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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 16:26:53 +1100
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On 24/02/2025 4:32 am, Cursitor Doom wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Feb 2025 14:42:25 +0100, 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 helps that their government is pouring money in education,
>> instead of abolishing the department of education.
>>>
>>> --
>>> Bill Sloman, Sydney
>>
>> Groetjes Albert
> 
> No wonder they're all learning English!

It's the language of scientific publication, as Latin used to be.

As a chemist I had to learn German to read Beilstein (for organic 
chemicals) and French for the Nouveau Traite de Chimie Minerale 
(inorganic chemicals).

-- 
Bill Sloman, Sydney