of words, basic units of written language. Chinese has about ten thousand words in a dictionary while the number of English is more than four hundred thousands. If you count a noun with plural and singular forms as two words, and a verb conjugation, together with prefixes and suffixes, the number of English word may be over a billion.  

The word in written language is similar to the pixel in digital imaging. The more pixels in an image, the closer the result can resemble the original. The more words in a language, the clearer the thought can be illustrated. The number of words is a significant criterion. It is clear evident when you compare the science books written in these two different languages. 

The basic units in written language are pictograms and words. Pictograms in writing enable humans to write and record history. Growing number of words emancipate thinking and enable humans to access and develop science.  

中英文之间真正的差距

中英文之间真正的差距是word数量的差距，或者说是基本单位数量的差距。中文字典里有大约一万个word，英文字典里有四十多万个。如果算上名词的单数和复数，动词各种不同的时态变化word的前缀和后缀，英文word总数可能超过一百万。

书面语言里的word有点像数码相机的像素。数码照片的像素越多，照片越清晰。书面语言的word越多，意思表达越清楚。word的数量至关重要。如果你比较中英文的科举书籍，这种差距非常明显。

书面语言的基本单位是象形文字和word，象形文字使人类有了书写记录历史。不断增加的word解放了人类的思想，使人类发现和发展了科学。

Why Did Lu Xun Say

Why Did Lu Xun Say If The Chinese Characters Are Not Eliminated, China Is Doomed?

Why did Lu Xun say if the Chinese characters are not eliminated, China is doomed? You will realize what he said after you read the following paragraph that Lu Xun wrote in "silent China".

The ethnic nature of the Chinese tends to go for a settlement in a conflict. For instance, your suggestion for installing a window to enhance brightness in the house would not be acceptable. However, if you instead call for taking down the rooftop, they would then agree to install a window as a compromise. In the same reasoning, without being pushed for drastic measures toward a reform, they simply would never choose to go for a moderate peaceful step.

Reference: Lu Xun, the preeminent writer of the twentieth century in China.

Chinese translation

为什么鲁迅说汉字不灭中国必亡？

为什么鲁迅说汉字不灭中国必亡？如果你读了下面他在《无声的中国》里的这段话，你就会明白为什么。

中国人性情是总喜欢调和、折中的。譬如你说，这屋子太暗，须在这里开一个窗，大家一定不允许的。但如果你主张拆掉屋顶，他们就会来调和，愿意开窗了。没有更激烈的主张，他们总连平和的改革也不肯行。

Lu Xun Said

Lu Xun Said

Lu Xun said if the Chinese characters are not eliminated, China is doomed. I say if pinyin is not in use, science in China is always falling behind. The reason is that the number of Chinese words is too small. No one has been able to produce any scientific theory in Chinese as a result of the small number of Chinese words, which limits our mindset.
I do not advocate abolition of the Chinese characters right now. Rather I am in favor of a multi-script system, in which pinyin will be permitted without restriction. The purpose of the using pinyin is to increase the number of Chinese words. 
Although characters and pinyin will coexist for a period time to come, I predict that Chinese characters will be abandoned eventually sooner or later in the future.


Reference: Lu Xun, the preeminent writer of the twentieth century in China.

Chinese translation
鲁迅先生说

鲁迅先生说，汉字不灭，中国必亡。我说，不使用汉语拼音，中国科学一定落后。原因是中文 word 数量太少了。数量少到已经严重限制我们的思维，以至于至今还没有人能使用汉字创造出科学理论。
我反对现在停止使用汉字，而是主张立即放开使用汉语拼音，也就是中文里同时使用汉字和拼音。使用拼音的目的就是为了增加中文的 word。
虽然汉字和拼音会同时存在一段时间，但是我认为汉字将来迟早会被淘汰的。

Two Kinds of Chinese Dictionaries

Two Kinds of Chinese Dictionaries

There are two kinds of dictionaries in Chinese. One is Zidian, and the other is Cidian.
Zidian means characters' dictionaries, or words' dictionaries. Chinese words are Chinese characters.
Cidian means phrases' dictionaries, which collect not only words but phrases also.
The difference between them is the size. Therefore words dictionary is a pocket dictionary, and phrases dictionary is a large dictionary.

Reference: New Concept Linguistics

字典和词典

中文有两种dictionary，字典和词典。
字典只解释汉字。
词典除了解释汉字，还解释词。
它们的区别是体积，字典是袖珍型，词典是大块头。

参考：新概念语言学

A Word or Two Words

A Word or Two Words

Q: Are two Chinese characters a word or two words?
A: If a Chinese character is a word, then two characters are two words, unless you do not acknowledge a character is a word. Actually it is. 
Therefore, it is self-contradictory if you say two Chinese characters are a word.
 
*Character is a short for Chinese character


Chinese Translation

两个汉字

问题：两个汉字是一个word，还是两个word？
回答：如果一个汉字是一个word，那么两个汉字就是两个words，除非你不承认一个汉字是一个word。实际上一个汉字确实是一个word。
因此，如果你说“两个汉字是一个word”，就是自相矛盾。

How Many Words Are There In Modern Written Chinese?

How Many Words Are There In Modern Written Chinese?

 Now that we know a Chinese word is a Chinese character, so the question is easy and simple. Just count the number of Chinese characters in a dictionary. That is it.

According to Xinhua Dictionary, the most authoritative standard modern Chinese dictionary, there are about ten thousand Chinese characters in it. Then there are about ten thousand Chinese words in modern written Chinese.

Chinese translation：

现代中文有多少个word字？

现在我们已经知道中文的word就是汉字，所以这个问题就简单了。只要数一数字典里有多少个汉字，就这么简单。

根据最权威的现代中文字典，新华字典收录了大约一万个汉字，那么现代中文使用大约一万个word。

The Structure Of Sentences And Words

The Structure Of Sentences And Words

A sentence is composed of either a single or multiple words, which begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop (period), a question mark, or an exclamation mark.

A word is composed of either a single or multiple letters, which shown with a space on either side, unless followed by a punctuation mark.

A Chinese word is composed of either a single or multiple strokes or radicals, which shown within a rectangle space.

Of course, all of these apply only to written language.

句子和字（单词）的结构

句子由一个字（单词）或者多个字（单词）组成，英文句子开头的第一个字母要大写，句子末尾是一个句号，问号，或者感叹号。

英文字（单词）由一个字母，或者多个字母组成，字（单词）的前后两边都有一个空格，除非后面紧跟一个标点符号。

中文的字，也就是汉字是由一个笔画（多个笔画），或者一个偏旁部首（多个偏旁部首）组成一个方格形状。

当然，这里讨论的都是书面语言，也就是文字。

The Structure Of Written Language

The Structure Of Written Language

The basic units, or the smallest units of written language are words. Words compose a sentence. Sentences compose a paragraph. Paragraphs compose an article. That is the structure of written language.

There are no letters and morphemes in written language because they are not stand-alone in a sentence. If they stand alone they are a word.

In the same way, the basic units, or the smallest units of written Chinese are Chinese characters. So Chinese characters are Chinese words. Chinese characters, Chinese words, compose a sentence.  The following are the same as English.

There are no strokes and radicals in written Chinese because they are not stand-alone in a sentence. If they stand alone they are a Chinese characters.

Linguistic terms:

一个字 a word

一个词 a phrase

一个句子 a sentence

一个段落 a paragraph

一篇文章 an article

一个偏旁部首 a radical, which is equivalent to a English morpheme

一个笔画 a stroke, which is equivalent to an English letter

中文和英文的结构 

英文的基本单位，也叫最小单位是word。word组成句子。句子组成段落。段落组成文章。这就是文字的结构。

英文文章里没有letters （字母） 和 morphemes （语素），因为它们不是句子中的独立单位。如果它们是独立的单位，它们就是一个word。 

同样，中文的基本单位，也叫最小单位是“字”，所以汉“字”就是中文的word。汉字组成中文句子，结构的其余部分和英文一样。

中文文章里没有笔画和偏旁部首，因为它们不是句子中的独立单位。如果它们是独立的单位，它们就是一个汉“字”。

The Secret about Chinese Language You Might Not Know

The Secret about Chinese Language You Might Not Know

-- My comment on "Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard? " 

By: Wang Yujiang

I recently read an essay on “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard” by David Moser of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies. As a native Chinese speaker, I would like to clarify and correct some information about the Chinese language noted in this essay. I will also share with you some secrets about the Chinese language you might not know.

Firstly, is Chinese hard to learn? It depends on what you want to learn. If you learn spoken Chinese only, it is as easy or as hard as every other language including English. Written Chinese is certainly hard. As we all know that there are thousands of Chinese characters instead of 26 alphabet letters as in English.

The Chinese characters are so numerous that most native speakers do not know how to write most of them unless they check a dictionary. In China, everybody has had an experience of writing or saying the wrong characters.

Secondly, David Moser wrote, “the writing system just ain't very phonetic.” He may say that the classical written Chinese is not phonetic; however, the contemporary written Chinese (Baihuawen) is phonetic. A Chinese character now stands for a sound, or a syllable. The Baihuawen in Chinese means the writing is like speaking.

Thirdly, David Moser wrote, “tonal languages are weird.” David Moser and many linguists regard Chinese as a tonal language. Actually, it is not. They do not distinguish the name of characters and the sounds they represent. English letters have both names and the sounds they represent. Chinese characters also have names and sounds they present.

Since we produce around four hundred sounds for thousands of Chinese characters, we have to use different tones to distinguish them when we talk about a single character. That is a tonal character not a tonal language. When we speak, we do not follow the tones marked in the dictionary that linguists call change of tone. Chinese intonation is the same as people speaking English.

Fourthly, David Moser wrote, “there's classical Chinese.” Now nobody uses classical Chinese because it is a clipped way of writing, which is similar to writing a telegram message. Sending a telegram was generally charged by the word. To save money, people typically wrote their telegrams in a very compressed style. Ancient Chinese people used knife-pen or brush-pen to write characters on bamboo slips, which are very slow. To save time, they had to pack as much information into the smallest possible number of characters. This is classical Chinese.

Classical Chinese is a style of writing without spaces and other marks between words and sentences. When reading classical Chinese, readers must put in the punctuation themselves to extract meaning from the writing. About a century ago fountain pens and pencils were introduced into China. Consequently the New Culture movement developed contemporary Chinese writing that replacing classical Chinese.

Now Chinese writers punctuate articles so the readers only have to space (multi-syllable) words by themselves. However, spacing words is still hard work for readers, because it is mostly trial and error. I guess it is especially hard work for a foreigner. If the writer spaces the words, Chinese is as easy as English.

Fifthly, David Moser wrote, “there are too many Romanization methods and they all suck.” There is only one scheme for the Chinese phonetic alphabet (pinyin) passed by the Chinese Congress and it works. Unfortunately it sucks because some conservative intellectuals resist it.

Conservatives believe that alphabets are not suitable for Chinese. If they know arbitrariness theory in linguistics, they will realize that any symbol is good for any language. In fact, the Chinese alphabet is a Roman alphabet that has been used by many languages in the world for long time.

Sixthly, I agree with what David Moser wrote, “the (Chinese) writing system is ridiculous.” However, my support is a little bit different. The progress of a language is based on the growth of the smallest units in writing, which is a simple metric to quantify languages. The Chinese characters are the smallest units of the Chinese writing. No matter how many Chinese characters there are, the quantity of them is limited, because the growth of characters in writing is unsustainable. Even though we treat Chinese characters as phonetic letters, we do not group them into a multi-syllable smallest unit, because they were the smallest units.

Since a Chinese character is the smallest unit, now ten thousand Chinese characters build up only then thousand smallest units. That is it, no more. Meanwhile twenty-six English characters (letters) build up hundreds thousands the smallest units (words), and they are still continually increasing. Needless to say, letters are more efficient than Chinese characters. Using thousands of Chinese characters instead of dozens letters is the reason why the Chinese writing system is ridiculous.

Lastly, if you ask me why written Chinese is so hard. As far as I am concerned, there are two causes. You have to space (multi-syllable) words by yourselves when you read contemporary Chinese writing, and there are numerous Chinese characters.

References:

New Concept Linguistics

《Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard》 by David Moser from University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies, http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/1991Moser.pdf