h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

You can always count on Woody

I'm working on a plot summary of Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung at the moment. Here's the short version:

The gods welsh on a deal and are cursed. They enlist a human and a half-human to sort it out. Everyone dies.

But it isn't clear whether the town of Chardonnay was named after the grape or vice versa.

Manolan, you're pretty much right about the Japanese literacy figure being based on hiragana. Whereas hiragana aren't hard to learn, kanji most definitely are. OK, so there's only 2,000 of them to learn ( only, that is, when compared with c. 4,000 for a decent literacy level in Chinese), but many of them have more than one meaning and/or pronunciation. The more obscure of these kanji are often glossed in hiragana, so that it may be possible to get away without remembering them.

The author of 'Chinese characters, literacy, and the Japanese model' (H Namagura) puts it like this:

'It seems safe to say that the "99%" figure so often quoted for Japan's literacy rate includes a fair number of people who have no functional literacy in kanji. The reason they are not considered illiterate is because the Japanese writing system offers a fallback for people who forget their kanji: the phonetic kana characters. If the system consisted solely of kanji, these people would be illiterate.'

I would argue Japanese people who don't know a reasonable number of kanji are effectively illiterate.

I've seen it stated that the Japanese writing system is the most complicated in the world, with effectively three different writing systems mixed on the page: Roman alphabetic letters; Kana syllabic symbols in two variations: hiragana and katakana, each with about 80 symbols, and kanji logographic system with about 2,000 symbols and which can be used in two disting ways, representing the word or the sound of the word.

That's why the literacy figures surprised me.

Is there still a much of a relationship between Chinese ideograms and the radicals that comprise them?

I know that there is between basic words - eg 'forest' includes repetitions of the radical for 'tree'. But how about newer words or words for more complex concepts? Has their use of radicals become arbitrary? Or, if not arbitrary, obscure in the same way that some English etymologies are?

Supplementary question: If you could work out what the redicals were, would you be able to guess at the word?: 'Tree + man - that must meen lumberjack.'

>I've seen it stated that the Japanese writing system is the most complicated in the world<

I'm starting to doubt that now, Moon. Yes, they have 3 writing systems:

1. Kanji. Chinese characters used for concepts. Often these have more than one meaning/pronunciation, as I said above, but this is true to some extent in Chinese too. Kanji can be, and increasingly are written as no. 2.

2. Hiragana. Native syllabary of 46 characters. The most important script, used for grammatical words, and becoming more and more prevalent.

3. Katakana. Native syllabary of 46 characters. Used for non-Chinese foreign words and onomatopoeia.

The last two are easy to learn, and the more difficult kanji are often glossed with hiragana. In fact, Japanese is sometimes written in only hiragana. But with Chinese, if you know only a few hundred characters, like me, you can't read even one sentence in ten.

Bob/Ed,

I'll have a quick nose into my Chinese dictionary about that (bit rusty, you see) and come up with an answer for you tomorrow.

Actually, I thought the reason why an increasing number of public signs were written in hiragana is because of the large number of gaijin. A few years ago, there was a law passed that all emergency signs (fire, earthquake, etc) had to be written in hiragana and/or romaji to ensure maximum survival!

One thing I have never understood about simplified Chinese is that while the basic characters may be easier to learn, surely the compound nature has been lost. So it may aid basic literacy, but it must make grasping new concepts harder.

Are yopu sure that's the reason? Maybe the locals are finsding all those kanji too hard to remember...

The Chinese at least have things like streetnames in pinyin, so you can look at them before pronouncing them completely wrongly (and maybe getting laughed at). And they also have comedy English to keep us laowai folk entertained - I don't think I saw a single sign that was in correct English

Like the traditional tourist fun with Greek menus...Lamp chops...Jim Fizz...

>Is there still a much of a relationship between Chinese ideograms and the radicals that comprise them?<

More than 80% of Chinese characters have radical and phonetic components. Radicals are meaning elements composed of 1 or 2 pictograms; Simplified Chinese has 189 of them. Examples are mouth, wood, speech, female. Their presence gives a guide to the meaning, though this is sometimes very tenuous. The phonetics give an also sometimes tenuous guide to the character's pronunciation. The classic linguistic example (why try harder?): 'ma (tone 3)' (horse) is a pictogram of a horse; 'ma(1)' with 'female' radical added is 'mother' and 'ma(toneless)' with 'mouth' radical is a question marker.

Of the rest, very few are actually ideograms (eg 'xia'(down), a bit like an arrow pointing down, and not many are pictograms (tree, sun, mountain etc). There are also some combinations of primitive characters, as in 'forest', (though man + tree = rest, as in resting against a tree) other examples being eye + water = cry, and grain + burn = autumn, + heart = melancholy.

The main problem with Chinese characters is that these phonetics are limitless in number and used arbitrarily. A single phonetic could have three or four components - this is what makes Traditional Chinese so burdensome to learn. Simplified Chinese addresses this to some extent, though simplifications were abandoned in the 1980s I think. Any talk of Traditional Chinese being easier to learn because of the roots of different characters is mostly blarney.

Have I got this right...A mother is a female horse, but a question marker is another character entirely? Or is mother a female with a ma phonetic?

'Autumn Heart' - me like! 'No sun, no fun, November'. And I understand that one Chinese word for 'homosexual' translates as 'Man dragon preference'.

I think I was probably a bit unclear.
Mother = female radical + horse phonetic
Question marker = mouth radical + horse phonetic

Nice, simple, meaningful examples like the vast majority aren't.

'Autumn heart' has always been one of my favourites. Not sure about 'homosexual' - my minidictionary just has a literal translation, but the other is possible as despite official pronouncements the concept's been around for donkey's years in China.

I read that in an article about gay clubs in Beijing.

I also know that in Lewis Gaelic vernacular, it's 'Botach Thon' - give or take a couple of diacritics. It translates, I'm afraid, as 'Batty Boy'.

While in Italia, it's 'il finnochio' - or 'fennel'.

That makes as much sense as the American one, faggot, a bundle of sticks.

I think the Chinese symbol for mother is "female, sounds like horse" because both words have the same syllable but different intonation.

'Faggot' and 'Fennel' unfortunately have similar origins. Sweetly scented fennel twigs were used for public burning.

>I think the Chinese symbol for mother is "female, sounds like horse" because both words have the same syllable but different intonation.<

Surely we are saying the same thing from different angles? Or do you mean that the phonetic modifies the radical? I'd say it's the other way round: to create a new character, you select an existing, hopefully soundalike character (the tone won't usually be the same), then add a radical to give a clue to the meaning.

I'm sure we're saying the same thing, Jack. I just wanted to stress that the sense of "horse" isn't involved anywhere in the symbol for mother. It is purely the sound of "horse".

The sound of "horse" of course being 'maaa' (third tone, similar to: 'A handbag?')