Compare this to Mandarin, for example, where the same texts have been widely read for thousands of years, and have changed minimally (simplified symbology being the only relatively modern change that I am aware of...)
Actually, ancient Chinese is different from modern chinese- the words were pronounced differently, they used different meanings for words than the modern meanings- it is just that the words themselves are written more or less the same; however, a modern chinese person cannot just pick up a copy of a classical chinese book, read it and understand it, they have to have studied classical chinese ( which not everybody does) and even then I don't know many people who read this kind of old book on a regular basis.
Ok, I see what you are saying- That the educated Japanese at the time used Chinese- this is true- in the sense that they used Chinese characters to write and read; however, they never actually spoke Chinese on a common everyday basis, they just had adopted it as notation because they didn't have a writing system of their own- also because they didn't have a writing system of their own, they obviously didn't have that many books, whereas China did, so if you were Japanese at the time and wanted to read much of anything, you had to learn to read Chinese.
The same thing is true in Korea, they also have used Chinese characters, after which they came up with their own set of writing which they use much more commonly just as the the Japanese eventually started using kana as well as kanji.
Basically I agree that there are too many differences between the situation in Asia and in Europe to make a good comparison here...
I have seen all sorts of different dictionaries, including the type that you mentioned, where the characters are organized by radical. However, in the mainland now there are a lot of dictionaries that are alphabetical
For example, I have sitting in front of me the "Xinhua Zidian", which is a small dictionary generally used by students to look up individual characters as opposed to words. In the front of the dictionary is a list of radicals (ordered by stroke number, with all radicals both simplified and traditional being included) Once you find a radical you can look up a list of all the characters under this radical, and it will tell you where in the dictionary they are; however, the words in the dictionary itself are alphabetical by pinyin, so if you know how to write the pinyin you can also look up words that way. Furthermore, the dictionary also has bopomofo and a conversion table in the back so that you can look up words that way also.
sorry, I should have been more clear- the word entered English from Portugese, however it is originally from sanskrit from where it went to Malay and then to Portugese:
From Spanish mandarín, from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay mntri, from Sanskrit mantr, mantrin- counselor, from mantra, counsel
(from dictionary.com, most sites seem to have the same history of the word, although opinions seem to differ whether the word came into English from Spanish or Portugese)
What about the fact that the east coast recieved many immigrants at the same time and after the settlers were going west? Is it possible that the way that italian immigrants spoke english has had an influence on the way people speak in say, New York or Boston?
I'm not sure what it's called but it basically let every key represent some basic mandarin symbol and a combonation of these symbols are used to represent a word. It looked a bit complicated but it's not that hard to learn. I also asked them whether they use pinyin as their method of input and most of them replied that pinyin is simply too slow compared to their other typing method I know what you are talking about; however, still most everybody I know uses the pinyin way of typing and can type about 30 characters per minute.
Let not lose sight of the fact that it's a waste of time to quibble about whose typing method is faster, the important thing to remember is that a QWERTY keyboard CAN be used and IS being used to type Chinese, already for several years and is a viable method for chinese to use a computer.
The reason most cantonese can speak mandarin is that mandarin is so measier than cantonese.
Actually a lot of people in HK do not speak mandarin they only speak Cantonese and English, and the ones that do a lot of them speak it only so-so and have accents. People in Guangdong and are different because in the PRC everybody has to learn putonghua; however, still most people have an accent. It is almost always easy to tell when a native cantonese speaker is speaking "guoyu" because their tones and pronounciation are different from standard. This goes both ways, of course, as you can also usually tell a native mandarin speaker from the way they speak cantonese and the words that they use.
It's not that one is easier than the other, it's that they are different languages.
The reason that more cantonese speakers speak Mandarin than Mandarin speakers speak Cantonese is that Cantonese is a regional "dialect", whereas Mandarin is the national language: now most every young person in all of China and Taiwan all must learn to speak Mandarin, but only people in Guangdong and HK speak cantonese. For people in other parts of China, there are a lot of other Chinese "dialects" that you rarely hear about, and usually people only speak their own one really well, but at the same time they speak mandarin with an accent.
The Japanese upper class had historically spoken only Mandarin, and left the women and "uneducated" to speak Japanese.
This is inaccurate. Never in Japanese history has there been a period when the majority of the Japanese "upper class" spoke chinese in the same sense that upper-class Europeans in the 1700s/1800s spoke French.
FYI- there is no such word as "Mandarin" in Chinese- it is a term that originated from pidgin in the Guangzhou area in the 1700s or 1800s and comes originally from either Spanish or Portugese roots, as it is somehow derived from "mandar" (to command or order). The word was originally used to refer to officials posted to the area, who gave commands. The reason that this word eventually became attached to a language is that the officials came from outside of Guangzhou, and so they spoke a different language than that of the natives (as I said in other posts, there is a lot of reason to consider dialects of Chinese as different languages), so the language spoken by the officials was referred to as "mandarin". This name has stuck around like a lot of other terms, such as the name "China", which also is not originally a Chinese word
Also, historically modern Chinese was different than middle chinese-the pronunciations used in modern chinese have only been standardized fairly recently, and many Chinese people in previous generations do not speak particularly "standard" Chinese.
It's Western Europe and North America. Feel free to counter with individual examples.. they are the exceptions that prove the rule.
An example: Japan is also part of the high-tech world: even though it is not in Europe or North America, it is where a lot of the technology in "high-tech" western Europe and North America comes from.
The same thing can be said to a somewhat lesser degeree of South Korea and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Singapore are also highly developed.
I have read a lot of comments about how it would be difficult to type Chinese on an English keyboard and I just want tell everybody that that is exactly what everyone from the mainland is doing RIGHT NOW.
There is software in common use which makes this possible: first type in pinyin and then select from a list of characters. This is probably the only system that anybody young enough to use a computer uses and is also the simplest as most young people can already write pinyin.
typing Chinese isn't that hard---- if you have some sort of input program you can type in pinyin, which is the method that pretty much everyone I know uses, after which you pick out the character you want to use from a list, which in most cases will remember the most commonly used characters----it's the fact that you already have to be able to read and write Chinese fairly well in the first place in order to be able to type, because you have to know what character you are looking for on the list, which is not as easy as it sounds as many times there are say 20-30 characters to choose from.
In Taiwan it is supposedly different: they have their own keyboard that uses their own writing system that is derived from chinese but is nevertheless a way of phonetically spelling chinese words. I don't think that many people outside of Taiwan use this system, but in Taiwan they have computer keyboards with this writing on the keys.
I'd like to find out how many Mandarin speakers know a second language given China is such a geographically large area. I'll bet it's only a small percentage.
This is a fairly complicated topic. First of all, in many areas of China mandarin is not the language commonly spoken by the native people.There are many "dialects", a misnomer in that dialects of Chinese are dialects in the same sense that Spanish, Italian and French are dialects of one another- many Chinese dialects cannot be understood by Mandarin speakers. For example, say we are in Shanghai. Local people all speak Shanghainese to each other (Shanghainese is one of the main Wu dialects, which are spoken in east-central China). Shanghainese and Mandarin have about the same relation as English and German, or possibly more distant. Still, everybody in Shanghai is taught Mandarin in school, and most television is in Mandarin. Plus, written Chinese is more or less the same no matter what dialect you speak, although there are some minor differences.
On the mainland, most everybody has to study a "second language", actually a third language(the favorites are English(probably over 90%) Japanese and Russian);however, people there have the same problems that Americans have in that they have little chance to practice speaking and small chance of ever going to another country where they have the chance to interact with native speakers.
In addition, Chinese English instruction is more focused on written language anyway. As a result, many educated people can read and write quite well, but if you talked to them would have more difficulty in communicating.
...convincing people of small towns to build monorails and other great follies such as the giant magnifying glass, the escalator that goes to nowhere, or the skyscraper built out of toothpicks...
Nimoy: My work is done here...
Bart:"But you didn't doanything!"
Nimoy: Oh didn't I? (Beams out, star trek sound effect)
The reason that prices were so high for previous nintendo systems is that the price of making cartridges is higher than making cds, which is why playstation games are cheaper than n64 games.
Now that nintendo is also using CDs the games will be about the same price as Playststion games.
What is new about most Nintendo games lately? Not much, actually. Most of the games they make are simply reincarnations of "franchise" games that they have been making since NES and SNES. Examples: Mario, Mario Kart, Pilotwings and Zelda are all good for starters. Also before nintendo and square parted ways there was final fantasy (and I wish there STILL was final fantasy on nintendo).
and another thing, how are we going to test all of these genetic modifications?
Answer: Cloning, as in, somebody will start cloning humans in order to test things like how genetic modifications work, otherwise such testing would get really messy.
I think that a even lot of people who might be willing to say, test a new drug might shrink at the thought of having their DNA modified for test purposes...this will also mean that it will take genetic technology a bit longer to develop
I would say it's a little early to be declaring that in the future we will all be mechanized. First of all, there is a difference between replacing your hip with a new joint and replacing something more complex like say, a spinal column or a brain.
I would say rather that in the future people might use genetics to modify the human body in order to make it more long-lived, quicker-thinking etc. etc.
It is incorrect to say that historically mandarin is badly spoken cantonese.
All the modern Chinese dialects, except Southern Min (Fujianese/Taiwanese),
are the daughter languages of Middle Chinese (about 7th century).
Phonologically each of these modern dialects, Mandarin or Cantonese, very
loosely speaking, is a simplified and modified version of Middle Chinese.
Modern dialects are sisters languages and none of them is developed from the
other. There are many phonological distinctions found in Mandarin but not
found in Cantonese, and vice versa.
Mandarin is good stuff too, but you really have to develop an ear for it as it is a lot different from English. From the perspective of many native English speakers it sounds silly; however once you are accustomed to speaking it it really is a lovely language ^_^
Hmm...I wish that you could be a little more specific about these invaders. I really tend to doubt this claim. As I recall, Classical Chinese (Tang Dynasty) is supposed to have sounded like Fujianese/taiwanese dialect. I have never heard that classical Chinese was like cantonese.
Of course, you might make the claim that because cantonese continues to use some words considered archaic in mandarin (for example, compare the way that you would say "cold" or "to eat/drink"), but that doesn't mean that Cantonese was necessarily THE classical Chinese, instead it is probably just that they have continued to use these words whereas Mandarin has adopted new ones.
Japanese is placed by many linguists in the Altaic language family, which includes Turkish, mongolian and korean- it is easier for most English speakers to speak and understand than sino-tibetan languages such as Chinese or Vietnamese.
I don't necessarily agree that Chinese is any picnic to read/write though, everything is characters, there is no furigana, and many characters can be read in more than one way...
oops sorry, I should have said- "If you are an average Japanese, it is damn hard to find a job". This is something I have heard from many of my Japanese friends who I met in China, one of whom was actually staying in China because he couldn't find a job at home and the cost of living was too expensive for hime to go back, whereas if he stayed as a student in China his parents could easily support him.
Actually if you are in IT and are willing to work there it is very easy to find a job in Japan or China. China is a similar situation if you are an international; however the conditions of living are different there than in Japan as they are more basic and cheap whereas Japan is expensive but nice. If you can find a short-term post I would recommend that you try it at least once. Japanese food is sooo good!
Watch out in Tokyo though, if you get a craving for American food it can set you back plenty.
Just a thought here- People are always making comparisons between books and movies. It is generally said that the book is better than the movie because of greater character development, more plot detail etc which can not be contained in a movie because of time constraints.
Believe it or not, this is also usually true of Anime and Manga(comics). The comics are longer and have better stories and have the added advantage of being better drawn because there are far fewer frames in a comic book than there are cells in an animated movie.
Come to think of it, this also holds true for many American cartoons and their comic book counterparts. Sure, Batman the Animated Series is pretty good, but it lacks the depth of story that the comic has.
Anyway, at present there are not a lot of places in the US to find manga. Also selection is pretty limited. One place to look would be Viz communications www.viz.com. Any others?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, ancient Chinese is different from modern chinese- the words were pronounced differently, they used different meanings for words than the modern meanings- it is just that the words themselves are written more or less the same; however, a modern chinese person cannot just pick up a copy of a classical chinese book, read it and understand it, they have to have studied classical chinese ( which not everybody does) and even then I don't know many people who read this kind of old book on a regular basis.
The same thing is true in Korea, they also have used Chinese characters, after which they came up with their own set of writing which they use much more commonly just as the the Japanese eventually started using kana as well as kanji.
Basically I agree that there are too many differences between the situation in Asia and in Europe to make a good comparison here...
For example, I have sitting in front of me the "Xinhua Zidian", which is a small dictionary generally used by students to look up individual characters as opposed to words. In the front of the dictionary is a list of radicals (ordered by stroke number, with all radicals both simplified and traditional being included) Once you find a radical you can look up a list of all the characters under this radical, and it will tell you where in the dictionary they are; however, the words in the dictionary itself are alphabetical by pinyin, so if you know how to write the pinyin you can also look up words that way. Furthermore, the dictionary also has bopomofo and a conversion table in the back so that you can look up words that way also.
From Spanish mandarín, from Portuguese mandarim, from Malay mntri, from Sanskrit mantr, mantrin- counselor, from mantra, counsel
(from dictionary.com, most sites seem to have the same history of the word, although opinions seem to differ whether the word came into English from Spanish or Portugese)
What about the fact that the east coast recieved many immigrants at the same time and after the settlers were going west? Is it possible that the way that italian immigrants spoke english has had an influence on the way people speak in say, New York or Boston?
Let not lose sight of the fact that it's a waste of time to quibble about whose typing method is faster, the important thing to remember is that a QWERTY keyboard CAN be used and IS being used to type Chinese, already for several years and is a viable method for chinese to use a computer.
Actually a lot of people in HK do not speak mandarin they only speak Cantonese and English, and the ones that do a lot of them speak it only so-so and have accents. People in Guangdong and are different because in the PRC everybody has to learn putonghua; however, still most people have an accent. It is almost always easy to tell when a native cantonese speaker is speaking "guoyu" because their tones and pronounciation are different from standard. This goes both ways, of course, as you can also usually tell a native mandarin speaker from the way they speak cantonese and the words that they use.
It's not that one is easier than the other, it's that they are different languages.
The reason that more cantonese speakers speak Mandarin than Mandarin speakers speak Cantonese is that Cantonese is a regional "dialect", whereas Mandarin is the national language: now most every young person in all of China and Taiwan all must learn to speak Mandarin, but only people in Guangdong and HK speak cantonese. For people in other parts of China, there are a lot of other Chinese "dialects" that you rarely hear about, and usually people only speak their own one really well, but at the same time they speak mandarin with an accent.
This is inaccurate. Never in Japanese history has there been a period when the majority of the Japanese "upper class" spoke chinese in the same sense that upper-class Europeans in the 1700s/1800s spoke French.
FYI- there is no such word as "Mandarin" in Chinese- it is a term that originated from pidgin in the Guangzhou area in the 1700s or 1800s and comes originally from either Spanish or Portugese roots, as it is somehow derived from "mandar" (to command or order). The word was originally used to refer to officials posted to the area, who gave commands. The reason that this word eventually became attached to a language is that the officials came from outside of Guangzhou, and so they spoke a different language than that of the natives (as I said in other posts, there is a lot of reason to consider dialects of Chinese as different languages), so the language spoken by the officials was referred to as "mandarin". This name has stuck around like a lot of other terms, such as the name "China", which also is not originally a Chinese word
Also, historically modern Chinese was different than middle chinese-the pronunciations used in modern chinese have only been standardized fairly recently, and many Chinese people in previous generations do not speak particularly "standard" Chinese.
An example: Japan is also part of the high-tech world: even though it is not in Europe or North America, it is where a lot of the technology in "high-tech" western Europe and North America comes from.
The same thing can be said to a somewhat lesser degeree of South Korea and Taiwan. Hong Kong and Singapore are also highly developed.
There is software in common use which makes this possible: first type in pinyin and then select from a list of characters. This is probably the only system that anybody young enough to use a computer uses and is also the simplest as most young people can already write pinyin.
In Taiwan it is supposedly different: they have their own keyboard that uses their own writing system that is derived from chinese but is nevertheless a way of phonetically spelling chinese words. I don't think that many people outside of Taiwan use this system, but in Taiwan they have computer keyboards with this writing on the keys.
This is a fairly complicated topic. First of all, in many areas of China mandarin is not the language commonly spoken by the native people.There are many "dialects", a misnomer in that dialects of Chinese are dialects in the same sense that Spanish, Italian and French are dialects of one another- many Chinese dialects cannot be understood by Mandarin speakers. For example, say we are in Shanghai. Local people all speak Shanghainese to each other (Shanghainese is one of the main Wu dialects, which are spoken in east-central China). Shanghainese and Mandarin have about the same relation as English and German, or possibly more distant. Still, everybody in Shanghai is taught Mandarin in school, and most television is in Mandarin. Plus, written Chinese is more or less the same no matter what dialect you speak, although there are some minor differences.
On the mainland, most everybody has to study a "second language", actually a third language(the favorites are English(probably over 90%) Japanese and Russian);however, people there have the same problems that Americans have in that they have little chance to practice speaking and small chance of ever going to another country where they have the chance to interact with native speakers.
In addition, Chinese English instruction is more focused on written language anyway. As a result, many educated people can read and write quite well, but if you talked to them would have more difficulty in communicating.
Certainly, when you burn a CD of free MP3s the price of the product placed on it effectively drops to $0!
Nimoy: My work is done here...
Bart:"But you didn't doanything!"
Nimoy: Oh didn't I? (Beams out, star trek sound effect)
The reason that prices were so high for previous nintendo systems is that the price of making cartridges is higher than making cds, which is why playstation games are cheaper than n64 games. Now that nintendo is also using CDs the games will be about the same price as Playststion games.
What is new about most Nintendo games lately? Not much, actually. Most of the games they make are simply reincarnations of "franchise" games that they have been making since NES and SNES. Examples: Mario, Mario Kart, Pilotwings and Zelda are all good for starters. Also before nintendo and square parted ways there was final fantasy (and I wish there STILL was final fantasy on nintendo).
Chip Manufacturers?: because their chips are being used in computers that are being used to listen to mp3s!!!
Hard Drive Manufacturers?:their hard drives are being used to store mp3s until they can be traded!!!
speaker manufacturers?: their speakers are being used to listen to etc. etc. etc.
seriously, there are far too many frivolous lawsuits relating to mp3s these days- and this latest suit against AOL is a good example of one.
Answer: Cloning, as in, somebody will start cloning humans in order to test things like how genetic modifications work, otherwise such testing would get really messy.
I think that a even lot of people who might be willing to say, test a new drug might shrink at the thought of having their DNA modified for test purposes...this will also mean that it will take genetic technology a bit longer to develop
I would say rather that in the future people might use genetics to modify the human body in order to make it more long-lived, quicker-thinking etc. etc.
Phonologically each of these modern dialects, Mandarin or Cantonese, very loosely speaking, is a simplified and modified version of Middle Chinese. Modern dialects are sisters languages and none of them is developed from the other. There are many phonological distinctions found in Mandarin but not found in Cantonese, and vice versa.
Mandarin is good stuff too, but you really have to develop an ear for it as it is a lot different from English. From the perspective of many native English speakers it sounds silly; however once you are accustomed to speaking it it really is a lovely language ^_^
Of course, you might make the claim that because cantonese continues to use some words considered archaic in mandarin (for example, compare the way that you would say "cold" or "to eat/drink"), but that doesn't mean that Cantonese was necessarily THE classical Chinese, instead it is probably just that they have continued to use these words whereas Mandarin has adopted new ones.
I don't necessarily agree that Chinese is any picnic to read/write though, everything is characters, there is no furigana, and many characters can be read in more than one way...
Actually if you are in IT and are willing to work there it is very easy to find a job in Japan or China. China is a similar situation if you are an international; however the conditions of living are different there than in Japan as they are more basic and cheap whereas Japan is expensive but nice. If you can find a short-term post I would recommend that you try it at least once. Japanese food is sooo good!
Watch out in Tokyo though, if you get a craving for American food it can set you back plenty.
Believe it or not, this is also usually true of Anime and Manga(comics). The comics are longer and have better stories and have the added advantage of being better drawn because there are far fewer frames in a comic book than there are cells in an animated movie.
Come to think of it, this also holds true for many American cartoons and their comic book counterparts. Sure, Batman the Animated Series is pretty good, but it lacks the depth of story that the comic has.
Anyway, at present there are not a lot of places in the US to find manga. Also selection is pretty limited. One place to look would be Viz communications www.viz.com. Any others?