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

Well, well, well. This is an innocuous question, isn't it? Somehow, people tend to have rather strange ideas as to what a Chinese character is and how it works. Are they pictographs, a kind of "concept script", or something else altogether? In a word, they are words- or logographs, if you prefer the technical jargon.

In the coming days, I will finish writing and then post my entry on this subject; it is very interesting and surprisingly not that complicated. Explaining how Chinese characters (Han4zi4) work, how they developed, and how it is that they are used by Japanese, Koreans, and Vietnamese is a little more involved. I promise to keep my Guide entries crisp, clear, and to the point. But for those who are interested in the arcana, then you will need look no further than this page. Here I create a repository for all the fascinating and immenently useless facts I have learned about the Chinese language over the course of five years of study. Exciting, huh? It is, but then I've been conditioned to think so!

One note to my page and the other entries and discussions on Mandarin Chinese. One of the tricky things about Chinese is how does one best transcribe it? There are at least four systems that I am aware of:
1) Pinyin, used mainly in the P.R.C.,
2) Wade-Giles, used mainly in Taiwan,
3) Bo-Po-Mo-Fo, used mainly in Taiwan to teach children how to pronounce characters, and
4) Gwoyu Romatzyh, invented by the late, emminent linguist Zhao Yuen Ren, and little used these days.

Each of these systems has its own advantages and disadvantages. To my ears, Pinyin best represents the sounds of Chinese, though it has lots of ungainly xes, qs, and js. Wade thends to confuse sounds like "g" and "k", and adds lots of apostrophes all over the place. Bo-Po looks a bit like the Japanese Hiragana, but for Westerners with no knowledge of characters, it takes the same intellectual leap just to learn how to pronounce these things, not to mention the characters they gloss! Gwoyu was a good idea that was sadly (is still?) ahead of it's time. The novel device here is to vary what are basically Pinyin spellings in order to indicate the tone of the word being glossed. On the other hand, you wind up with lots of fourth-tone words that end in q, and people want to pronounce these letters that are added only to indicate the tone. The result is often mildly described as "frustration".
A way around this is by simply adding the numerals 1, 2, 3 or 4 immediately after the word or syllable, with the numeral corresponding to the tone in spoken Chinese. Quick, easy, and ugly. On the other hand, it works, and until we can write in characters for the Guide, it might have to do. It has the advantage of being compact and intuitive, so that is the system I will use in further entries.

I, for one, am eager to read all you write!