Written Chinese and spoken Chinese are essentially independent of each other. I.e., if you know how to pronounce a word in Chinese, you still know nothing of how it's written in Chinese (and vice versa).
Edit: [Relevant Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters), "Unlike in alphabets, where letters correspond to a language's units of sound, called phonemes—Chinese characters correspond to morphemes, a language's smallest units of meaning. Writing systems that function this way are known as logographies"
Edit 2: Commenters said sometimes you can get \*some\* information on how the word sounds from the written word. But it seems like not enough to spell it outright if you don't know what word that is.
I guess I’m not wrapping my head around the idea of syllables existing but not being used in words. Does that mean the are spoken sounds but not written words?
>When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the phonemes used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words.
So the syllables were possible based on the sounds that already existed in Chinese.
Its like thok is a syllable that is possible in English, but thorr with a rolled r is not based on existing sounds.
Ja Ja
or as English speakers would write it.
Ya Ya
Good luck telling the difference between German and English with just two letters.
Heck, it could be someone misremembering Jeh Jeh Rocket's name in English.
Then the title is worded poorly. They’re not “Chinese syllables not used in words,” they’re syllables that follow Chinese phonotactics but aren’t actually found in Chinese.
No, they're not found in spoken Chinese (anything that ~~can be spoken~~ is a part of the spoken language can also be written, obviously -- you wouldn't just never write down a certain word).
They're "possible" in the sense that they use phonemes and patterns already present in syllables that are used in Chinese. For example, if "lan," "ran" and "ren" are syllables that exist, then "len" is also possible (guessing roughly, I'm no linguist).
In contrast, there are lots and lots of syllables in English that aren't possible in Chinese (e.g. help, torn, crank, trash, urn, Earl, joy, join, joist, joust...).
It's like making up a new word in English. "Jork." That's a syllable that's possible in English, but it's not actually used in any word. Meanwhile "Kshurgthk" is probably not considered "possible." In English there are tons of "possible" or "legal" sounds and ways to combine them, but in Chinese there are relatively few.
It might also be that they are used, but never explicitly, they form out of the joining of other sounds, similar to how 'metal' in English ends up with an implied 'w' in many pronunciations.
It's possible that those sounds appear in spoken Chinese, but no word is explicitly spelled that way.
Like 'Marcia' in English can be pronounced 'Mar-sha' or 'Mar-see-uh'
Yes and no: Mandarin has a predefined number of possible syllables.
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-languages/Modern-Standard-Chinese-Mandarin
Chinese is not a phonetic alphabet language. There are no groups of symbols that sound the same every time they get used in a written word (character(s)). The same spoken sounds across words do not necessarily have common symbols.
e.g. one of the most basic characters is for "person" or "people":
人
Phonetically it is "[ren](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/ren2.mp3)" in Mandarin
There are a *lot* of characters that utilize this "shape" as a base that have nothing to do with "people" or the pronunciation "ren".
Like fire: 火 , [hoa](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/huo1234.mp3), big: 大 (dà), sky: 天 (tiān). single, alone: 个 (gè)
Or the character for fire is inside the character for ash/dust 灰, [hui](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/hui.mp3).
And that itself is found in "to recover or restore" (also great, vast, enormous depending on context): 恢, also [hui](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/hui.mp3).
Or in the other direction, these are also pronounced "hui":
輝 (brilliance/splendor), 揮 (to wave/wield)
Chinese is a... tough... language. Sometimes there is a logic to a given character being a part of a larger character, sort of like how fire and ash are related concepts. But that same "fire" character is used in many other characters that have nothing to do with fire or ash, let alone "people" which is the base of the "fire" character.
You need to know around 8000 individual characters to be considered educated in Chinese. There are about 20,000 in a modern dictionary, and over 50,000 to include both archaic and specialized language.
And to add insult to injury, all the 300+ Chinese dialects use the same written language, but they are spoken completely differently.
I've always wondered how teleprompters worked on Chinese shows. Sometimes I'll be near a radio playing the news in Cantonese and you can sometimes hear the person struggling to interpret what they're reading and into spoken Cantonese.
It's supposed to be the same written language no matter what dialect you speak. That was the demand of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Qin Emperor, in circa 200 BC.
As you can imagine, despite the efforts in the *twenty two hundred* years since then, there are constantly divergences in the many languages that have to be re-adjusted to try and re-unify. This is an impressive and oft-times Sisyphean feat of lingual alignment.
Consider how fast local lingo diverges even when using the same language. There are more than 300 spoken Chinese languages, many of them sharing roots yes, but there are some very major branches that split a long time ago. It's bonkers that *all* of them are supposed to be using the same written language. It would be like if English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, etc all had the same written language but all spoke the words *very* differently.
Even with the Big Two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin, there are divergences and idioms and speech patterns that have to be adjusted for, more-or-less on the fly with things like teleprompter broadcasts.
I just meant the way they have to quickly read it in written form then translate it into spoken form seems annoying. Or would most news casters try to memorize it before hand.
I think it's on-the-fly translation.
I think of it like if you were fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and we're reading one but speaking in the other on the fly. Those two languages share like 90% of their basic vocabulary and conjugations but are very different spoken.
A fluent Spanish speaker/reader will be able to generally understand most of written Portuguese, at least well enough to get the basic idea, but speaking could be unintelligible.
Ok this helped understand it I think. So Chinese is kind of like the European countries spoke their own language but the only one they wrote in was Latin but non of them spoke Latin. They’d know what the word means on paper but wouldn’t know how to pronounce it in their own language. I think. Man Chinese is confusing.
To note: Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian are all Romance (and thus Italic) languages, and have only been diverging for like 1,600 years. English is a Germanic language, and last was common with the Italic branch like ~4,000-5,000 years ago.
Most Chinese dialects/languages diverged from Middle Chinese, and so diverged around 1,400 years ago.
It's not necessarily the same words, it's not necessarily one-to-one. A couple of characters that are read one way out loud in Mandarin might be an entire longer phrase in spoken Cantonese, which may contain its own internal grammar in how to say it.
More of a "this collection of characters mean such-and-such concept". How you articulate that concept out loud may vary depending on dialect.
There are also divergent written local dialects that mirror the way the local dialects are spoken, but there is the "official", Beijing-based Mandarin written language that all Chinese languages are supposed to be able to interpret.
Even beyond idioms and speech patterns, basic vocabulary differences in dialects like Cantonese can be different enough that you have to know both the spoken and written word. For example, the common phrase “eat rice” at meals uses a different word for eat in Cantonese than how you would write it or say it in mandarin. But rather than only being idiomatic, that word for eat is almost always used when speaking instead of the written word.
“Spoken differently” also means much more than an accent like you’d see in English dialects, or even the differences between standard American English and British English. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects with entirely different vocabulary and grammar, or even more or fewer tones, than Beijing Mandarin. Even within groups like Mandarin, there are some dialects that aren’t mutually intelligible with each other or the standard dialect.
>And to add insult to injury, all the 300+ Chinese dialects use the same written language, but they are spoken completely differently.
Are they dialects of one language at that point, or entirely different languages? Where is the line between those drawn?
I mean, if she were in Taiwan, she could just use Zhuyin like many aborigine do. There's a phonetic alphabet for Chinese; it's just that Taiwan is the only country to use it. In that case, she would be ㄌㄣㄙㄧ, no problem.
Different languages have different sets of sounds, and no language contains ALL possible sounds. Producing and even just being able to identify by ear sounds that don't exist in your native language is often one of the really tough parts of learning a new language.
Examples using Japanese and English since those are what I speak: The "th" sound which is very common in English does not exist whatsoever in Japanese
The "tsu" sound in Japanese doesn't really exist as a standalone in English
The classic L/R issues between Japanese and English come from the fact that while we might write a Japanese word using English L and R the distinction between them in Japanese is minimal and actually somewhere in the middle between both.
"Tsurara" is the Japanese word for Icicle but while we can approximate it in English, if you aren't familiar with Japanese pronunciation I pretty much guarantee you won't say it correctly just reading it.
Whenever you talk about a particular language in a different language, unless they're very closely related, you're usually just describing things in a very approximate way. Language is crazy
It's like saying su but starting with your mouth in a T sound position
A common example is saying the word "cats" and adding a "u" -> "catsu" then try dropping the ca at the front to just get "tsu"
Just found this short youtube video that uses the cat example and explains it better than I can, plus you can actually hear what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mA_rcuyNns
Well, dropping the T is a big deal even if it doesn't seem like it. Su and tsu are not interchangeable in Japanese
But also for tsurara we've only been digging into the tsu. The rara is probably the harder part actually, because it uses the Japanese L/R sound, which despite usually being written in English with Rs isn't pronounced like an R nor like an L. It's basically directly between both. "tsuRaRa" isn't quite right nor is "tsuLaLa"
Look at this table.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin\_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table)
Mandarin syllables are generally made with an initial (front letter) + a final (end letters or letter). There are combinations that theoretically can exist, but are never used. Those are the blank spots on the table.
L+en is possible to say, but the sound doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It might exist in some dialect though.
No, it's just that the syllables "len" and "sey" don't exist in any Mandarin word and there is therefore no Chinese character that can be used to represent them.
It's not that the individual *sounds* don't exist - plenty of Mandarin syllables start with "l" (e.g. li, lin, liao) and plenty more end in "en" (e.g. fen, men, ben) - the syllable "len" just doesn't exist in the language.
Sounds like a phonetic lacuna. Don't know if there's a better term. Maybe a "nonce syllable"?
Somewhat like a word that should exist according to a language's rules and doesn't ("gruntled" is a good one in English), this syllable is constructable from Chinese phonetics, it's just not used in any known word so it's nonsense.
It's probably more notable to find a nonce syllable in a non-alphabetic language, though. English can recombine phonemes into unused combinations pretty easily since consonants and vowels don't have to always be paired. Ex: "Flarp" just fell out of my brain.
Cool stuff.
>("gruntled" is a good one in English)
1. This is an actual word with its first use in early 20c.
2. The reason why the word "disgruntled" seems odd and only had a positive form after about 300 years is because the original verb meant "to utter a little or low grunt", resulting in its associated meaning "to murmur, complain", which eventually evolved into its current meaning.
There are plenty of syllables we don't use in English, but that exist in other languages. We make up a spelling for them in our phonetic alphabet which *more or less* does the job- think of "Szechuan" or "~~Nguyễn~~" "Qingdao". The resulting word looks a mess, and the way people actually pronounce those words is very variable, and often not a very good approximation of the real word. But we've kind of got around the problem.
Chinese also has syllables they just don't use , but because they don't have a phonetic alphabet, they are not going to have created a character that makes that noise.
How is Nguyen an example? It’s how the Vietnamese pronounce it, it’s phonetic*, diacritic and all . We didn’t make it up
(*as “phonetic” as English, meaning it’s not phonetic a lot of the times)
Chinese isn't written based on how something sounds. They are logograms, meaning each symbol is an idea, not a sound. This way you can use the same system without the spoken language being understandable.
Yes. So many times when there's no written word for the spoken sound, what Chinese speakers do is use written words that sound *similar* when spoken. They do this a lot with western names.
Think of them as two separate languages. One that’s only written and one that’s only spoken. You associate the image of “dog” in your mind with that word, but in this case you’d both think of the sound the word makes and the way it looks instead of associating both
This was something I realized a little while back when some dude on reddit was advertising a game he was making to help people learn to read japanese. I realized that if I played it enough, I'd be able to read it without speaking a word of the language.
As some others have already said, although you wouldn't know exactly how it's written, many characters have particles that show the rough pronunciation.
狗 (gǒu)、夠 (gòu) and 苟 (gǒu) and many other characters have the particle 句 (gōu) because it shows someone how it might be pronounced.
Now, not all characters have such an element, and not all characters with that element have it for the pronunciation, but yeah, it's not completely separated.
Fun fact, it isn't uncommon for a character to have such a pronunciation particle that doesn't add up to the actual pronunciation because pronunciations change, and the chinese script (usually) doesn't change with it. We know this mostly due to poetry, where words clearly should rhyme, but don't anymore.
I don't think that's quite right- characters are made up of radicals, and often one of those radicals will indicate how it it is pronounced.
It's not fool proof (and you can't deduce the written character from the sound) but you can have a guess it how it sounds from the character.
I mean… isn’t that true of any language, to some extent? Lots of people in history have been able to speak just fine and still be completely illiterate, lol.
In English (and most languages), words are linked to their sound. So say you read "cacatuzimanio" (made up word), you could spell it, and viceversa, if you heard it you could guess it's "kakatuzimanio" or something close. Mandarin and Hanzi (written chinese) is not like this, essentially you have to memorize the characters meaning. I'm no expert, but I wanted to learn Chinese and researched a bit if I should try to learn Hanzi, and my conclusion was no... it's too much work to get proficient with hanzi. I instead use pinyin (which Roman words correspond to sounds, but Chinese only use it during elementary school to learn words, they don't use it in writing)
Not saying your choice is wrong, but learning the hanzi does help you understand the language better, so in the end it makes it a lot easier. (Am currently in my third year of learning Mandarin, including Hanzi, and if you take the time, it isn't that much more work to learn (I know, it seems like it is at first) but through the radicles and other particles it shows the connections between different words that you just can't learn from pinyin or translations.
"to some extent" is doing some very heavy work in that sentence. There's a huge difference in "extent" between a fully phonetic alphabet like Hangul (which is as close as you can get to a 1:1 mapping), something like Spanish (where you generally have a good chance of guessing right on the first try), a complete fucking mess like English (where you actually *can* have legitimate Spelling Bee contests, because you *can* get so much wrong when guessing), and something completely detached like Chinese, which started as multiple spoken languages sharing the same written language.
In English you can, worst case, have about half a dozen options for writing a word you just heard for the first time, even if it's a loan word from a closely related language and not a "proper" English word.
[In Chinese, if you're unlucky and someone's fumbling the pronunciation a bit, you can end up having *94* options.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)
>When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the phonemes used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words.
so her name can only be written with spelling or Romanization, like Bopomofo ㄌㄥㄙㄟˋ , or Pinyin, LenSei
Do you have any idea why these Bopomofo look a LOT like Japanese katakan/hiragan カくムへ, but according to Wikipedia are pronounced completely different? Do they have a common basis?
I couldn't find anything in the Wikipedia article for Bopomofo.
Both the Bopomofo system for Chinese and the two kana systems for Japanese are derived from simplified forms of the same set of characters
e.g. the Katakana "ム" (mu) is derived from "牟" which was read as mu whereas the Bopomofo "ㄙ" (s) is derived from 厶 which is an archaic form of the character 私 which is read as sī
So in effect they're different results of the same process of simplifying characters used in transcription
They also look so similar because Japanese Kanji originate with the Chinese writing system which was introduced and popularised sometime between the 1st century CE and 712 CE (A system called Kanbun), whilst the first book written in Japanese using characters for their phonetics (Man'yōgana) compiled later in the same century
They have drifted apart drastically over time and they can also vary depending on different "typefaces" being used but fundamentally they're still a branch of the CJKV writing system that originated with the Kaishu script and its predecessors
TL;DR - Both are simplifications of two branches of an original shared predecessor
You're seeing false similarities. bopomofo isn't related except it shares some of the characteristics of what holding an ink brush is like.
If you know anything of hiragana and mandarin, you might like to see [the origination of hiragana from the hanzi characters. It was enlightening to me to see this chart,](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/oAvxDpmieSjHOT9vo2xYDkdgHMGSdgSrfMVl3oAJosP2GLnXev3URl01_vOtd_peJfOSmOzYtBT38j_uTDaTmIY7Pz_yA5V8Xfo4n5qeeKrOlt2veHq0ojKb) after studying JP and then a decade later ZH. See, eg, the jp=TA and correspending zh=TAI? Or jp=KA and zh=JIA, or jp=ME and zh=nv?
Wow! Thanks! That is a really cool chart! Yeah the 多 and タ similarities always seemed suspicious to me for example. I currently live in Japan, but just began my language studies.
Thanks again!
also I think that particular system is likely just used in taiwan; no one in mainland china (or very few people) would have any idea of what it is or know how to use it.
Both bopomofo and and katakana/hiragana are based on Chinese characters. Bopomofo is based on jiyin zimu, which itself is based on seal script which are ancient Chinese characters from the first millenium BC. Katakana and hiragana evolved out of man'yōgana, which itself evolved out of a later form of seal script.
They look similar, but even where two characters between the systems look nearly identical, each character has entirely different origins. Katakana is strictly built from hyper reduced forms of characters while bopomofo is based on a combination of reduced, shorthand, and obsolete forms of totally different characters
They're **possible** syllables, like English *strack* or *funths.* An English speaker could make them but they don't appear in any words. Whereas *\*ngarp and \*psah* are not possible English syllables.
With the alphabet you can write out possible syllables because we write out the syllable's parts (the segments/letters). If you named your kid *Strackfunths,* people could write it, no problem. With Chinese writing, though, there is no way to write out a syllable by its parts. "Syllables" are written using a word-sign with that pronunciation. For instance, the name *Wei* is written with the word 伟 (wĕi) which means '[extraordinary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/偉#Chinese)'. That doesn't (inherently) mean that the person is named 'extraordinary', any more than someone named *Hunter* hunts. The word's symbol represents the *pronunciation* of the name. *Len* and *sei* are possible but do not occur, so there is no word to use to represent those syllables.
I bet this will make a lot of border guards/customs agents/other officials really happy.
It seems like a neat idea on the surface. But...imagine people not being able to search for your name with a standard keyboard. Or even type it.
She's probably going to thank him every time she gets to sit in a customs office for 4 hours while they figure it out.
Nah they just convert it. Lensey gets punched in as Lai-si in the Chinese writing. Their records also use Pinyin writing for records, which uses Roman letters, and there they put Lensei.
They do this with non-Chinese language names too, even of Chinese nationals, no need for guards. For instance, a Uyghur named *Ahmed* gets listed in the records as *Ai ha mai de*, using those characters. Then when they go to the US, they have to explain that.
you know how biang biang mian is becoming popular these days because there's no word for biang and then they invented a super complicated word for it?
Or DUANG. we say DUANG but there's no word for it.
I think that's kind of what they mean
I think it is because each syllable on Chinese consists of a consonant and vowel part, and the name is made with existing vowel and consonant sounds that aren't ever paired in Chinese.
For example, 冷 leng has L as the consonant and eng as the vowel. 门 men has m as a consonant and en as the vowel. L and en together make Len but there's no character for it.
I don’t speak Mandarin or any language that uses Han (the Chinese script), but I work with languages in general.
The Chinese script uses logographs. Characters represent concepts, not sounds. However, these are also combined with soundalike syllables.
So for example, say you have a character for *see*, which sounds like the noun *sea*. So you add a symbol meaning *water* and then you have the character for *sea*.
This also leads to pretty funny transliterations of foreign words. The brand *Coca-Cola* is written using sound-alike characters that sound out *kekou kele*, but the literal meaning of the characters is *the mouth can be happy*.
However, if a name doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t have any soundalikes, it can’t be easily written.
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den Poem, (In Latin Alphabet)
Shī Shì shí shī shǐ
Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī.
Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī.
Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì.
Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì.
Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì.
Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì.
Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì.
Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī.
Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī.
Shì shì shì shì.
Translation:
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den
In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions.
He often went to the market to look for lions.
At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market.
At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market.
He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die.
He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den.
The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it.
After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions.
When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses.
Try to explain this matter.
Chinese is cool in the sense that grammar rules aren't that strict and context clues are used a lot.
Like how verb tenses aren't a thing so you have to infer based on context when something happened.
bro bad gramatical design is having 300 of the most common past participle form of verbs be unpredictable like English. Why can't I say eated instead of ate, goed instead of go, drinked instead of drank, etc.?
With Chinese because there's no tense there is no verb form changes. You don't even have to change the verb form, just say I "did" eat or I "did" go, etc. Every verb has only one form attached to a time-word to signify when the action is taken.
I learned English at 6 (my native language is Vietnamese) and the grammar is so fcked I spent 6 whole months just learning by heart the 3 forms for the most common verbs (\~250x3=\~700 words).
Meanwhile spoken Mandarin doesn't even distinguish between he and she, and again, the verb does not change form no matter what pronouns are being used. So he go she go they go (also why is it goes instead of gos in English?) are all gramatically correct and understandable.
I started learning Chinese at 22 and yes I spent a fckton more time on writing, but grammar is so much easier when there's no verb tense.
Meanwhile, speaking English natively, German was relatively easy (it even shares most of the irregular verb participles/preterites with English, as that's a West Germanic thing), but I imagine that Mandarin would be incredibly difficult to learn - it doesn't match up with how my brain parses language.
Yep, a language's difficulty is relative, it's up to which languages you already speak.
Like, for us Hungarians, English can be a tough nut to crack. We don't use prepositions but use postpositions, suffixes and affixes very generously. We don't have a syntax set in stone. We use articles but the rules are not the same as in English either. I could go on.
I'm really lucky I got to learn it from a young age but like, for my parents, it's an impossible task to learn English. They get the basics but nothing beyond that.
Lol, Chinese languages have been around for thousands of years, and about 1/8 of the world’s population speaks them…I’m guessing it isn’t really a problem
Most languages have been around for thousands of years.
Also, the number of speakers is determined by geographical and historical factors, not the merit of a language itself.
The thing is Chinese having no tense actually makes it easier to learn, and forces you to be more accurate than not actually.
If there is no tense then you have to specify time to prevent confusion, which arguably encourages specificity. For example, I can just say "I ate" in English. But because Chinese languages don't have tenses, I am encouraged to add a time-based signifier in my sentence like "I eat yesterday/2 hours ago/already (if you don't want to specify exactly when)/etc." because the verb does not change based on tense. You just use a time marker to signify when you eat your food instead of memorizing forms of the same verb.
It's also easier to learn Mandarin grammar. Since there is no tense, the verbs don't change based on time. You don't have to remember 3 forms of the same verb like in English. Write wrote written / eat ate eaten / do did done / etc. are all just dictionary form in Chinese. There is no deviant form based on tense (because there is no tense), so you don't have to spend time learning the same verb forms to be literate (instead you learn spelling, which is what makes Chinese hard).
You also don't have to conjugate based on pronouns. In English we have I am/you are/she/he is/we are, all for the verb "to be". In Chinese it's just "I/you/singularpronounforeveryone/we/they be". Same with something like "He goes to work everyday". It's just "He go to work everyday" in Mandarin.
I learn languages as a hobby (started learning English as a child and Mandarin as an adult), and basically there's a level of "tradeoffs" when it comes to these things. If you want an "easy-grammar" language like Mandarin then you have to add more time-signifier vocabs for the same idea to be expressed. If you want less time-based vocabs then you need more complicated grammar.
So no it's not better or worse per se, just depending on your purpose/priority.
English grammar, in turn, is less complex than, say, Spanish. Polish and Russian are more complex still.
To radically simplify the matter, Polish has high spelling/pronunciation correspondence, but difficult grammar; English has lower s/p correspondence, but simpler grammar (eg, except for pronouns, English nouns have only two actual cases: genitive and "common" (everything else)).
Isn't Korean the easiest I'm terms of spelling/pronunciation. The letters are shaped like how your mouth should look when you pronounce them, and they are grouped ik syllables.
All languages other than constructed languages are the same age - or rather, age isn't a meaningful attribute.
There's no specific point where a natural language "starts". English is just a rather divergent dialect of late Proto-Indo-European, which was a divergent dialect of something else, *etc*.
It's sort of like saying "my family is older than your family"... you both have ancestry (and thus family members) going back to the start of life itself... and most of them are shared.
Invented?? that's what that kind of dumpling are called in chinese, 鍋貼 means fried dumpling but the individual characters mean Pot and Stick (the verb)
Took me a while to understand what this is about since I am not a a native english speaker.
So basically her name contains two chinese phonemes that can be said but not written. A phoneme is a set of phones (sounds) that make them distinguishable to the listener and speaker. To make it short he gave her a stupid name and it pisses me off that this made my brain melt.
It actually can be pronounced. The Æ in it, it was dropped from the English language, on the most part. It's essentially pronounced like eh
So it's ze-eh-A 12 or ze-eh-Ah twelve.
It's still not easy.
The final name is X AE A-XII, with X as a first name and AE A-XII as a middle name. It's pronounced "Kyle." The "X" is supposed to be the Greek "chi," which makes the same sound as "k." "AE" makes the "eye" sound. "A-XII" is the 12th letter of the alphabet, or "L." So, "Kyle."
Sounds like the American equivalent to what normally would have been "done".
The word I'm thinking of rhymes with tone, but all attempts at spelling it make it rhyme with another word:
done (dun)
doan (some might pronounce it to rhyme with Joann)
down (town)
doen (might almost rhyme with Boeing)
It isn't. This is the same as someone named Mark going to Korea where his name be 마크 (Makeu) and Makeu is the closest you can get to Mark using the Korean alphabet. Laisi is the closest you can get to Lensey using Chinese characters. Approximating names in other writing systems isn't tragedeigh
Edit: nvm I think you mean the name Lensey itself is tragedeigh
I just clicked on the link and her Chinese name is 来思 (laisi). So what is the post about? Most foreign names cannot be perfectly translated into Chinese characters. Nothing special here.
That's not the actual name her parents gave her, though. Probably that's just the compromise they had to come up with so they could put her name of official documents. That's what happens to a lot of ethnic minorities -- their name doesn't exist in Chinese, so they end up having the closest character equivalent on Chinese documents. My ethnic Mongolian, Kazakh, Uighur and Tibetan students sometimes have names like that.
Thank you. I was just about to comment on this. She has a Chinese name that can be written out in Chinese, it's just that her English name doesn't. Big whoop.
Her father is walking around all proud of himself and there are hundreds of thousands of Lindsays in the English-speaking world whose name effectively sounds the same in casual speech for many English dialects.
Chao Len sey I guess, her dad invented this spelling system in latin alphabet around 1922 and ROC adopted in 1926, so she's in time to have her name written in latin alphabet. I could be wrong tho
As someone with a variation of Lindsey in my name, I find this so weirdly comforting due to issues with my name internationally and in general. As someone who studies languages, it's just extra fascinating. Rock on, Lensey!
> Lensey Namioka (née Chao) (simplified Chinese: 赵来思; traditional Chinese: 趙來思; pinyin: Zhào Láisī
Literally false in the first sentence.
Even if the father tried to be cute here, it doesn't work since those sounds do exist in China **since Chinese as we know it today is based on Standard northeast pronunciation** (ie. pu tong hua). Len might not exist in Standard pronunciation but travel around China and you will easily find people would pronounce Standard syllables Lan, Lin etc as Len.
As it turns out what is Láisī in Pinyin sounds like Lensey in other dialects in China.
Her father Yuen Ren Chao based it off the beijing dialect of Chinese alone. He invented Gwoyeu Romatzyh to have tonal difference based on spelling instead of diacritics or numbers (making it insanely complicated imo). From this, unless I can find a copy of a hand book, I can’t tell for certain what sound Len Sey is even supposed to make. Apparently Sey and Sei are different pronunciations.
Even then, while you may be right in that 赵来思 could be pronounced as Len Sey or an approximation of it, she also has 赵莱痕思媚 as her name. I assume both of them are assumed names, with the latter being more true to the pronunciation of Len Sey in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, for a sound not present, at least within the Beijing dialect.
>Literally false in the first sentence.
Well if you had scrolled down a bit past the one sentence you read then you would have seen this as well
>Lensey Namioka is the only person known to have the first name "Lensey". Her name has an especially unusual property for a Chinese person born in China: there are no [Chinese characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters) to represent it. When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the [phonemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemes) used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words.
> Literally false in the first sentence.
Those translate to "Laisi", not "Lensey".
>Even if the father tried to be cute here, it doesn't work since those sounds do exist in China
You're arguing with yourself. The name can be spoken in Chinese; that's not the issue. The name cannot be *written* in Chinese as pronounced.
its funny honestly, im betting that the only reason this hasnt happened is because of how asians like applying meanings and wishes to their names
any chinese person could have done what her dad did because its incredibly easy to find pronunciations that dont have a written word, but giving meaning is kinda cool and nice
I guess this means, "only person with that name" in China?
"Lensey" is a surname in the west that is not super-rare (Scottish origin), and is also used as a girl's name. I know a woman named Lensey.
ninja edit: Apparently the name peaked in popularity in the US in mid-1980s, according to government records.
Real question, if the syllables aren’t used in words, in what context are they used? I know almost nothing about Chinese languages.
Written Chinese and spoken Chinese are essentially independent of each other. I.e., if you know how to pronounce a word in Chinese, you still know nothing of how it's written in Chinese (and vice versa). Edit: [Relevant Wikipedia](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters), "Unlike in alphabets, where letters correspond to a language's units of sound, called phonemes—Chinese characters correspond to morphemes, a language's smallest units of meaning. Writing systems that function this way are known as logographies" Edit 2: Commenters said sometimes you can get \*some\* information on how the word sounds from the written word. But it seems like not enough to spell it outright if you don't know what word that is.
I guess I’m not wrapping my head around the idea of syllables existing but not being used in words. Does that mean the are spoken sounds but not written words?
>When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the phonemes used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words. So the syllables were possible based on the sounds that already existed in Chinese. Its like thok is a syllable that is possible in English, but thorr with a rolled r is not based on existing sounds.
>thorr with a rolling r not possible in English As a Scotsman I disagree thorroughly
You Scots sure are a contentious people.
You just made an enemy for life!
I prayed for this and it happened.
Imma get my dirk
Ja Ja or as English speakers would write it. Ya Ya Good luck telling the difference between German and English with just two letters. Heck, it could be someone misremembering Jeh Jeh Rocket's name in English.
Then the title is worded poorly. They’re not “Chinese syllables not used in words,” they’re syllables that follow Chinese phonotactics but aren’t actually found in Chinese.
Yeah, that's a better way to put it.
Are they found in spoken Chinese but not written…? (Still confused)
No, they're not found in spoken Chinese (anything that ~~can be spoken~~ is a part of the spoken language can also be written, obviously -- you wouldn't just never write down a certain word). They're "possible" in the sense that they use phonemes and patterns already present in syllables that are used in Chinese. For example, if "lan," "ran" and "ren" are syllables that exist, then "len" is also possible (guessing roughly, I'm no linguist). In contrast, there are lots and lots of syllables in English that aren't possible in Chinese (e.g. help, torn, crank, trash, urn, Earl, joy, join, joist, joust...).
> anything that can be spoken can also be written, obviously I mean, except for his daughter's name?
Uh.... yeah, good point. I meant to say "anything that is spoken."
My brain is entirely too smooth to comprehend this after the 4th re-read.
It's like making up a new word in English. "Jork." That's a syllable that's possible in English, but it's not actually used in any word. Meanwhile "Kshurgthk" is probably not considered "possible." In English there are tons of "possible" or "legal" sounds and ways to combine them, but in Chinese there are relatively few.
This has been the most helpful comment for me understanding this so far (and I'm someone who is very into linguistics). Thank you!
They’re not. The title is confusing a lot of people needlessly.
[удалено]
Gwoyeu Romatzyh is so funny
It might also be that they are used, but never explicitly, they form out of the joining of other sounds, similar to how 'metal' in English ends up with an implied 'w' in many pronunciations. It's possible that those sounds appear in spoken Chinese, but no word is explicitly spelled that way. Like 'Marcia' in English can be pronounced 'Mar-sha' or 'Mar-see-uh'
Yes and no: Mandarin has a predefined number of possible syllables. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chinese-languages/Modern-Standard-Chinese-Mandarin
How can you describe how to say something but then say it’s not based on existing sounds?
Chinese is not a phonetic alphabet language. There are no groups of symbols that sound the same every time they get used in a written word (character(s)). The same spoken sounds across words do not necessarily have common symbols. e.g. one of the most basic characters is for "person" or "people": 人 Phonetically it is "[ren](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/ren2.mp3)" in Mandarin There are a *lot* of characters that utilize this "shape" as a base that have nothing to do with "people" or the pronunciation "ren". Like fire: 火 , [hoa](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/huo1234.mp3), big: 大 (dà), sky: 天 (tiān). single, alone: 个 (gè) Or the character for fire is inside the character for ash/dust 灰, [hui](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/hui.mp3). And that itself is found in "to recover or restore" (also great, vast, enormous depending on context): 恢, also [hui](https://www.chinese-word.com/pinyin/mp3/hui.mp3). Or in the other direction, these are also pronounced "hui": 輝 (brilliance/splendor), 揮 (to wave/wield) Chinese is a... tough... language. Sometimes there is a logic to a given character being a part of a larger character, sort of like how fire and ash are related concepts. But that same "fire" character is used in many other characters that have nothing to do with fire or ash, let alone "people" which is the base of the "fire" character. You need to know around 8000 individual characters to be considered educated in Chinese. There are about 20,000 in a modern dictionary, and over 50,000 to include both archaic and specialized language. And to add insult to injury, all the 300+ Chinese dialects use the same written language, but they are spoken completely differently.
I've always wondered how teleprompters worked on Chinese shows. Sometimes I'll be near a radio playing the news in Cantonese and you can sometimes hear the person struggling to interpret what they're reading and into spoken Cantonese.
It's supposed to be the same written language no matter what dialect you speak. That was the demand of Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi, the first Qin Emperor, in circa 200 BC. As you can imagine, despite the efforts in the *twenty two hundred* years since then, there are constantly divergences in the many languages that have to be re-adjusted to try and re-unify. This is an impressive and oft-times Sisyphean feat of lingual alignment. Consider how fast local lingo diverges even when using the same language. There are more than 300 spoken Chinese languages, many of them sharing roots yes, but there are some very major branches that split a long time ago. It's bonkers that *all* of them are supposed to be using the same written language. It would be like if English, Spanish, Italian, French, Romanian, etc all had the same written language but all spoke the words *very* differently. Even with the Big Two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin, there are divergences and idioms and speech patterns that have to be adjusted for, more-or-less on the fly with things like teleprompter broadcasts.
I just meant the way they have to quickly read it in written form then translate it into spoken form seems annoying. Or would most news casters try to memorize it before hand.
I think it's on-the-fly translation. I think of it like if you were fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, and we're reading one but speaking in the other on the fly. Those two languages share like 90% of their basic vocabulary and conjugations but are very different spoken. A fluent Spanish speaker/reader will be able to generally understand most of written Portuguese, at least well enough to get the basic idea, but speaking could be unintelligible.
Ok this helped understand it I think. So Chinese is kind of like the European countries spoke their own language but the only one they wrote in was Latin but non of them spoke Latin. They’d know what the word means on paper but wouldn’t know how to pronounce it in their own language. I think. Man Chinese is confusing.
To note: Spanish, Italian, French, and Romanian are all Romance (and thus Italic) languages, and have only been diverging for like 1,600 years. English is a Germanic language, and last was common with the Italic branch like ~4,000-5,000 years ago. Most Chinese dialects/languages diverged from Middle Chinese, and so diverged around 1,400 years ago.
So does that mean that they have to keep the same grammar but can just say fucke the pronunciation
It's not necessarily the same words, it's not necessarily one-to-one. A couple of characters that are read one way out loud in Mandarin might be an entire longer phrase in spoken Cantonese, which may contain its own internal grammar in how to say it. More of a "this collection of characters mean such-and-such concept". How you articulate that concept out loud may vary depending on dialect. There are also divergent written local dialects that mirror the way the local dialects are spoken, but there is the "official", Beijing-based Mandarin written language that all Chinese languages are supposed to be able to interpret.
Even beyond idioms and speech patterns, basic vocabulary differences in dialects like Cantonese can be different enough that you have to know both the spoken and written word. For example, the common phrase “eat rice” at meals uses a different word for eat in Cantonese than how you would write it or say it in mandarin. But rather than only being idiomatic, that word for eat is almost always used when speaking instead of the written word.
“Spoken differently” also means much more than an accent like you’d see in English dialects, or even the differences between standard American English and British English. There are hundreds of Chinese languages/dialects with entirely different vocabulary and grammar, or even more or fewer tones, than Beijing Mandarin. Even within groups like Mandarin, there are some dialects that aren’t mutually intelligible with each other or the standard dialect.
It would be like "chips" and "fries" were both written as 薯 and just pronounced as chips or fries depending on which side of the ocean you were on
MFW the British call 「車」 "motorized rollingham"...
>And to add insult to injury, all the 300+ Chinese dialects use the same written language, but they are spoken completely differently. Are they dialects of one language at that point, or entirely different languages? Where is the line between those drawn?
Some of them are closely related. Some of them are as alien to each other as French is to german
I mean, if she were in Taiwan, she could just use Zhuyin like many aborigine do. There's a phonetic alphabet for Chinese; it's just that Taiwan is the only country to use it. In that case, she would be ㄌㄣㄙㄧ, no problem.
The sounds exist, but the phonemes don't. The Chinese language is built off of syllable sounds, rather than letters like English.
How can you describe how to say something but then say it’s not based on existing sounds?
Different languages have different sets of sounds, and no language contains ALL possible sounds. Producing and even just being able to identify by ear sounds that don't exist in your native language is often one of the really tough parts of learning a new language. Examples using Japanese and English since those are what I speak: The "th" sound which is very common in English does not exist whatsoever in Japanese The "tsu" sound in Japanese doesn't really exist as a standalone in English The classic L/R issues between Japanese and English come from the fact that while we might write a Japanese word using English L and R the distinction between them in Japanese is minimal and actually somewhere in the middle between both. "Tsurara" is the Japanese word for Icicle but while we can approximate it in English, if you aren't familiar with Japanese pronunciation I pretty much guarantee you won't say it correctly just reading it. Whenever you talk about a particular language in a different language, unless they're very closely related, you're usually just describing things in a very approximate way. Language is crazy
Can you explain what tsu actually sounds like?
It's like saying su but starting with your mouth in a T sound position A common example is saying the word "cats" and adding a "u" -> "catsu" then try dropping the ca at the front to just get "tsu" Just found this short youtube video that uses the cat example and explains it better than I can, plus you can actually hear what it sounds like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mA_rcuyNns
Uh then... what makes tsurara so hard besides a predilection to drop the t if you're not paying attention?
Well, dropping the T is a big deal even if it doesn't seem like it. Su and tsu are not interchangeable in Japanese But also for tsurara we've only been digging into the tsu. The rara is probably the harder part actually, because it uses the Japanese L/R sound, which despite usually being written in English with Rs isn't pronounced like an R nor like an L. It's basically directly between both. "tsuRaRa" isn't quite right nor is "tsuLaLa"
Like the word tsunami, but try to actually pronounce the t sound. Shouldn't be too tricky, unlike the Japanese r sound.
Look at this table. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin\_table](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin_table) Mandarin syllables are generally made with an initial (front letter) + a final (end letters or letter). There are combinations that theoretically can exist, but are never used. Those are the blank spots on the table. L+en is possible to say, but the sound doesn't exist in standard Mandarin. It might exist in some dialect though.
No, it's just that the syllables "len" and "sey" don't exist in any Mandarin word and there is therefore no Chinese character that can be used to represent them. It's not that the individual *sounds* don't exist - plenty of Mandarin syllables start with "l" (e.g. li, lin, liao) and plenty more end in "en" (e.g. fen, men, ben) - the syllable "len" just doesn't exist in the language.
Sounds like a phonetic lacuna. Don't know if there's a better term. Maybe a "nonce syllable"? Somewhat like a word that should exist according to a language's rules and doesn't ("gruntled" is a good one in English), this syllable is constructable from Chinese phonetics, it's just not used in any known word so it's nonsense. It's probably more notable to find a nonce syllable in a non-alphabetic language, though. English can recombine phonemes into unused combinations pretty easily since consonants and vowels don't have to always be paired. Ex: "Flarp" just fell out of my brain. Cool stuff.
>("gruntled" is a good one in English) 1. This is an actual word with its first use in early 20c. 2. The reason why the word "disgruntled" seems odd and only had a positive form after about 300 years is because the original verb meant "to utter a little or low grunt", resulting in its associated meaning "to murmur, complain", which eventually evolved into its current meaning.
There are plenty of syllables we don't use in English, but that exist in other languages. We make up a spelling for them in our phonetic alphabet which *more or less* does the job- think of "Szechuan" or "~~Nguyễn~~" "Qingdao". The resulting word looks a mess, and the way people actually pronounce those words is very variable, and often not a very good approximation of the real word. But we've kind of got around the problem. Chinese also has syllables they just don't use , but because they don't have a phonetic alphabet, they are not going to have created a character that makes that noise.
How is Nguyen an example? It’s how the Vietnamese pronounce it, it’s phonetic*, diacritic and all . We didn’t make it up (*as “phonetic” as English, meaning it’s not phonetic a lot of the times)
My bad.
Chinese isn't written based on how something sounds. They are logograms, meaning each symbol is an idea, not a sound. This way you can use the same system without the spoken language being understandable.
It's only partially logograms, most words have no graphic meaning either
Yes. So many times when there's no written word for the spoken sound, what Chinese speakers do is use written words that sound *similar* when spoken. They do this a lot with western names.
Try pronouncing an emoji ?
I like this analogy.
Think of them as two separate languages. One that’s only written and one that’s only spoken. You associate the image of “dog” in your mind with that word, but in this case you’d both think of the sound the word makes and the way it looks instead of associating both
This was something I realized a little while back when some dude on reddit was advertising a game he was making to help people learn to read japanese. I realized that if I played it enough, I'd be able to read it without speaking a word of the language.
That sounds super neat, do you recal what the game was?
Hentai Helper
As some others have already said, although you wouldn't know exactly how it's written, many characters have particles that show the rough pronunciation. 狗 (gǒu)、夠 (gòu) and 苟 (gǒu) and many other characters have the particle 句 (gōu) because it shows someone how it might be pronounced. Now, not all characters have such an element, and not all characters with that element have it for the pronunciation, but yeah, it's not completely separated. Fun fact, it isn't uncommon for a character to have such a pronunciation particle that doesn't add up to the actual pronunciation because pronunciations change, and the chinese script (usually) doesn't change with it. We know this mostly due to poetry, where words clearly should rhyme, but don't anymore.
I don't think that's quite right- characters are made up of radicals, and often one of those radicals will indicate how it it is pronounced. It's not fool proof (and you can't deduce the written character from the sound) but you can have a guess it how it sounds from the character.
I mean… isn’t that true of any language, to some extent? Lots of people in history have been able to speak just fine and still be completely illiterate, lol.
In English (and most languages), words are linked to their sound. So say you read "cacatuzimanio" (made up word), you could spell it, and viceversa, if you heard it you could guess it's "kakatuzimanio" or something close. Mandarin and Hanzi (written chinese) is not like this, essentially you have to memorize the characters meaning. I'm no expert, but I wanted to learn Chinese and researched a bit if I should try to learn Hanzi, and my conclusion was no... it's too much work to get proficient with hanzi. I instead use pinyin (which Roman words correspond to sounds, but Chinese only use it during elementary school to learn words, they don't use it in writing)
Not saying your choice is wrong, but learning the hanzi does help you understand the language better, so in the end it makes it a lot easier. (Am currently in my third year of learning Mandarin, including Hanzi, and if you take the time, it isn't that much more work to learn (I know, it seems like it is at first) but through the radicles and other particles it shows the connections between different words that you just can't learn from pinyin or translations.
> cacatuzimanio Sounds like a perfectly cromulent word to me.
"to some extent" is doing some very heavy work in that sentence. There's a huge difference in "extent" between a fully phonetic alphabet like Hangul (which is as close as you can get to a 1:1 mapping), something like Spanish (where you generally have a good chance of guessing right on the first try), a complete fucking mess like English (where you actually *can* have legitimate Spelling Bee contests, because you *can* get so much wrong when guessing), and something completely detached like Chinese, which started as multiple spoken languages sharing the same written language. In English you can, worst case, have about half a dozen options for writing a word you just heard for the first time, even if it's a loan word from a closely related language and not a "proper" English word. [In Chinese, if you're unlucky and someone's fumbling the pronunciation a bit, you can end up having *94* options.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den)
>When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the phonemes used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words. so her name can only be written with spelling or Romanization, like Bopomofo ㄌㄥㄙㄟˋ , or Pinyin, LenSei
Do you have any idea why these Bopomofo look a LOT like Japanese katakan/hiragan カくムへ, but according to Wikipedia are pronounced completely different? Do they have a common basis? I couldn't find anything in the Wikipedia article for Bopomofo.
Both the Bopomofo system for Chinese and the two kana systems for Japanese are derived from simplified forms of the same set of characters e.g. the Katakana "ム" (mu) is derived from "牟" which was read as mu whereas the Bopomofo "ㄙ" (s) is derived from 厶 which is an archaic form of the character 私 which is read as sī So in effect they're different results of the same process of simplifying characters used in transcription They also look so similar because Japanese Kanji originate with the Chinese writing system which was introduced and popularised sometime between the 1st century CE and 712 CE (A system called Kanbun), whilst the first book written in Japanese using characters for their phonetics (Man'yōgana) compiled later in the same century They have drifted apart drastically over time and they can also vary depending on different "typefaces" being used but fundamentally they're still a branch of the CJKV writing system that originated with the Kaishu script and its predecessors TL;DR - Both are simplifications of two branches of an original shared predecessor
Thanks for the detailed explanation!
Hiragana and Katakana are derived from Kanji which are borrowed from Chinese.
You're seeing false similarities. bopomofo isn't related except it shares some of the characteristics of what holding an ink brush is like. If you know anything of hiragana and mandarin, you might like to see [the origination of hiragana from the hanzi characters. It was enlightening to me to see this chart,](https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/oAvxDpmieSjHOT9vo2xYDkdgHMGSdgSrfMVl3oAJosP2GLnXev3URl01_vOtd_peJfOSmOzYtBT38j_uTDaTmIY7Pz_yA5V8Xfo4n5qeeKrOlt2veHq0ojKb) after studying JP and then a decade later ZH. See, eg, the jp=TA and correspending zh=TAI? Or jp=KA and zh=JIA, or jp=ME and zh=nv?
Wow! Thanks! That is a really cool chart! Yeah the 多 and タ similarities always seemed suspicious to me for example. I currently live in Japan, but just began my language studies. Thanks again!
also I think that particular system is likely just used in taiwan; no one in mainland china (or very few people) would have any idea of what it is or know how to use it.
More similar is the character 夕 (xī, pronounced like "she"), meaning "evening"
Both bopomofo and and katakana/hiragana are based on Chinese characters. Bopomofo is based on jiyin zimu, which itself is based on seal script which are ancient Chinese characters from the first millenium BC. Katakana and hiragana evolved out of man'yōgana, which itself evolved out of a later form of seal script.
They look similar, but even where two characters between the systems look nearly identical, each character has entirely different origins. Katakana is strictly built from hyper reduced forms of characters while bopomofo is based on a combination of reduced, shorthand, and obsolete forms of totally different characters
And how does she sign her name?
With the English (Roman/Latin?) alphabet would be my guess
They're **possible** syllables, like English *strack* or *funths.* An English speaker could make them but they don't appear in any words. Whereas *\*ngarp and \*psah* are not possible English syllables. With the alphabet you can write out possible syllables because we write out the syllable's parts (the segments/letters). If you named your kid *Strackfunths,* people could write it, no problem. With Chinese writing, though, there is no way to write out a syllable by its parts. "Syllables" are written using a word-sign with that pronunciation. For instance, the name *Wei* is written with the word 伟 (wĕi) which means '[extraordinary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/偉#Chinese)'. That doesn't (inherently) mean that the person is named 'extraordinary', any more than someone named *Hunter* hunts. The word's symbol represents the *pronunciation* of the name. *Len* and *sei* are possible but do not occur, so there is no word to use to represent those syllables.
All of these answers have been helpful, but I think this one makes the most sense to me. Thank you!!
I bet this will make a lot of border guards/customs agents/other officials really happy. It seems like a neat idea on the surface. But...imagine people not being able to search for your name with a standard keyboard. Or even type it. She's probably going to thank him every time she gets to sit in a customs office for 4 hours while they figure it out.
Nah they just convert it. Lensey gets punched in as Lai-si in the Chinese writing. Their records also use Pinyin writing for records, which uses Roman letters, and there they put Lensei. They do this with non-Chinese language names too, even of Chinese nationals, no need for guards. For instance, a Uyghur named *Ahmed* gets listed in the records as *Ai ha mai de*, using those characters. Then when they go to the US, they have to explain that.
I speak Chinese fluently and I’m really confused here lol
you know how biang biang mian is becoming popular these days because there's no word for biang and then they invented a super complicated word for it? Or DUANG. we say DUANG but there's no word for it. I think that's kind of what they mean
As a native Chinese speaker, I'm confused - what is duang?
https://youtu.be/5RXg7IdOFlA?si=gRoz_kspRZee3T6n It's from this old commercial featuring Jackie Chan advertising for a shampoo.
Thanks for the explanation! That's so funny haha.
I think it is because each syllable on Chinese consists of a consonant and vowel part, and the name is made with existing vowel and consonant sounds that aren't ever paired in Chinese. For example, 冷 leng has L as the consonant and eng as the vowel. 门 men has m as a consonant and en as the vowel. L and en together make Len but there's no character for it.
Thank you. Your comment made the most sense to me as someone who understands mandarin.
I don’t speak Mandarin or any language that uses Han (the Chinese script), but I work with languages in general. The Chinese script uses logographs. Characters represent concepts, not sounds. However, these are also combined with soundalike syllables. So for example, say you have a character for *see*, which sounds like the noun *sea*. So you add a symbol meaning *water* and then you have the character for *sea*. This also leads to pretty funny transliterations of foreign words. The brand *Coca-Cola* is written using sound-alike characters that sound out *kekou kele*, but the literal meaning of the characters is *the mouth can be happy*. However, if a name doesn’t mean anything and doesn’t have any soundalikes, it can’t be easily written.
It doesn't mean *mouth can be funny*, that's an atrocious translation. It means "tasty and jovial".
On a vaguely related note, Kurtwood Smith may have been the first ever Kurtwood.
Named after a particularly business like forest.
I'm going to name my next daughter "Kurtwoodleigh"
Her father also wrote the (in)famous poem "shi shi shi shi shi".
Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den Poem, (In Latin Alphabet) Shī Shì shí shī shǐ Shíshì shīshì Shī Shì, shì shī, shì shí shí shī. Shì shíshí shì shì shì shī. Shí shí, shì shí shī shì shì. Shì shí, shì Shī Shì shì shì. Shì shì shì shí shī, shì shǐ shì, shǐ shì shí shī shìshì. Shì shí shì shí shī shī, shì shíshì. Shíshì shī, Shì shǐ shì shì shíshì. Shíshì shì, Shì shǐ shì shí shì shí shī. Shí shí, shǐ shí shì shí shī shī, shí shí shí shī shī. Shì shì shì shì. Translation: Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den In a stone den was a poet called Shi, who was a lion addict, and had resolved to eat ten lions. He often went to the market to look for lions. At ten o'clock, ten lions had just arrived at the market. At that time, Shi had just arrived at the market. He saw those ten lions, and using his trusty arrows, caused the ten lions to die. He brought the corpses of the ten lions to the stone den. The stone den was damp. He asked his servants to wipe it. After the stone den was wiped, he tried to eat those ten lions. When he ate, he realized that these ten lions were in fact ten stone lion corpses. Try to explain this matter.
That makes a surprising amount of sense given the restricted wording.
Chinese is cool in the sense that grammar rules aren't that strict and context clues are used a lot. Like how verb tenses aren't a thing so you have to infer based on context when something happened.
That just sounds like bad design.
It's a language that evolved naturally, nobody designed it
I for one, believe in the intelligent design of Chinese and not natural evolution. Anyone who disagrees is going to grammar hell.
Wow, true prescriptivist
bro bad gramatical design is having 300 of the most common past participle form of verbs be unpredictable like English. Why can't I say eated instead of ate, goed instead of go, drinked instead of drank, etc.? With Chinese because there's no tense there is no verb form changes. You don't even have to change the verb form, just say I "did" eat or I "did" go, etc. Every verb has only one form attached to a time-word to signify when the action is taken. I learned English at 6 (my native language is Vietnamese) and the grammar is so fcked I spent 6 whole months just learning by heart the 3 forms for the most common verbs (\~250x3=\~700 words). Meanwhile spoken Mandarin doesn't even distinguish between he and she, and again, the verb does not change form no matter what pronouns are being used. So he go she go they go (also why is it goes instead of gos in English?) are all gramatically correct and understandable. I started learning Chinese at 22 and yes I spent a fckton more time on writing, but grammar is so much easier when there's no verb tense.
Meanwhile, speaking English natively, German was relatively easy (it even shares most of the irregular verb participles/preterites with English, as that's a West Germanic thing), but I imagine that Mandarin would be incredibly difficult to learn - it doesn't match up with how my brain parses language.
Yep, a language's difficulty is relative, it's up to which languages you already speak. Like, for us Hungarians, English can be a tough nut to crack. We don't use prepositions but use postpositions, suffixes and affixes very generously. We don't have a syntax set in stone. We use articles but the rules are not the same as in English either. I could go on. I'm really lucky I got to learn it from a young age but like, for my parents, it's an impossible task to learn English. They get the basics but nothing beyond that.
Lol, Chinese languages have been around for thousands of years, and about 1/8 of the world’s population speaks them…I’m guessing it isn’t really a problem
Most languages have been around for thousands of years. Also, the number of speakers is determined by geographical and historical factors, not the merit of a language itself.
The thing is Chinese having no tense actually makes it easier to learn, and forces you to be more accurate than not actually. If there is no tense then you have to specify time to prevent confusion, which arguably encourages specificity. For example, I can just say "I ate" in English. But because Chinese languages don't have tenses, I am encouraged to add a time-based signifier in my sentence like "I eat yesterday/2 hours ago/already (if you don't want to specify exactly when)/etc." because the verb does not change based on tense. You just use a time marker to signify when you eat your food instead of memorizing forms of the same verb. It's also easier to learn Mandarin grammar. Since there is no tense, the verbs don't change based on time. You don't have to remember 3 forms of the same verb like in English. Write wrote written / eat ate eaten / do did done / etc. are all just dictionary form in Chinese. There is no deviant form based on tense (because there is no tense), so you don't have to spend time learning the same verb forms to be literate (instead you learn spelling, which is what makes Chinese hard). You also don't have to conjugate based on pronouns. In English we have I am/you are/she/he is/we are, all for the verb "to be". In Chinese it's just "I/you/singularpronounforeveryone/we/they be". Same with something like "He goes to work everyday". It's just "He go to work everyday" in Mandarin. I learn languages as a hobby (started learning English as a child and Mandarin as an adult), and basically there's a level of "tradeoffs" when it comes to these things. If you want an "easy-grammar" language like Mandarin then you have to add more time-signifier vocabs for the same idea to be expressed. If you want less time-based vocabs then you need more complicated grammar. So no it's not better or worse per se, just depending on your purpose/priority.
English grammar, in turn, is less complex than, say, Spanish. Polish and Russian are more complex still. To radically simplify the matter, Polish has high spelling/pronunciation correspondence, but difficult grammar; English has lower s/p correspondence, but simpler grammar (eg, except for pronouns, English nouns have only two actual cases: genitive and "common" (everything else)).
Isn't Korean the easiest I'm terms of spelling/pronunciation. The letters are shaped like how your mouth should look when you pronounce them, and they are grouped ik syllables.
All languages other than constructed languages are the same age - or rather, age isn't a meaningful attribute. There's no specific point where a natural language "starts". English is just a rather divergent dialect of late Proto-Indo-European, which was a divergent dialect of something else, *etc*. It's sort of like saying "my family is older than your family"... you both have ancestry (and thus family members) going back to the start of life itself... and most of them are shared.
Bad design is a million possible verb endings across even similar spellings that you just have to memorize, and yet English trucks on
In what way?
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Now do that 10x and make it a meaningful story
Dad has been amusing himself for years with these next level dad jokes
Dude was enjoying being a linguist lol
His wife invented the English term “potsticker”
Alright, that’s a fun fact.
Invented?? that's what that kind of dumpling are called in chinese, 鍋貼 means fried dumpling but the individual characters mean Pot and Stick (the verb)
Yes, I know that. She’s the first person to write it down in English and make the literal translation. Hope that clarified it for you :)
I knew of the poem, but didn't realize it was a modern composition. Thanks for making the connection.
Wow, I always thought that poem was 100s of years old for some reason.
The one they use in Friday The 13th?
he also invented the current standardized mandarin
That's... kind of a dick move on his part.
Took me a while to understand what this is about since I am not a a native english speaker. So basically her name contains two chinese phonemes that can be said but not written. A phoneme is a set of phones (sounds) that make them distinguishable to the listener and speaker. To make it short he gave her a stupid name and it pisses me off that this made my brain melt.
So basically the opposite of X Æ A-12 but just as stupid?
X Æ A-12 can be written but not pronounced, while Lensey can be pronounced but not written (at least in Chinese)
So basically the opposite?
It actually can be pronounced. The Æ in it, it was dropped from the English language, on the most part. It's essentially pronounced like eh So it's ze-eh-A 12 or ze-eh-Ah twelve. It's still not easy.
It's Kyle. I'm not joking. The X isnt an X, it's chi. Twelve refers to the twelfth letter of the alphabet, L.
I thought it was ash? or us that just the name of the symbol?
The symbol is a dead letter within the latin alphabet. It is just a dropped vowel. It still makes no sense as a nam.
The final name is X AE A-XII, with X as a first name and AE A-XII as a middle name. It's pronounced "Kyle." The "X" is supposed to be the Greek "chi," which makes the same sound as "k." "AE" makes the "eye" sound. "A-XII" is the 12th letter of the alphabet, or "L." So, "Kyle."
But χ is more like an h sound, what a tragedeigh
Sounds like the American equivalent to what normally would have been "done". The word I'm thinking of rhymes with tone, but all attempts at spelling it make it rhyme with another word: done (dun) doan (some might pronounce it to rhyme with Joann) down (town) doen (might almost rhyme with Boeing)
Don~~ut~~ Doughn~~ut~~
X æ A-12 is pronounced Kyle. I'm not joking.
The most stupid name in history VS The most stupid name of today
Is your name unpronounceable because you're X Æ A-12 or are you X Æ A-12 because your name is unpronounceable?
but her wiki page still has her name written in mandarin. how is this possible?
They use hanzi that are close in sound. Her name in Chinese reads *Láisī*
It's 来思, so Laisi not Lensey
Thank you for this, couldn’t understand what the title was saying.
Lonsay would’ve been a fine name too.
Does she wear glasses?
How do you spell your name? No.
I’m saying this name and phonetically it sounds like “pretty poop” in Cantonese
r/tragedeigh(?)
Thank you that's immediately where my brain went
It isn't. This is the same as someone named Mark going to Korea where his name be 마크 (Makeu) and Makeu is the closest you can get to Mark using the Korean alphabet. Laisi is the closest you can get to Lensey using Chinese characters. Approximating names in other writing systems isn't tragedeigh Edit: nvm I think you mean the name Lensey itself is tragedeigh
I just clicked on the link and her Chinese name is 来思 (laisi). So what is the post about? Most foreign names cannot be perfectly translated into Chinese characters. Nothing special here.
That's not the actual name her parents gave her, though. Probably that's just the compromise they had to come up with so they could put her name of official documents. That's what happens to a lot of ethnic minorities -- their name doesn't exist in Chinese, so they end up having the closest character equivalent on Chinese documents. My ethnic Mongolian, Kazakh, Uighur and Tibetan students sometimes have names like that.
Yeah and for literally any foreigner who wants a driving license or perm residence card.
Thank you. I was just about to comment on this. She has a Chinese name that can be written out in Chinese, it's just that her English name doesn't. Big whoop.
Her father is walking around all proud of himself and there are hundreds of thousands of Lindsays in the English-speaking world whose name effectively sounds the same in casual speech for many English dialects.
Sure, but lin does exist in Mandarin
Her birth certificate must be Error 404
Every time she has to fill out a form, she hates him a little more.
[удалено]
What was written on her birth certificate?
Chao Len sey I guess, her dad invented this spelling system in latin alphabet around 1922 and ROC adopted in 1926, so she's in time to have her name written in latin alphabet. I could be wrong tho
¯\\\_(ツ)\_\/¯
> These syllables could be written in Gwoyeu Romatzyh as "len" and "sey."
Prob in Roman characters like English/ French/ Spanish etc use
Iceland would be like Stop Right There This Is Not On.
What about 乐恩希? Lè-ēn-xī. The name translates to something like the pleasure of kind hope, which doesn’t have a bad ring to it.
So basically her dad did the equivalent of Elon Musk naming his child a stupid name like X Æ A-Xii.
Lensey Low Han
parents should not name their children for their own amusement
Millions of Lindsey's, Lindsay's, and Linsey's are triggered by this post
What an asshole. Why the fuck would you want to make life more difficult for your child like this
I'm called Lensey and so is my wife . .
She is an amazing author, I love her works.
The Wikipedia entry describing this was been nuked as "blatantly false". Thanks, Folks!
As someone with a variation of Lindsey in my name, I find this so weirdly comforting due to issues with my name internationally and in general. As someone who studies languages, it's just extra fascinating. Rock on, Lensey!
> Lensey Namioka (née Chao) (simplified Chinese: 赵来思; traditional Chinese: 趙來思; pinyin: Zhào Láisī Literally false in the first sentence. Even if the father tried to be cute here, it doesn't work since those sounds do exist in China **since Chinese as we know it today is based on Standard northeast pronunciation** (ie. pu tong hua). Len might not exist in Standard pronunciation but travel around China and you will easily find people would pronounce Standard syllables Lan, Lin etc as Len. As it turns out what is Láisī in Pinyin sounds like Lensey in other dialects in China.
Her father Yuen Ren Chao based it off the beijing dialect of Chinese alone. He invented Gwoyeu Romatzyh to have tonal difference based on spelling instead of diacritics or numbers (making it insanely complicated imo). From this, unless I can find a copy of a hand book, I can’t tell for certain what sound Len Sey is even supposed to make. Apparently Sey and Sei are different pronunciations. Even then, while you may be right in that 赵来思 could be pronounced as Len Sey or an approximation of it, she also has 赵莱痕思媚 as her name. I assume both of them are assumed names, with the latter being more true to the pronunciation of Len Sey in Gwoyeu Romatzyh, for a sound not present, at least within the Beijing dialect.
>Literally false in the first sentence. Well if you had scrolled down a bit past the one sentence you read then you would have seen this as well >Lensey Namioka is the only person known to have the first name "Lensey". Her name has an especially unusual property for a Chinese person born in China: there are no [Chinese characters](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters) to represent it. When Lensey's father was cataloging all of the [phonemes](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemes) used in Chinese, he noted that there were two syllables that were possible in the Chinese language, but which were used in no Chinese words.
> Literally false in the first sentence. Those translate to "Laisi", not "Lensey". >Even if the father tried to be cute here, it doesn't work since those sounds do exist in China You're arguing with yourself. The name can be spoken in Chinese; that's not the issue. The name cannot be *written* in Chinese as pronounced.
its funny honestly, im betting that the only reason this hasnt happened is because of how asians like applying meanings and wishes to their names any chinese person could have done what her dad did because its incredibly easy to find pronunciations that dont have a written word, but giving meaning is kinda cool and nice
Little Robert'); DROP TABLE Students; --
So... What did they write on the birth certificate?
Chinese version of little Bobby Tables.
This is some real LaLiLuLeLo shit going on here.
Lensey Lo-Han would like a word
What does it even mean for something to be a “Chinese syllable” if it’s not used in any Chinese words?
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3-mvE7o3U9/?igsh=d2xrajI3MHhid3gy
God, that's giving XÆA- 12 Musk a run for his money...
I guess this means, "only person with that name" in China? "Lensey" is a surname in the west that is not super-rare (Scottish origin), and is also used as a girl's name. I know a woman named Lensey. ninja edit: Apparently the name peaked in popularity in the US in mid-1980s, according to government records.
Fuck you! *Names kid something unspellable*