Chinese characters and the messiness of Chinese culture
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Is it really so?
Uncannily and independently, Apollo Wu* sent me the following note before I made this post:
Hànzì bǐ bù shàng zìmǔ wénzì de guānjiàn lǐngyù zàiyú páixù jiǎnsuǒ hé réngōng zhìnéng děng fāngmiàn. Fùzá fánsuǒ nán xué nán yòng shì dāngqián miàn duì de kùnnán. Hànzì wú xù gěi Zhōngguó wénhuà dǎshàng língluàn de làoyìn!
汉字 比不上 字母文字 的 关键 领域 在于 排序 检索 和 人工智能 等 方面。复杂 繁琐 难学难用 是 当前 面对的 困难。汉字 无序 给 中国 文化 打上 凌乱 的 烙印！
Google Translate:
The key areas where Chinese characters are not as good as alphabetic characters are sorting, retrieval and artificial intelligence. Complicated, cumbersome, difficult to learn and difficult to use are the difficulties we are currently facing. The disorder of Chinese characters marks Chinese culture as messy!
Baidu Fanyi:
The key areas where Chinese characters cannot compare to alphabetic characters are sorting and retrieval, as well as artificial intelligence. The current difficulty is that it is complex, cumbersome, difficult to learn, and difficult to use. The disorder of Chinese characters has left a messy imprint on Chinese culture!
Bing Translator:
The key areas where Chinese characters are inferior to alphabetic characters are in aspects such as sorting and retrieval and artificial intelligence. Complex, cumbersome, difficult to learn, and difficult to use are the difficulties we face today. Chinese characters disorder brand Chinese culture with mess!
DeepL
The key areas where Chinese characters are not as good as alphabetic characters are in the areas of sequencing, retrieval and artificial intelligence. Complex and cumbersome, difficult to learn and difficult to use are the current difficulties. The disorder of Chinese characters has put a messy stamp on Chinese culture!
VHM:
I could make my own translation of Apollo's text, but considering that he raises the matter of artificial intelligence (and other basic linguistic issues), I thought this was an opportune moment to compare several online translation tools that are relevant to the capability of AI.
I was thunderstruck to receive this particular message from Apollo in advance of the time when he could have read my recent post on Cantonese romanization. Must be something in the air.
P.S.: Note that Apollo, even though writing in sinoglyphs, indicates word division and parsing by separating with an extra space between characters.
P.P.S.: This has been the credo of Apollo, a former United Nations translator (Chinese-English) and software designer, since I first met him around four decades ago.
*See this comment for a note on Apollo's name.
Selected readings
- "'Romanisation '"gives clarity"'" (5/19/23)
- "Loose Romanization for Cantonese" (9/21/19)
- "Public Romanization in Canton" (5/30/20)
- "Uppercase and lowercase letters in Cantonese Romanization" (5/28/20) — includes a long list of relevant posts
- "The Roman Alphabet in Cantonese" (3/23/11)
- "rime-cantonese, a Cantonese lexicon for building keyboards and more" (10/31/21)
Paul Frank said,
May 23, 2023 @ 10:21 am
Me to ChatGPT-4: How would Sima Qian have written this?
ChatGPT:
Sima Qian, known as the "Father of Chinese historiography," lived during the Han Dynasty, and his prose style is often marked by a blend of historical and literary narration. However, it's important to remember that modern concepts like "alphabet", "sorting", "retrieval", and "artificial intelligence" didn't exist during his time. Translating these into his style is challenging, but here's an attempt to capture the essence in a style he might have used, while sacrificing some literal translation:
"文字之優劣，漢字匪能與之競也。其所以然者，權在列次、尋覽及思維之巧機之中。深奧複雜，學之難，用之不易，此乃當今之困也。漢字之無以序列，使華夏之文化為之玷污，混亂矣！"
This translation leans more towards the classical literary style and doesn't perfectly mirror the modern Chinese text, but rather captures the overall sentiment of the passage in a style that's more in line with the prose of Sima Qian. It's important to note that this translation uses language and syntax that is significantly different from modern Chinese.
Jonathan Smith said,
May 23, 2023 @ 1:54 pm
Interesting GPT4 query @Paul Frank, although "文字之優劣，漢字匪能與之競也" is simply wrong/nonsensical even when we allow 文字 to mean 'alphabet / alphabetic script' — encouraging I guess that these tools can't yet do everything.
This post initially had a different pinyin version of the message generated not by transcription but by some kind of translation tool I guess. For the curious
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1A46oEk7gl23uik_5ff-FFLnASIAj_JJb/view?usp=share_link
Victor Mair said,
May 23, 2023 @ 6:17 pm
@Jonathan Smith:
The different pinyin transcription was based on a variant version of Apollo's credo, of which he has penned many over the years.
liuyao said,
May 24, 2023 @ 12:37 am
All the translations went with "disorder of Chinese characters", a pun that is not in the Chinese original.
Jerry Packard said,
May 24, 2023 @ 5:45 am
Thanks to liuyao for pointing out the errant ‘disorder’ in the place of something like ‘lack of serial ordering.’ Speaking to the content of the note, in my view however messy one might perceive Chinese culture to be (and I’m not sure what the author means there) Chinese characters contribute just about as much as the abacus or chopsticks. In my view Chinese characters contribute to the elegance of Chinese literary culture. But then, that has always been my bias.
cliff arroyo said,
May 24, 2023 @ 12:23 pm
"my view Chinese characters contribute to the elegance of Chinese literary culture"
I don't think anyone would dispute the general aesthetic quality of characters and/or their value in certain kinds of literature or overall cultural importance.
But there are a lot of mundane life activities (or necessary modern state activities) or expressive language functions where they don't actually shine….
From thinks like writing labels on boxes when you move (an example from a few years ago) to bureaucratic needs (which include alphabetization) to the incorporation of foreign names in literature to sound play…. (jibber jabber, super duper, sus, yeet)
Jerry Packard said,
May 24, 2023 @ 2:49 pm
“I don't think anyone would dispute the general aesthetic quality of characters and/or their value in certain kinds of literature or overall cultural importance.”
As they like to say, “You may be surprised.”
Adam c said,
May 24, 2023 @ 4:29 pm
As an outsider/amateur I have been surprised at the amount of uniformity that still exists among so many characters after several millennia, i.e., that the mouth radicals still look like mouth radicals and that there is often an semantic component and a phonetic component to many characters. IMHO English irregular spellings, pronunciation, and verb forms are messier than sinoglyphs.
Complicated and cumbersome, yes. Messy, no.
Chester Draws said,
May 24, 2023 @ 5:13 pm
Much of this is because there is a conception that China should be regarded as a unity, in the way similar sized areas elsewhere are not.
"European" culture is not made easy by the extreme variants in alphabets, leading to some very messy kludges when it comes to transliterating, sorting etc.
Chris Button said,
May 25, 2023 @ 8:29 am
@ AdamC
I think a book by Geoffrey Sampson (possibly someone else) talks about how readers of English and Chinese have more in common in how they process text that readers of say English and Spanish.
@ Jerry Packard
It was mainly the writing system that drew me studying Chinese. Admittedly that wasn’t the case for Japanese, which I was attracted to at a younger age for other reasons, but then I became really interested in the script and wanted to learn Chinese as a result.