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From: Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org>
Newsgroups: sci.electronics.design
Subject: Re: OT: Cracking Speech by JDV!
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2025 16:01:54 +1100
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On 24/02/2025 12:42 am, albert@spenarnc.xs4all.nl wrote:
> In article <voqh85$45vh$1@dont-email.me>,
> Bill Sloman  <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote:
> <SNIP>
>> China has had to cope with a truly terrible writing system. To get
>> access to Western technology they've had to train a lot of people to
>> read an alphabetic (phoneme-based) writing systems, and it may yet save
>> their bacon, but it's a pretty recent change. Computerised text
>> processing may be starting to help them cope with the defects of a
>> syllable based writing system.
>>
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Written_Chinese
> 
> I'm following a course in Chinese. The language is sufficiently
> different that pin-yin doesn't really help, that means it cannot
> be a replacement for Chinese characters.
> There are too much homonyms. Say 80000 characters and about 100
> pronunciations available. If you express "know" , you use "ren-shi" in
> speaking. Each of these halves mean "know", but each halve is only disambiguous
> in writing. The combination makes it more or less disambiguous in
> speaking.
> 
> Pin-yin can help. You type in "ma" and press function key 3.
> A computer looks up probable words with the 3th tone
> in order of plausibility. Plausibly words are presented in
> order of probability, so you arrive at the character for
> horse expeditiously.
> 
> A famous example is a poem that consist of a few dozen qi.
> It is a story about a man named qi who eats (qi) 9 (qi)
> lions (qi).
> You can bet that this is incomprehensible for a born Chinese,
> unless it is written.
> 
> The upside is probably that Chinese children
> are more challenged to master the Chinese language,
> so they become more intelligent.

It is unlikely that they will become more intelligent. They will get a 
lot more practice in communication, but since the medium they use to 
communicate isn't well-adapted to the job the skills they are acquire 
will be as crippled as the medium they are stuck with using.

> It helps that their government is pouring money in education,
> instead of abolishing the department of education.

It would help more if the government poured money into solving the 
problems that the writing system creates, rather exposing more people to 
a flawed system  for longer.

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney