Written Language

Written Language

Recently, I’ve started learning Mandarin Chinese. Like most people, I came in thinking the complex writing system would be the hardest part, so I was pleasantly surprised to learn how intuitive it actually is. Unlike most writing systems, Chinese hanzi do not provide any direct information about how to pronounce them and only represent meaning. At first, this seems very difficult and unintuitive as you would have to either look up the character in a dictionary of some kind or ask a native speaker (or even use a TTS) to know how it sounds and even after that, you still need to remember how it’s pronounced and even how to say the tones (which is hard for people unfamiliar with tonal languages) to be able to read it aloud again. However, as I started to use the language more (which, as of me starting this article, has only been a week), I found a beauty in the separation of the written language from the spoken language.

See, one of the first things I learned about hanzi is that they can mostly be read in any language that uses them whether it be Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean, etc. since they just contain meanings, not phonetic information (obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but I won’t get into that here). This means that the same characters can be pronounced differently by different languages or dialects but still have mostly the same meaning. I didn’t fully appreciate this until I started to actually use hanzi to text my Chinese friends (btw, typing in Chinese is wonderful and I’ll talk more about that later) and found that even if I had forgotten how to pronounce a character, I could still remember what it means and sometimes just read it in English in my head. Of course, I still look up the pinyin to remember how to pronounce it so I can actually speak it, but I really appreciated how I could just look at a character and know what it’s supposed to mean before knowing how to say it. With alphabet-based languages like English, reading works the same way as over time, you eventually become familiar with the shape of the word, not the individual letters and they have the advantage of still having phonetic information to pronounce them, but as I learned more about Chinese, I started to appreciate just how much meaning can be put into each character.

Now, I am going to butcher this explanation as I am not yet an expert on Chinese characters, but I hope I can still make you appreciate how it works. Basically, hanzi are typically made up of multiple smaller characters squished together into one character. For example, 好, meaning “good” is made up of 女(woman) and 子(child). 我(meaning I or me) is made up of 手(hand) and 戈(meaning spear, halberd, etc.). Even then, those simpler characters can sometimes be broken down further, or you can even go the other way around and form more complex characters with new meanings. Most of the time, there is no logical coherence to how these characters are formed, mainly due to the language itself evolving naturally over several thousands of years of people using it, but it does mean that new characters can be created. I think the best way to show this is with the Chinese periodic table of elements. The video I embedded below best explains it, but I will try my best to give a brief summary. Basically, each hanzi has a specific smaller character within in called its “radical” which helps to identify it (think of it like the first letter in a word so you can look it up in a dictionary). With the periodic table, each element’s hanzi is given a radical to represent its state of matter at room temperature, so gasses like oxygen (氧) would have the radical 气 to indicate that they are normally gasses, while Mercury (汞) has the radical 水(water) to indicate that it’s a liquid at room temperature. The video explains much better the brilliance of how the rest of the character is formed, but my point is that every single one of the elements in the periodic table gets its own unique character that tells you a basic property of that element and also makes it so that they can be pronounced with a single syllable!

Before I continue to my next point, I’d like to talk a bit about typing in Chinese because it is perhaps my favourite thing about the language. There are obviously many different ways to input Chinese characters into a computer due to the complexity of the writing system, but the way that I and many other people type is using the pinyin keyboard. For those unaware, pinyin is the official and most common system for romanizing Chinese characters (i.e. turning them into Latin alphabet letters). This means that you get to use the same keyboard you’d use for typing in English to type in the pinyin for the words you want and then you get a text prediction like on your phone keyboard that shows a list of hanzi that are pronounced that way. Now, at first it just seems like the same as typing any other language since you’re just typing in the letters as you’d pronounced them, but I found that the text prediction is smart enough that most of the time, you can type a whole sentence with a few key presses! For example, say I wanted to type 我是快乐 (I am happy). I could just type the pinyin “Wo shi kuaile” (idk how to type the tones); however, I could also hit the keys “W S 1 K L 1” and get the same result (btw, the “1” means that I chose the first prediction that showed up). That’s 6 total key presses compared to the 13 I would have done if I typed the whole pinyin. Unfortunately, I still have to use a handwriting input to type less common characters like some people’s names, but in every day use, the pinyin keyboard is extremely fast at inputting information. I’m normally not that fast at typing in English (even with text prediction) and I’m not fluent enough in Chinese yet to know how much faster I am typing in it, but I’ve found that when I switch back to texting in English, it feels so much more clunky than when I type in Chinese, and it made me really appreciate the language so much more.

I’ve been hyping up written Chinese for this whole article so far. Does that mean I think it’s the greatest system in the world and that everyone should switch to it so we can all experience its greatness and 中国永远? No, not all all. But learning all this about the language made me really appreciate the diversity of languages around the world and why we should make an effort to study and preserve languages as much as we can. It’s especially important to preserve both the written and spoken forms of languages because it’s the relationship between both parts that make up the whole language. With Chinese, there is a massively interdependent relationship between the spoken form and written form as there are some things that can be conveyed in the written language but not the spoken language and the same thing in the opposite direction. One cannot be fully understood without the other and if suddenly all Chinese speakers (and computer TTS programs) disappeared and we only had the written texts or conversely if we lost all records of written Chinese and all Chinese speakers had to only speak the language or write with a different system, then there would be so much of the language lost. It would basically be dead. And this interdependent relationship between the spoken and written language made me think about how other languages have a similar thing going on. Maybe not as much, but let me explain.

I think the first thing that made me think about all this is capital letters. Grammatically, capital letters signify the beginning of a sentence or a proper noun, and other languages that don’t have an uppercase set of letters usually have their own way of signifying these or don’t even need to at all. However, from a cultural perspective, capital letters provide some things that can’t be truly represented in other languages. For example, TYPING IN ALL CAPS LIKE THIS CAN SIGNIFY YELLING WHICH NORMALLY CAN ONLY BE CONVEYED THROUGH SPOKEN LANGUAGE BUT WITH ALPHABETS LIKE LATIN OR CYRILLIC WHICH HAVE UPPERCASE LETTERS, YOU CAN CONVEY YELLING THROUGH TEXT ALONE. Also, sarcasm and mockery often are difficult to convey outside of spoken language, but iF yOu aLtErNaTe BeTwEeN cApiTaL aNd LoWeRcAsE LeTtErS LiKe tHiS, yOu cAn MaKe iT oBviOuS tHaT yOu DoN’t iNtEnD tO bE tAkEn sEriOuSLy. Some people online have started to use what they call tone indicators to indicate things like sarcasm, mainly to help neurodivergent people who normally can’t pick up on that, but for the most part, I think my point still stands that capital letters are an example of a feature of written language that adds a whole new layer of self-expression to a language.

As I thought on this further, I started to see a lot more examples of things even in English that show the interdependence of written and spoken language. The most obvious thing I could think of are jokes and puns. Some puns and jokes only make sense when spoken aloud, some only when written down, and some require the cultural context of both the spoken and written language. I can’t name any specific ones in English off the top of my head, but there is a joke I will mention later that only makes sense spoken aloud, but that has more to do with my later point about interdependence between completely different languages. Anyway, I digress. With written English, you can also see examples of how the written form of a word doesn’t always represent the spoken form, almost like with what I mentioned earlier about written Chinese being separate from the spoken form. With English, it’s mainly due to the inconsistent spelling rules, but the concept is still there. For example, “there”, “their”, and “they’re” are pronounced exactly the same in spoken English and cannot be differentiated on their own without context, but their written forms can be instantly distinguished at a glance. On the other end, you have words like “live” which are always written the same way but have a different meaning or even pronunciation and are only differentiated by context or from spoken word. For the most part, there’s not as much of a disparity between the spoken and written language in English as with Chinese, but you can start to see my point that basically every language only really makes sense with both parts.

A lot of my points really just boil down to cultural context because every natural language arises from groups of people communicating each other. That’s why spoken Mandarin can still be understood even though almost all the words sound like another word. The words themselves don’t necessarily convey the meaning, it’s their interaction and placement with other words that do. And of course, no natural language exists within a vacuum as they are spoken by people who speak with other groups of people who may speak other language. This means that every language is influenced by other languages as well. And sometimes, the interaction between two or more different languages can provide new cultural context that can’t be conveyed by either language alone.

If you’re reading this, unless you’ve translated it to your own language, it means you know English and therefore would know that almost all English words are either borrowed or evolved from other languages (to be fair, that’s most languages, but modern English is a relatively young language and unlike most languages, doesn’t really have direct roots to an older language like how Spanish and French stem from Latin). But yeah, like the text in parentheses says, most languages also borrow from other languages. Usually, this happens between neighboring groups of people, like how the Japanese adopted the Chinese writing system into Kanji while also adopting some of their words and at the same time some words in Chinese are borrowed from Japanese. Other times, it happens from huge migrations of people to other lands, like how most Filipino languages have a lot of words from the Spanish language due to the conquistadors settling there or the English word “boondock” coming from the Tagalog word for mountain due to the Philippine-American war. You can even find some huge examples of a bunch of languages mixing together into a unique one like Hawaiian Pidgin which is a mix of a ton of different languages from different groups of immigrants working together. I’m running out of examples that I can name off the top of my head, but hopefully you get my point. Anyway, I mentioned earlier about a joke that can only be spoken aloud to make sense. It’s a joke my dad used to tell when I was a kid, but it only makes sense if you speak both English and Tagalog. It’s a knock-knock joke that goes something like this: “Knock-knock” “Who’s there?” “Ako maba” “Ako maba who?” and it ends there because the recipient of the joke is supposed to realise they just said “I smell bad” in Tagalog and it doesn’t work for someone who doesn’t speak the language because for one, they likely wouldn’t be able to repeat the “Ako maba” line and also, it doesn’t follow the usual “knock-knock” joke structure where the person telling the joke says the punch line. There must be more examples out there to further drive my point, but I think it’s enough to illustrate that these cultural differences are what make the interactions between different groups so beautiful.

I don’t know how to continue without rambling and repeating most of my points, so I’ll end it with this thought I had about forcing everyone in the world to have the same language. There are some people out there who genuinely think that we should all speak the same language or that we should switch to a universal writing system like the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). I mean, I think what I’ve mentioned throughout this are enough to illustrate why that’s a terrible idea, but even then, I don’t think these people realise just how much you limit humanity as a whole by having only one language. Even with computer programming languages, we embrace a huge variety of them because even though they are all Turing complete and can mostly do the same things, there are things in some languages that you just can’t do in others. And since language is our way of communicating with other humans, it affects our way of thinking and therefore allows people of different backgrounds have different systems of thought. Sure, English is pretty much a universal language at this point since it’s the language of the internet which spans the whole globe, but having it be the only one severely limits the human experience. And before I end this post, I’d like to rant about the concept of universal translators in science fiction. Most of the time, they’re just used as a plot device so the writers don’t have to come up with new languages or even explain why everyone speaks the same language as humans, but I think what bothers me about them is that they often imply that every thought can be directly translated to another language which simply isn’t true. I get not wanting to come up with new languages, but when they don’t show any cultural differences between alien races, it breaks a lot of the immersion for me. I think an example of where this is done brilliantly is in Star Trek, specifically in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where they’re having dinner with an alien race (I don’t remember which one lol it’s been a long time) and the aliens storm off as they are offended by something, but the crew’s translator can’t figure out what because what they’re saying can’t be directly translated to English. To be fair, this isn’t really an example of the universal translator trope as they did have the aliens speaking a different language, but my point is that they put in a little extra effort to show that some things cannot be translated perfectly to other languages and I get that a lot of writers want to keep things simple, but surely it wouldn’t hurt to have a few small details to show cultural differences between us and the alien races. Also, another fun example I just remembered was in Godzilla: Final Wars where one of the Xiliens is asked for his name and he simply tells them to call him X since his name cannot be pronounced by humans. It’s such a small detail, but it just adds so much intrigue to this alien race because it tells us that the way they normally communicate with each other is something that humans can’t do. It’s like how bees communicate with dance moves but probably won’t be able to understand us if we do the same moves since we don’t have the same body parts (unless it’s just the motion of their entire body, but you get my point). My point is that we need to be more aware of our cultural and linguistic differences to really appreciate the human experience. Yeah, I think that’s good enough for now. Okay, back to work.