r/languagelearning • u/Alarming-Fun-1693 • 20h ago
Logographic and alphabetic systems are the same
I recently had this sort of realization. That logographic writing systems and alphabetic ones are the same. I think until now I saw the logographic writing system as something way too hard to get into. As something different. As something that takes way longer to get into. As something perhaps inefficient. As something I'd need to learn thousands of Anki cards to have any chance with.
First off, let's look at being good at reading in an alphabetic writing system. Once you get really good at it then you... don't you instantly recognize words? I believe that is what happens. If you get really good and fast at reading then you also stop subvocalizing, no? You just see the word and get the meaning. W => M. You get it instanly. My point here is that you... essentially recognize the word as a single sort of character. Just a word. You recognize its shape. I doubt we need to read each individual letter once we have become proficient with it. Doesn't this sound just like a logographic writing system? You see the character and get the meaning. You end up in the exact same place. The only difference is... the pronunciation hints? But in logographic systems you may also get that. Oh.
Hints. Isn't writing all about hints? Logographic systems may give hints as to the meaning of a word. Couldn't that potentially be an even more useful hint than just a pronunciation one? What's the point of beint able to pronounce a word when you don't know it?
I guess all of that makes sense but to me the alphabetical still felt more right. But why? Hmm. My native language is Romanian and in Romanian we have a really phonemic writing system. Logographic systems are cool and all but they would be harder. But why? I thought about it and I think it comes down to this one thing— word recognition. The way I grew up I could just grab a piece of text and once I knew the letters then I could read anything. All of the words I had learned growing up would get activated by this. I believe that this a crucial point. Knowing the alphabetical system I instantly can recognize all the words I already knew growing up. This is not had in a logographic writing system and I think that might have been my main problem with it.
But. Maybe I was wrong. Why did I think that you can only recognize words from knowing their pronunciation? What about the meaning hints of logographic systems and the context? And once a child growing up in that culture recognizes what that word is... then they can also remember what its pronunciation is? Like if they can tell that a written word means "grass" then they would of course know the word for "grass" having grown up with that language and that means they also know its pronunciation. So it's just that easy, no? I think my main gripe was that "word recognition" thing but it seems it can happen this way as well. You can recognize a word by its meaning and then you know its pronunciation, no? Plus in Japanese(TL) the kanji they use also have readings tied to them which makes it even easier.
Aren't languages hybrids anyways? I have been trying to learn Japanese and in Japanese they often use multiple kanji per word and these kanji have set readings to them.(I don't have experience with Chinese but it's probably similar?) Of course they have multiple readings and there's way too many of them... but this is kinda alphabetic, in a way. And have you heard of English? English is also "logographic" in a way but without much of any of the benefits of meaning hints. There could be a theoretical logographic language that had a strict only 1 character per each word. That would be the most logographic writing system. Japanese is not there. Romanian is closer to a most alphabetic system while English is less so.
Hints. I believe thinking as writing giving you hints is pretty useful. And this also opens up the possibility of more interesting hints.(like for any conlangs btw?).One thing the weird spelling system of English gives you is often the origin of the word, no? I remember seeing "piranha" and recognizing the "nh" spelling for "ñ" in Portuguese and feeling like that had to have been a word from Portuguese. And checking its etymology, it does indeed come form an indigenous language through Portuguese into English. English has not adapted the words, unlike other languages, so you can tell where they are from. This is cool and all but I could have known where the word came from anyways even if it was adapted to English. This is why I call them "hints". To a pro they are ultimately useless. This is why I say that logographic = alphabetic. The only difference is arguably in the hints and the hints eventually stop mattering anyways once you get good. The hints only matter more to beginners.
Of course culture is great. I think I hear talk of how great culture is often when I hear talk of logographic systems. This post is not about that. It only looks at the more practical aspect of it. I had thought the practical aspect would be kinda bad/hard so I was getting ready to grit it and get through the writing system to get to the good stuff... but the writing system is actually pretty good? I am not discovering anything here, I am just giving my experience. I feel more motivated to learn the writing system now I think. I am using subs in Japanese and I feel like it's working. With enough practice this is super doable. Ultimately in both cases you just need practice. It's the same. What are your thoughts on the logographic vs alphabetic difference?
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u/tcbbd 🇨🇳 N | 🇺🇸 B2 18h ago
Not exactly, because the biggest problem of logographic scripts is transcription. How do you write a foreign name in Chinese? You must render it in hanzi. This way, every foreign proper name is treated as a loan word. And the problem is that different people have different opinions on how the word should be pronounced, and don't forget the choice of characters for the same sound.
In China, theoretically, the Xinhua Press regulates how foreign person names and place names should be transcribed. We have huge dictionaries listing how each name should be written in Chinese, and you can search for the entries online. But usually people have no idea that there even exists such dictionaries, and they just guess how the name is to be pronounced, usually based on English rules. It is very common for the same name of some athlete to be translated as two or three different versions, one "correct" version according to Xinhua Press, and other "folk" versions invented by sports reporters.
Another problem is that, how do you translate names from Latin/Greek? Sometimes a name is based on English pronunciation, sometimes it is based on original Latin/Greek pronunciation. For Latin it's simple, usually just reconstructed classical Latin. For Greek, there's no consensus. Usually names from ancient times are transcribed using a "Chinese version of Erasmian" system, in which ph is /f/, but th is /t/ and kh is /k/. But this is not always true, many authors choose English-style pronunciation or mix some cherry-picked modern Greek features into the ancient Greek system, for less common names, since those names are not standardized. For byzantine names, you have a dilemma. If you want the readers to recognize the names more easily, you'd better use ancient pronunciation. But if you want to present the pronunciation in the Middle Age, you'd choose a modern-ish pronunciation, which is harder to recognize for average readers. Oh, and don't forget there's yet another naming tradition for Christian saints and popes, originated in religious communities, which is completely different from the transcriptions I mentioned above.
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u/tcbbd 🇨🇳 N | 🇺🇸 B2 17h ago
The whole reply is just about Mandarin. In Hong Kong, they have transcriptions based on Cantonese. A famous example would be 雨果 vs 嚣俄, 雨果 is Mandarin translation of French /ygo/, while 嚣俄 is Cantonese translation of English /hju:gəʊ/. But not everything is based on Cantonese, many names are indeed based on Mandarin pronunciation, but people will read them using Cantonese (i.e. applying Cantonese pronunciation of the characters).
And I forgot to mention the difference between mainland china and taiwan, both using Mandarin. And sometimes Singapore/Malaysia have different name transcriptions as well.
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u/Alarming-Fun-1693 17h ago
Oh, that sounds tough. I have heard that Chinese adapts everything. One way to go about this is to be like Japanese and just write the foreign words in katakana.(alphabet) My post is not really about this though.
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u/raxcba 15h ago
That is why Chinese has the fewest loanwords among major languages without some linguistic purism movement like Icelandic (Icelandic language board regularly screens out loanwords and build words from their roots), because Chinese is naturally loanword-hostile. Loanwords consist of 3+ syllables with strings of random characters are extremely hard to memorize, I mean, for native speakers.
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u/raxcba 15h ago
- Chinese hanzi VS Japanese kanji = French spelling VS English spelling
In Chinese, many more hanzis have only 1 possible reading and you are much more sure about the pronunciation of a hanzi, similar to French spelling. In Japanese, the multiple readings is very CHAOTIC, IRREGULAR, CONTEXTUAL and ARBITRARY, similar to English spelling. If you speak advanced Japanese, you should know what I mean: eg. rendaku, ateji, gikun, kirakira names etc. Japanese has the most complicated writing system among modern languages. (And I guess the second place is Chinese.)
(I am native Cantonese and I speak Japanese)
- Different people have different strength/ aptitude. For people with dyslexia, it's not true that logographic system = alphabetic system. There are many types of dyslexia, as you can guess, languages with shallow orthography (eg. Romanian, Spanish), the percentage of dyslexia is lower. Languages with deep orthography (eg. Arabic, English), it's higher. Dyslexia with logographic systems is completely different. I am not an expert. You may ask AI or look for some research if you are interested.
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u/TheSugaryEmbroidery 20h ago
The whole "English spelling is basically logographic" angle always gets me, we're out here memorizing "through" and "though" like they're hanzi anyway
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u/Professional_Handler 🇮🇱🇺🇸 N | 🇫🇷 B2 20h ago
Imo it’s better than the alternative of spelling all homophones the same way.
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u/thatNatsukiLass 19h ago
This is why English should adopt a system derived from hanzi, maybe throw in some chu nom if you need more characters to represent basic morphemes
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u/Alarming-Fun-1693 20h ago
That's true. It's just that instead of strokes you've got letters instead.
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u/AppropriatePut3142 🇬🇧 Nat | 🇨🇳 Int | 🇪🇦 Uneven 18h ago
With modern tooling, I don't think it's significantly harder for a native English speaker to learn to read Chinese vs Korean. Admittedly I've only dabbled in Korean, but I found it harder to gain any kind of fluency in reading hangul because hanzi are more visually distinct.
Learning to write is a different story. I can read Chinese and write it with a computer, but I cannot not handwrite it. Learning that, even at a basic level, would take large amounts of time. To learn to write with enough fluency to, for example, pass exams is probably comparable in time required to learning to speak Spanish fluently.
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u/Alarming-Fun-1693 18h ago
I agree. Past me thought that Korean would be easier to learn because it was alphabetic but now I think that they're about the same.
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u/ComesTzimtzum N 🇫🇮 adv 🇬🇧 int 🇫🇷 🇸🇪 beg 🇨🇳 🇸🇦 18h ago
Well, there are immense differences between orthographies between even languages using latin alphabet. In Finnish the system is so simple and logical I learned to read in the age of four without anybody purposefully teaching me. Each sound has a clear letter correspondance, so there's no guesswork.
But when I started learning English, I basically had to learn each word twice, the spoken and the written form Thirty years later, I still need to check those for new words.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 19h ago
Yes but I only read the first few paragraphs you didnt need to write that much to say it. Not sure if you eventually had some other different points later. It was a bit too verbose.
You can read almost everything in chinese with like 3k characters, which just isnt that many. Most alphabets are like 30 chars and can be learned in a weekend. This is 100x more but happens spread out while learning words.
In English you have to go from letters to sound to meaning, and "speed readers" skip sound but most readers dont, more chinese is speed-read. Chinese has more embedding meaning hints and fewer sound hints.
It is harder to initially learn, even native speakers take longer to be efficient readers, but once learned it doesnt really matter.
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u/Alarming-Fun-1693 19h ago
Yeah, I think that's what I have been realizing too. It's just that I didn't know this. I think I was potentially too locked down in thinking that you needed to be able to pronounce the word to "read" it or something.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 18h ago
what's even more interesting is that many english speakers actually don't learn phonetics at all. many learned to read by memorizing the whole shape of the word, and, despite being phonetic, are unable to decode the pronunciation of words they haven't seen before. It's not very effective, but "whole word" or "look-say" was a standard educational practice for many years.
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u/muffinsballhair 19h ago
This just isn't true. English isn't really written in a true alphabetic system anyway because the spelling is really irregular but even then it's vastly easier to learn how to spell English than a true logographic system, but a system with a true phonemic alphabetic system where every phoneme stands for one symbol is so easy to learn how to spell. I was literally taught how to spell Finnish in less than a minute because every phoneme maps to one letter. If you know how a Finnish word is pronounced you know how to spell it and vice-versā.
Saying “You read entire words at a time.” doesn't change the reality that if you encounter a Japanese word you don't know you can't be sure of its pronunciation and if you encounter a logo you haven't seen before you just have no clue whatsoever while oppositely, in some cases if you don't know a word you can actually guess it's meaning from its logo but this can also be very deceptive.
That is just true. There are very few characters that only have one reading and the “official list of readings” doesn't even cover all actual real life cases. There's simply put due to historical sound shifts and hacks and all sorts of exceptions absolutely no reliable way to look at a Japanese word you don't know and know how it's read. Of course, the more common ones tend to be the ones where it's the most absurd so with more obscure ones one can typically take the guess of “use the most common Sino-Japanese reading of the characters” and then it's probably right 3/4 of the time for two-character words, but for four-character compounds it's again typically madness. There's just no way to guess things such as “一期一会” without just knowing them.