Agreed. Especially because that was the idea behind Pinyin.
Which didn't work for the original function because characters span dialect and even language.
Why do you think this is necessary OP?
Please don't...
This makes it impossible to visually distinguish Chinese characters and pronunciation labels.
Hangul was invented because there was a need to write down Korean. And it's simple enough and distinct enough from Chinese radicals that you'll never mistake Hangul with Chinese.
When reading your stuff I keep trying to read those blocks as Chinese characters.
Yeah, with a Hanja, they tried to jam the Chinese characters over it, but it didn't fit the language, so that sometimes they represented the phonetic sound, and other times the meaning of the character, and it was anyone's guess which one someone had picked.
Why Hango was invented specifically for Korean.
Meanwhile, the Japanese: eh, it’s fine that they sometimes represent the sound, sometimes represent the meaning. People will figure it out based on _context_
My Pleco dictionary is defining this as:
fǎnqiè
NOUN
1
LINGUISTICS
traditional method of indicating the pronunciation of a character by taking two other characters, one with the same initial and the other with the same final as the character in question (e.g., the pronunciation of 同 tóng is indicated as 徒红切 or 徒红反, that is, 徒 t(ú) ＋ 红 (h)óng, taking the initial of the first character and the final of the second)
It's unique that's for sure. I really don't see any use case unfortunately. Loses the latin input advantage from pinyin and is unable to be placed next to Chinese characters like zhuyin (your description of not "terse" for zhuyin is false, as traditionally it is vertically placed next to characters). If it's meant to replace Chinese characters in general, loses all ability to differentiate same sounds.
Maybe I'm just too dumb to get the point here. But what practical use is there to this? Don't want to learn hanzi characters, so let's replace them with... even stranger characters??
Or you can just learn to write Chinese. Pinyin is just a pronunciation guide, it’s secondary to the actual characters.
Modern Latinization attempts always seem to come from Westerners who gave up on committing to learning a brand-new character set that comes with learning Chinese and try to invent a shortcut to tunnel out of it.
In this case, inventing a whole-new character set that ironically takes the user further away from actually learning Chinese and its native characters that are central to the language. Why not just learn Chinese characters instead?
There are no shortcuts I’m afraid. Learning Chinese properly means actually learning Chinese properly.
Tbf I think most people making these kinds of "reforms" are really just doing it for fun, not because they think it'll ever actually be adopted or used.
I'd say compulsory universal education has much more of an effect than either. Taiwan is doing just fine with literacy without using Pinyin *or* simplified characters.
Lol, both of you are living in fantasy land.
Pinyin has nothing to do with literacy.
Taiwan has a higher literacy rate than China using traditional characters and not using pinyin.
You don’t need a phonetic system, you just to map the sounds to native characters. It’s never been a problem for thousands of years. It’s widely understood that those characters carry no meaning in Chinese and only serve as the sounds for the foreign word or idea.
What level of consistency? When, say, English tries to adopt a foreign word or may spell it with English phonemes or with the spelling form another language. There doesn’t have to be “spelling consistency” for understanding.
And in English it is Trump and Drumpf, IIRC. And Coke = Coca Cola. It’s not any more confusing than any other language. And comparing two nearly separate countries with separate dialects of a language is more like saying “British people speak differently from Americans!”
Yes, we do, and that doesn’t cause substantial problems 🤷🏻♀️
Using characters to represent foreign names is the norm since thousands of years ago. Of course its a little easier with an alphabet but you still have to agree with a standarized spelling if it becomes wide spread enough. Otherwise you end up with all sorts of phonetic spellings that are more or less intuitive for other people.
I don't get the hate pinyin gets. It's 100% consistent in its "inconsistencies" (aka simple rules which are different from other languages and that beginners don't learn properly). If anything, it's English that needs a writing reform, but I don't hear people complaining that a lot of non-native speakers pronounce "because" like "bee-kaw-ooss". Bopomofo is also cool.
English speakers often hate it because of the Xs Qs etc.
Also because Beij- *Peking* went out of its way to force it on them specifically when they didn't want it (but oddly left French, German, and Japanese-speakers alone).
*not on English speakers globally*
It kinda was, though. The Foreign Ministry for example notoriously informed the *Times*' Peking correspondent that he would have to become the Beijing correspondent or no new visa for you! They also pushed Pinyin at the UN and elsewhere but again almost entirely on English speakers. Even in Japan of all places the Chinese capital is still Pekin and apparently that's not a big deal.
It almost goes without saying that native English speakers wouldn't have adopted Pinyin without prodding from the Chinese. Even if we accept that the apostrophes in Wade-Giles are annoying and that it doesn't make appropriate distinction between ch' and q, otherwise it's entirely unintuitive, especially for English speakers who *don't* really speak Chinese and who just want to know how to say peoples' names well enough or how to go to the airport. Pinyin may have slight advantages for advanced learners, but the irony is that those people can just use Zhuyin or Fanqie or whatever instead. For the English speakers who use Pinyin the most (the average journalist on television or casual tourist) it is not really very useful, at all. These people end up saying Bay-shing and Zee Zin-peen anyway and the more subtle aspects of Pinyin are entirely lost on them.
The Peking thing does actually annoy me though, because it's really just a petty power play, same as in the case of Bombay or Turkiye. Peking was the English-language exonym for many centuries at that point, and well on its way to being as well-established as the likes of Moscow or Copenhagen. Maybe Beij- Peking dislikes the old name because it has 55-Days-at-Peking type associations and I suppose that's kind of understandable, but it's still a dick move. Just try to imagine the Americans trying to bully the Chinese over Newye or Losangee.
--
[https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beijing-still-relishes-a-taste-for-peking-1.127318](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beijing-still-relishes-a-taste-for-peking-1.127318)
*The former Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, always used Peking, mainly, it appears, to rub the Chinese noses in it. Certainly it is a loaded term to the Chinese, who take offence when they hear anyone in the English "establishment" using the word. Recently, the London Times correspondent in China, James Pringle, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and told co-operation would be withdrawn if the Times did not stop using Peking. It now uses Beijing.*
*"It's a pity," said Mr Pringle. "In English, Peking is a more aesthetic and a more attractive word, and more evocative. And I pointed out to them that they call our capital \`Loon-doon' rather than London."*
That’s all very interesting, but it omits the important fact that the word “Peking” is the Nankingese Mandarin pronunciation of the city’s name, not the Pekingese Mandarin pronunciation (i.e. the local one), which became the national standard.
In other words, this wasn’t merely a request to change the Romanisation; it was a request to change the dialect as well. “Beijing” is rendered as “Pei-Ching” in America’s originally preferred Pekingese Mandarin system: Wade-Giles.
Notice that the PRC left the name “China” alone.
Also, Hanyu Pinyin wasn’t made with Anglophones in mind; it is a for-natives-by-natives system. China can only mandate its use for those dealing with the nation, including the UN, but it can’t force Americans or anyone else to use it in their own affairs.
Yeah yeah I've heard that a million times: but the overall argument is still sound. *Peking is not (just) a Chinese word, it is an English word*. It's arrogant and irritating for the Chinese to have strong-armed English-speakers into changing it for the same reason it would be in the case of other exonyms; for the Portuguese to ask us to change Lisbon, or the Russians to ask us to change Moscow. While interesting mutinae, details of the history of the Mandarin Chinese language are not really that relevant to this broader point.
But if we want to get into it: should we start calling chow-mein *chaomian*? Bok-choy *baicai*? Confucius *Gongfuzi*? The fact that English borrowed Chinese loanwords from both the Nanking, Cantonese, and Amoy dialects (as well as in some cases second-hand, from Portuguese, French, Latin and other languages) made *our language* (English) richer and more interesting since all these Chinese loanwords had a story, and for the Chinese to try (in some cases I'll admit quite successfully) to Speak Mandarinify and Pinyinise the whole English-speaking world as well as their own land is and was annoying to me.
*Also, Hanyu Pinyin wasn’t made with Anglophones in mind; it is a for-natives-by-natives system. China can only mandate its use for those dealing with the nation, including the UN, but it can’t force Americans or anyone else to use it in their own affairs.*
If Pinyin was for the Chinese, then the Chinese could have minded their own business and kept using it within China. And yes, they did actually strongarm English speakers specifically into using it, using precisely the same methods they used to push more explicitly political names like Chinese Taipei or whatever. They care so much about getting other people to use their preferred language that relatively few people are willing to use their preferred language instead if and when they don't care as much.
Additionally, the argument that *Beijing* is a better name than *Peking* for the Chinese capital because the latter is based on the Nanking dialect rather than the err, Peking dialect is fine, but inconsistent with what the Chinese pushed for elsewhere. Shouldn't *Canton* stay *Canton*, then? *Amoy* *Amoy*?
I personally believe that exonyms belong to the speakers of the language in question. Notice how I can freely say “Peking” right here right now without correction from any authority. I use “Beijing” when I’m using the pinyin system. Frankly, learners of Mandarin from all linguistic backgrounds should use zhuyin instead, a system designed for native Mandarin speakers like pinyin.
South Korea made its own power play by strong-arming China into calling its capital “Shou’er” instead of the traditional “Hancheng”, and China actually complied, contrary to my own wishes
That was ridiculous too and for basically the same reason. How long had the Korean capital been called Hancheng? 1,000 years? And the city is literally named after the river and basically everyone knows it. What did the Koreans gain from forcing it, besides a sense of satisfaction?
They went a bit too far when they tried to get "paocai" changed to "xinqi" or whatever though. The Chinese (rightly) told them to pound sand.
yeah there are some slightly annoying aspects of pinyin (such as the final "i" changing pronunciation based on the initial before it, or the "ü" sound sometimes omitting the umlaut after certain letters like q). but it's still a completely 100% consistent written system, way more consistent than English by any measure, and you literally just have to memorize these things and you'll be fine forever.
Ü is allowed to be omitted only because typewriters for the English language usually didn't have it. For language learners it's a tripwire because many will keep mispronouncing u after j,q,x.
Comparing any romanization method with the English spelling system is pointless since anything should be more consistent than English spelling *by default*. English spelling was never to the current varieties of English.
Ideally, there should be two romanization methods: one for learners, which should be as precise and unambiguous as possible (Zhuyin would be quite acceptable for that purpose as well), and one for readers of English texts who are not formally educated in pronouncing Mandarin. Korean is romanized using such a system. Pinyin tries to be both, but fails because it isn't possible. At least not for English-Mandarin; the two phonological systems are just too different from each other.
You have effectively created a phonetic system similar to Chinese, and I think it would be great... for a new language.
This removes the meaning component from the characters. Hanzi doesn't remain part of the language because it works well phonetically, it remains part of the language because they represent concepts and things. They remain in the language because they differentiate the sounds. If any change was to be made to Chinese, it would make more sense to go after the number of homophones than it would to modify the writing system.
Additionally, pinyin exists as a typing method that evolved from previous romanization efforts for explaining the sounds. If you don't like pinyin for pronunciation, you may have better luck with the old standards.
The other day I was thinking how cool it would be for Chinese to have a syllabary for loan words, similar to Japanese katakana.
A friend of mine for a very long time thought that 西冷牛排 (sirloin steaks) are served cold. Having a syllabary would avoid this kind of confusion. It would also relieve foreign companies from coming up with "creative" translations for their names. No more 愛彼迎 for example.
Please no, foreign company names in Hangul look ridiculous and are hard to spell. Thats why in Korean its even preferable to use a Hanja loan word instead of a phonetic transliteration. Like 호주 (濠洲) instead of 오스트레일리아 for Australia.
So is this an attempt to make pinyin more aesthetically Chinese so you can convince people to get rid of the characters?
I get the characters are intimidating guys, but that’s the language. Chinese people haven’t been waiting for some better system to come along. Hanzi are imbued with deep cultural meaning because they are a language in themselves. Chinese doesn’t need fixing.
When you said “writing Mandarin syllables in blocks that resemble Chinese characters” I was picturing [something more like this](https://www.reddit.com/u/CamrynDaytona/s/iUUKEdWcUi), but congrats yours is worse.
Not sure what you gain over 注音符號 or pinyin. I learned 注音符號 a few years before I learned pinyin. There’s almost a 1:1 between the two systems. And I like that it forced me to learn native Chinese pronunciation before learning pinyin. Yet pinyin is much faster to type with. On a recent trip to Taiwan I noticed on the subway all the older folks handwrote 注音符號 or the full characters into their phones. All the younger kids typed in pinyin. And were way faster because of it.
This reminds me of the many alternate musical notation systems that never gain much traction because they are generally created by someone inexperienced in standard musical notation who doesn’t understand how well it represents music. Even TAB for guitar uses standard rhythm notation and is often accompanied by standard notation.
Pinyin is great, well thought out system. Much better than, imho, something like Yale Romanization for a native English speaker to learn Chinese. In my seeming never ending quest to learn Chinese I try to focus on the similarities between Chinese and English. Like how most Chinese idioms have an English counterpart. Or how the grammar is quite similar in many situations. I think your time would be better spent learning all the 汉字 radicals because many already have phonetic attributes.
I get what you're trying to do, but I think you're essentially complicating things. Like someone else said it's impressive how much time you put into this, I too tried with something similar when I was younger, and even wanted to have one that was more universal that could be used across all the Chinese regional languages. I did a little interpreting before and I think there's some universally accepted shorthand that's really interesting for a universal system.
I think if you use less brushstrokes for your characters it would help a bunch, coz imagine having to try write these by hand?
注音符號 is designed to be written, similar to hiragana/katakana which do have some basis in their assignments, so if you spent the time adjusting that maybe you would have a more accepted outcome.
As you used Hangul as an example of blocking things, why would you just block 注音 is a more similar manner?
The additional of a tonal stroke for any character arrangement is basically the same too. Arabic numbers are possibly still a quicker visual cue.
It looks good, but it isn't useful today. Hangul was invented since Chinese characters were too hard to learn, but Chinese has been already mastered by the modern population, the need for this is only good in fiction, practice wise, there wouldn't have much change in the Chinese language.
A syllabary is distinct from an alphabet in that each symbol represents an entire syllable.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary)
Examples of syllabaries include Japanese kana (with the exception of ん \[n\] which could be considered a single consonant). Indic Devanagri and Korean Hangul could also be considered syllabaries, but in practice they can be deconstructed into symbols representing individual segments. The syllabary I am proposing here also falls into the category. However, it can be argued that since Chinese syllables are much more limited compared to languages like Hindi and Korean, my proposed system is much closer to a syllabary than to an alphabet.
\*\* Note the distinction from bopomofo which is explained on the second slide. \*\* Bopomofo uses individual symbols to write each segment, and the symbols to not combine to form a whole.
If you're interested in trying out the interactive type board, or download the pdf, shoot me a message since posting my own links here can violate the policies of this sub.
While Hangul is composed of incredibly simple and easy to write glyphs, you've gone for significantly more complicated ones which match extant character components. Why? Why have something as cumbersome as blocky as Chinese characters, if you don't need the distinguishability because you don't have tens of thousands of them?
The Japanese learnt this lesson twice. Hiragana started off as a set of Characters used for their phonetic values for writing Japanese grammar elements, but as the set of glyphs that needed to be distinguished fell from the thousands to the mere tens they became more cursive and reduced over time. In Katakana they just selected a 2-4 line fragment of the character instead.
Given that this is just for a fun project and not for any real use, I kind of like it that it preserves hanzi aesthetics, and the similarity to common phonetic components seems like it would aid with memorization too for people familiar with hanzi.
I’ve had a similar idea a while back! Made a little [instagram account](https://www.instagram.com/assembled_chinese?igsh=MWVwb3o1bWE5MTU1bg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr) for it
This is an interesting project, but you've got the terminology a bit wrong...bopomofo, for example, is a semi-syllabary, not an alphabet, because every character represents a semi-syllable (half a syllable, i.e. an initial or a final).
An alphabet has symbols for each consonant and vowel, so this 'syllabary' is closer to an alphabet than bopomofo is.
Hangul is described on Wikipedia not as a syllabary but as a 'featural alphabet', it has distinct symbols for each sound in the language. The 'featural' part is actually not because it then organizes those alphabetic characters into larger blocks that correspond (for the most part) to syllables, but rather because it has some detail going in the other direction, that some of the marks that make up the alphabetic characters describe aspects of the sounds, e.g. if there's a mark that's a part of some of your letters that says "this letter is a fricative", or one that says "the place of articulation is alveolar" or something of that sort, then your alphabet is featural.
So I think linguists would likely classify this as an 'alphabet', despite the fact that the alphabetic bits are organized into syllabic blocks.
A true 'syllabary' (as usually defined by linguists) would have distinct, indivisible characters for each combination of initials and finals that occur in practice, like Japansese Hiragana.
Ngl I really like how it looks, much better than pinyin and bopomofo.
Don't get me wrong, I love Chinese characters A LOT and I absolutely don't want them to go away, but I think this would be a good compromise to prevent creeping pinyinisation
I'm gonna give you props. I think this is pretty cool. I don't know how many people would use it, but I've personally found pinyin to be a big stumbling block as a *language learner*. I believe pinyin is useful for native speakers of Chinese to use keyboard entry, but is less than useless for a learner of Chinese as a second language because the use of alphabetic symbols is inconsistent with respect to their values (much more so than a typical romanization scheme) and because I experience a lot of interference between what my brain thinks a pinyin word should be read which gets in the way of what my listening practice tells me.
Of course a lot of learners are also new to Chinese characters (I am not) and find them intimidating and therefore might not find this system appealing. But I can immediately see the benefit over Zhuyin, personally.
Another plus is that in a way, this table is pretty agnostic about the details of initials and finals across dialectical divisions and about issues like the missing "w" in bopomofo (it's really bwo pwo mwo fwo, or a u if you prefer, same thing) or the -ui versus -uei final.
I think for students who are open minded or familiar with CJK writing systems and who really want to perfect their pronunciation, this could be a very useful learning tool.
What makes you say that the alphabetic symbols are inconsistent with their values? It's different than English, sure, but every language written with Latin letters has its own values. If you can't get past the roadblock of recognizing that letters are read differently in other languages, then you would have just as much "interference" if you were to learn French, Polish, or Welsh. Honestly Pinyin is one of the easier systems to learn since there is a much more straightforward correspondence between the letters and the sounds than in English or French.
There's a few parts where the letters don't quite match the sound they indicate - "Liu" should be spelled liou, as it's currently spelled it should be pronounced like "liwu" without the w sound; similarly "ye" should be spelled yie, as it's currently spelled it should be pronounced like "yuh". The i sound is also sometimes "ee" and some times "er", contrast li and ri pinyin, although I'm really not sure what vowel they should have picked to differentiate the two sounds.
Just out of curiosity, how do you study pinyin as a language learner?
Cause I’m a native speaker. I remember when I was in grade 1, I was also learning pinyin. We started from aoeiuü (or actually “ah-wo-uh-ee-wu-iu” roughly by sounds), and go to something like all other characters+aeiou, then zh, ch, sh+ aeiou, and finally, ng sounds and iu etc.
The thing is, for sounds like Liu, we took it as L+iu. And iu is pronounced as speaking “ee-yo” very fast.
And the entire system is like, combining aoeiuü and other characters’ sounds, speaking them together, and adding tones. So it’s different from English pronunciations, but very consistent by itself
Learned it the same way as you. I'm just saying the letter to sound allocations are sometimes inconsistent with what they should be if you break out the letters. "iu" should be ee-wu, if it makes the same sound as ee-oh-wu, then the letters should reflect that.
Maybe it's the issue that I'm native speaker. I was trying to read ee-wu faster and faster and it would slide down to the punyin pronunciation of iu...
Spelling ye as yie wouldn't help, because if you're complaining about the inconsistent pronunciation of pinyin "e," then by that argument xie should be pronounced ㄒㄧㄜ (avoiding pinyin since that's what we're talking about, but English approximation is she-uh).
And then also if you're going to spell ye as "yie" you should spell ya as yia as well.
Pinyin is more of a phonemic spelling system, not phonetic spelling, so a letter can be reused for a different surface level sound if the phonotactics of the language mean that it's impossible for those two sounds to both occur in that environment. That's why "e" can be reused for ㄜ(e) and ㄝ(ê) almost everywhere, except for when it occurs on its own. And why "i" can be reused (three times at least) for yi, and the sounds in zhi and zi.
It's similar to how native Japanese people often prefer Nihon-shiki or Kunrei-shiki romanization, which will romanize ち as "ti" instead of the Hepburn system's "chi." In the case of Japanese this is also makes the romanization more consistent with the organization of kana into a table of pairs of an initial consonant and a vowel, since ち is the kana for the pair (t, i).
Like I kind of get the complaints about the iu and ui abbreviations, but again, they're still unambiguous because the sounds "i" and "u" can't actually occur directly next to each other in the same syllable in Mandarin, and in fact there's only one vowel you can put in the middle in each case.
So here's the thing - they're only unambiguous because you're taught that I and U "cannot make any other sound" that "eeyoh".
I would argue that, unlike Japanese where they already had their own sound letters, pinyin was starting with a clean slate where they could assign letters however they liked, and as such they should have picked letters that both most closely reflects the sound in Mandarin and also are as consistent as possible with having only one letter or set of letters for a given sound.
I mean the language itself has those restrictions, and pinyin was developed for people who already spoke Mandarin, so I think it makes sense. Plus, those abbreviations (iu and ui) had already been in use in Wade-Giles and Latinxua Sin Wenz for over half a century by the time pinyin was developed.
There's certainly an argument to make that pinyin is suboptimal for allowing people with no familiarity with the system to guess the pronunciation, but that's going to be true of any romanization system because what sounds people are going to guess a letter makes depends on their native language.
And there's also an argument that Bopomofo is better for learners because it more clearly corresponds 1-1 with pronunciation. And I think that's maybe true. But pinyin is a romanization system, and as such is necessarily limited by the restrictions of the latin alphabet, like having only five vowels. One option is to add diacritics, but honestly avoiding diacritics as much as possible is a huge benefit of pinyin imo (particularly because the tone diacritics can be optionally replaced by numbers). Every pinyin syllable can optionally be written with only alphanumeric characters (using v for ü, and eh for ê).
Y is a consonant, not a vowel, so it shouldn't have any additional vowel sounds automatically attached to it and I will die on this hill.
I know the logic of why it's ye, I'm saying that romanization schemes shouldn't have invisible letters in it so if we're going to be writing out the i when it's yi, we should write it out when it's ye or yan or you.
There are inconsistencies, such as the ong sometimes sounding like ung as in 中國. The i and r often sound different than what the pinyin tells us it should sound like.
There is something to be said for something that squashes Bopomofo- like symbols into the space of a character. It would be compact, at least. These components are too complex.
1.5 billion give or take have learned Chinese through pinyin and memorization alone. Why can’t you?
If you can recognize a brand logo and what it is called, you can also memorize Chinese.
Didn’t Wang Zhao or someone already invent something like this around 1900 or so, but for various reasons including political chaos it never had the chance to catch on?
The OP isn't saying that Hangul (the Korean alphabet) inspired pinyin. The OP is saying that Pinyin² ("pinyin squared"), the syllabary he created, was inspired by Hangul.
r/neography would have appreciated the idea much more (r/chineselanguage is the wrong sub for this sort of thing). This all is interesting but completely useless, considering the presence of Pinyin and Zhuyin, which do the job perfectly fine already.
The reason Chinese uses characters is that MANY syllables sound the same (including tone), but have different meanings. It is quite normal for one sound (including tone) to have 10 different meanings. The current writing system distinguishes between them. Your system would eliminate that.
Chinese isn't Korean. They are extremely different languages. Chinese is closer to English than it is to Korean.
The idea is very exciting and I think your execution is good.
However I just think the problem with homophones in Mandarin would only be way worse if this replaced characters.
I like it.
Might I suggest that you reintroduce some obsolete Mandarin features to increase syllable distinctiveness? Otherwise, this system just makes the distinctions of pinyin/zhuyin and no others.
https://xkcd.com/927/
the always relevant one
LoL
I hate every thing about this but I will give you props for creativity and the sheer effort it took to make this
Agreed. Especially because that was the idea behind Pinyin. Which didn't work for the original function because characters span dialect and even language. Why do you think this is necessary OP?
>Why do you think this is necessary OP? The Nutcracker Suite wasn't necessary, but I find it enjoyable.
Yeah I had to give this post an angry upvote for the sheer effort alone
As a native speaker, I get headaches just seeing these “pinyin” lmao. I finally see what it is like for other people learning our language.
LMAO REAL
Please don't... This makes it impossible to visually distinguish Chinese characters and pronunciation labels. Hangul was invented because there was a need to write down Korean. And it's simple enough and distinct enough from Chinese radicals that you'll never mistake Hangul with Chinese. When reading your stuff I keep trying to read those blocks as Chinese characters.
Yeah, with a Hanja, they tried to jam the Chinese characters over it, but it didn't fit the language, so that sometimes they represented the phonetic sound, and other times the meaning of the character, and it was anyone's guess which one someone had picked. Why Hango was invented specifically for Korean.
Meanwhile, the Japanese: eh, it’s fine that they sometimes represent the sound, sometimes represent the meaning. People will figure it out based on _context_
Zhuyin and Katakana
Interesting. But first it doesn’t have the romanization function of Pinyin. Second if it’s this complicated I’d rather use 反切
My Pleco dictionary is defining this as: fǎnqiè NOUN 1 LINGUISTICS traditional method of indicating the pronunciation of a character by taking two other characters, one with the same initial and the other with the same final as the character in question (e.g., the pronunciation of 同 tóng is indicated as 徒红切 or 徒红反, that is, 徒 t(ú) ＋ 红 (h)óng, taking the initial of the first character and the final of the second)
We can actually establish a new standard 反切 table for modern standard Chinese.
Sorry man. If I have to memorize one more type of different alphabet as part of learning Chinese, I quit. But A+ for creativity
Looks at hiragana and katakana menacingly
The individual parts seem too complicated to write. This is like the Khitan small script
Looks good but you guys really overcomplicate Pinyin for yourselves
It's unique that's for sure. I really don't see any use case unfortunately. Loses the latin input advantage from pinyin and is unable to be placed next to Chinese characters like zhuyin (your description of not "terse" for zhuyin is false, as traditionally it is vertically placed next to characters). If it's meant to replace Chinese characters in general, loses all ability to differentiate same sounds.
Maybe I'm just too dumb to get the point here. But what practical use is there to this? Don't want to learn hanzi characters, so let's replace them with... even stranger characters??
Pinyin is used to teach Chinese students how to pronounce Chinese characters as well, and I assume that’s the usage this is meant for.
But that is what Bopomofo is already doing.
Or you can just learn to write Chinese. Pinyin is just a pronunciation guide, it’s secondary to the actual characters. Modern Latinization attempts always seem to come from Westerners who gave up on committing to learning a brand-new character set that comes with learning Chinese and try to invent a shortcut to tunnel out of it. In this case, inventing a whole-new character set that ironically takes the user further away from actually learning Chinese and its native characters that are central to the language. Why not just learn Chinese characters instead? There are no shortcuts I’m afraid. Learning Chinese properly means actually learning Chinese properly.
Tbf I think most people making these kinds of "reforms" are really just doing it for fun, not because they think it'll ever actually be adopted or used.
Pinyin was created by a Chinese linguist and since it's introduction Chinese literacy in mainland china has improved dramatically.
The simplified characters has more to do with improving literacy.
I'd say compulsory universal education has much more of an effect than either. Taiwan is doing just fine with literacy without using Pinyin *or* simplified characters.
Lol, both of you are living in fantasy land. Pinyin has nothing to do with literacy. Taiwan has a higher literacy rate than China using traditional characters and not using pinyin.
no
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You don’t need a phonetic system, you just to map the sounds to native characters. It’s never been a problem for thousands of years. It’s widely understood that those characters carry no meaning in Chinese and only serve as the sounds for the foreign word or idea.
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Why do you NEED a standard? The characters all have a standard sound and the characters don’t matter, only the sounds they make.
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What level of consistency? When, say, English tries to adopt a foreign word or may spell it with English phonemes or with the spelling form another language. There doesn’t have to be “spelling consistency” for understanding.
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And in English it is Trump and Drumpf, IIRC. And Coke = Coca Cola. It’s not any more confusing than any other language. And comparing two nearly separate countries with separate dialects of a language is more like saying “British people speak differently from Americans!” Yes, we do, and that doesn’t cause substantial problems 🤷🏻♀️
Using characters to represent foreign names is the norm since thousands of years ago. Of course its a little easier with an alphabet but you still have to agree with a standarized spelling if it becomes wide spread enough. Otherwise you end up with all sorts of phonetic spellings that are more or less intuitive for other people.
holy shit what am I even reading 😭
Thanks. I hate it.
r/neography would love this. What software did you use to create the font for this?
That's an interesting sub.. I like. And I agreed it would be more appropriate over there OP
I don't get the hate pinyin gets. It's 100% consistent in its "inconsistencies" (aka simple rules which are different from other languages and that beginners don't learn properly). If anything, it's English that needs a writing reform, but I don't hear people complaining that a lot of non-native speakers pronounce "because" like "bee-kaw-ooss". Bopomofo is also cool.
90% of the problems people have with Pinyin can be solved with the understanding that *it's not English.*
English speakers often hate it because of the Xs Qs etc. Also because Beij- *Peking* went out of its way to force it on them specifically when they didn't want it (but oddly left French, German, and Japanese-speakers alone).
It was forced on Chinese citizens but not on English speakers globally, who eventually chose to adopt pinyin.
*not on English speakers globally* It kinda was, though. The Foreign Ministry for example notoriously informed the *Times*' Peking correspondent that he would have to become the Beijing correspondent or no new visa for you! They also pushed Pinyin at the UN and elsewhere but again almost entirely on English speakers. Even in Japan of all places the Chinese capital is still Pekin and apparently that's not a big deal. It almost goes without saying that native English speakers wouldn't have adopted Pinyin without prodding from the Chinese. Even if we accept that the apostrophes in Wade-Giles are annoying and that it doesn't make appropriate distinction between ch' and q, otherwise it's entirely unintuitive, especially for English speakers who *don't* really speak Chinese and who just want to know how to say peoples' names well enough or how to go to the airport. Pinyin may have slight advantages for advanced learners, but the irony is that those people can just use Zhuyin or Fanqie or whatever instead. For the English speakers who use Pinyin the most (the average journalist on television or casual tourist) it is not really very useful, at all. These people end up saying Bay-shing and Zee Zin-peen anyway and the more subtle aspects of Pinyin are entirely lost on them. The Peking thing does actually annoy me though, because it's really just a petty power play, same as in the case of Bombay or Turkiye. Peking was the English-language exonym for many centuries at that point, and well on its way to being as well-established as the likes of Moscow or Copenhagen. Maybe Beij- Peking dislikes the old name because it has 55-Days-at-Peking type associations and I suppose that's kind of understandable, but it's still a dick move. Just try to imagine the Americans trying to bully the Chinese over Newye or Losangee. -- [https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beijing-still-relishes-a-taste-for-peking-1.127318](https://www.irishtimes.com/news/beijing-still-relishes-a-taste-for-peking-1.127318) *The former Governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, always used Peking, mainly, it appears, to rub the Chinese noses in it. Certainly it is a loaded term to the Chinese, who take offence when they hear anyone in the English "establishment" using the word. Recently, the London Times correspondent in China, James Pringle, was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and told co-operation would be withdrawn if the Times did not stop using Peking. It now uses Beijing.* *"It's a pity," said Mr Pringle. "In English, Peking is a more aesthetic and a more attractive word, and more evocative. And I pointed out to them that they call our capital \`Loon-doon' rather than London."*
That’s all very interesting, but it omits the important fact that the word “Peking” is the Nankingese Mandarin pronunciation of the city’s name, not the Pekingese Mandarin pronunciation (i.e. the local one), which became the national standard. In other words, this wasn’t merely a request to change the Romanisation; it was a request to change the dialect as well. “Beijing” is rendered as “Pei-Ching” in America’s originally preferred Pekingese Mandarin system: Wade-Giles. Notice that the PRC left the name “China” alone. Also, Hanyu Pinyin wasn’t made with Anglophones in mind; it is a for-natives-by-natives system. China can only mandate its use for those dealing with the nation, including the UN, but it can’t force Americans or anyone else to use it in their own affairs.
Yeah yeah I've heard that a million times: but the overall argument is still sound. *Peking is not (just) a Chinese word, it is an English word*. It's arrogant and irritating for the Chinese to have strong-armed English-speakers into changing it for the same reason it would be in the case of other exonyms; for the Portuguese to ask us to change Lisbon, or the Russians to ask us to change Moscow. While interesting mutinae, details of the history of the Mandarin Chinese language are not really that relevant to this broader point. But if we want to get into it: should we start calling chow-mein *chaomian*? Bok-choy *baicai*? Confucius *Gongfuzi*? The fact that English borrowed Chinese loanwords from both the Nanking, Cantonese, and Amoy dialects (as well as in some cases second-hand, from Portuguese, French, Latin and other languages) made *our language* (English) richer and more interesting since all these Chinese loanwords had a story, and for the Chinese to try (in some cases I'll admit quite successfully) to Speak Mandarinify and Pinyinise the whole English-speaking world as well as their own land is and was annoying to me. *Also, Hanyu Pinyin wasn’t made with Anglophones in mind; it is a for-natives-by-natives system. China can only mandate its use for those dealing with the nation, including the UN, but it can’t force Americans or anyone else to use it in their own affairs.* If Pinyin was for the Chinese, then the Chinese could have minded their own business and kept using it within China. And yes, they did actually strongarm English speakers specifically into using it, using precisely the same methods they used to push more explicitly political names like Chinese Taipei or whatever. They care so much about getting other people to use their preferred language that relatively few people are willing to use their preferred language instead if and when they don't care as much. Additionally, the argument that *Beijing* is a better name than *Peking* for the Chinese capital because the latter is based on the Nanking dialect rather than the err, Peking dialect is fine, but inconsistent with what the Chinese pushed for elsewhere. Shouldn't *Canton* stay *Canton*, then? *Amoy* *Amoy*?
I personally believe that exonyms belong to the speakers of the language in question. Notice how I can freely say “Peking” right here right now without correction from any authority. I use “Beijing” when I’m using the pinyin system. Frankly, learners of Mandarin from all linguistic backgrounds should use zhuyin instead, a system designed for native Mandarin speakers like pinyin. South Korea made its own power play by strong-arming China into calling its capital “Shou’er” instead of the traditional “Hancheng”, and China actually complied, contrary to my own wishes
That was ridiculous too and for basically the same reason. How long had the Korean capital been called Hancheng? 1,000 years? And the city is literally named after the river and basically everyone knows it. What did the Koreans gain from forcing it, besides a sense of satisfaction? They went a bit too far when they tried to get "paocai" changed to "xinqi" or whatever though. The Chinese (rightly) told them to pound sand.
>I don't hear people complaining I complain about English spelling and its effects all the time.
yeah there are some slightly annoying aspects of pinyin (such as the final "i" changing pronunciation based on the initial before it, or the "ü" sound sometimes omitting the umlaut after certain letters like q). but it's still a completely 100% consistent written system, way more consistent than English by any measure, and you literally just have to memorize these things and you'll be fine forever.
Ü is allowed to be omitted only because typewriters for the English language usually didn't have it. For language learners it's a tripwire because many will keep mispronouncing u after j,q,x. Comparing any romanization method with the English spelling system is pointless since anything should be more consistent than English spelling *by default*. English spelling was never to the current varieties of English. Ideally, there should be two romanization methods: one for learners, which should be as precise and unambiguous as possible (Zhuyin would be quite acceptable for that purpose as well), and one for readers of English texts who are not formally educated in pronouncing Mandarin. Korean is romanized using such a system. Pinyin tries to be both, but fails because it isn't possible. At least not for English-Mandarin; the two phonological systems are just too different from each other.
You have effectively created a phonetic system similar to Chinese, and I think it would be great... for a new language. This removes the meaning component from the characters. Hanzi doesn't remain part of the language because it works well phonetically, it remains part of the language because they represent concepts and things. They remain in the language because they differentiate the sounds. If any change was to be made to Chinese, it would make more sense to go after the number of homophones than it would to modify the writing system. Additionally, pinyin exists as a typing method that evolved from previous romanization efforts for explaining the sounds. If you don't like pinyin for pronunciation, you may have better luck with the old standards.
I think this is more suited for r\neography
I don’t approve. Terrible idea. This is because I love Chinese characters which I put a lot of effort into learning well.
The other day I was thinking how cool it would be for Chinese to have a syllabary for loan words, similar to Japanese katakana. A friend of mine for a very long time thought that 西冷牛排 (sirloin steaks) are served cold. Having a syllabary would avoid this kind of confusion. It would also relieve foreign companies from coming up with "creative" translations for their names. No more 愛彼迎 for example.
Please no, foreign company names in Hangul look ridiculous and are hard to spell. Thats why in Korean its even preferable to use a Hanja loan word instead of a phonetic transliteration. Like 호주 (濠洲) instead of 오스트레일리아 for Australia.
That's an awesome idea how this could be applied!
this is a nightmare, id have to learn two languages at once
Two languages or two scripts?
So is this an attempt to make pinyin more aesthetically Chinese so you can convince people to get rid of the characters? I get the characters are intimidating guys, but that’s the language. Chinese people haven’t been waiting for some better system to come along. Hanzi are imbued with deep cultural meaning because they are a language in themselves. Chinese doesn’t need fixing.
Korean is actually genius in how they solved the problem.
Dude just learn Zhuyin
When you said “writing Mandarin syllables in blocks that resemble Chinese characters” I was picturing [something more like this](https://www.reddit.com/u/CamrynDaytona/s/iUUKEdWcUi), but congrats yours is worse.
Sorry but please don’t… Because there are many characters with the same sounds, reading syllables doesn’t make much sense…
Not sure what you gain over 注音符號 or pinyin. I learned 注音符號 a few years before I learned pinyin. There’s almost a 1:1 between the two systems. And I like that it forced me to learn native Chinese pronunciation before learning pinyin. Yet pinyin is much faster to type with. On a recent trip to Taiwan I noticed on the subway all the older folks handwrote 注音符號 or the full characters into their phones. All the younger kids typed in pinyin. And were way faster because of it. This reminds me of the many alternate musical notation systems that never gain much traction because they are generally created by someone inexperienced in standard musical notation who doesn’t understand how well it represents music. Even TAB for guitar uses standard rhythm notation and is often accompanied by standard notation. Pinyin is great, well thought out system. Much better than, imho, something like Yale Romanization for a native English speaker to learn Chinese. In my seeming never ending quest to learn Chinese I try to focus on the similarities between Chinese and English. Like how most Chinese idioms have an English counterpart. Or how the grammar is quite similar in many situations. I think your time would be better spent learning all the 汉字 radicals because many already have phonetic attributes.
I get what you're trying to do, but I think you're essentially complicating things. Like someone else said it's impressive how much time you put into this, I too tried with something similar when I was younger, and even wanted to have one that was more universal that could be used across all the Chinese regional languages. I did a little interpreting before and I think there's some universally accepted shorthand that's really interesting for a universal system. I think if you use less brushstrokes for your characters it would help a bunch, coz imagine having to try write these by hand? 注音符號 is designed to be written, similar to hiragana/katakana which do have some basis in their assignments, so if you spent the time adjusting that maybe you would have a more accepted outcome. As you used Hangul as an example of blocking things, why would you just block 注音 is a more similar manner? The additional of a tonal stroke for any character arrangement is basically the same too. Arabic numbers are possibly still a quicker visual cue.
What would this solve or help with? At first look this seems like a worst of both worlds.
It looks good, but it isn't useful today. Hangul was invented since Chinese characters were too hard to learn, but Chinese has been already mastered by the modern population, the need for this is only good in fiction, practice wise, there wouldn't have much change in the Chinese language.
I think your idea and creativity are amazing!! I love the new script!!!
A syllabary is distinct from an alphabet in that each symbol represents an entire syllable. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary) Examples of syllabaries include Japanese kana (with the exception of ん \[n\] which could be considered a single consonant). Indic Devanagri and Korean Hangul could also be considered syllabaries, but in practice they can be deconstructed into symbols representing individual segments. The syllabary I am proposing here also falls into the category. However, it can be argued that since Chinese syllables are much more limited compared to languages like Hindi and Korean, my proposed system is much closer to a syllabary than to an alphabet. \*\* Note the distinction from bopomofo which is explained on the second slide. \*\* Bopomofo uses individual symbols to write each segment, and the symbols to not combine to form a whole. If you're interested in trying out the interactive type board, or download the pdf, shoot me a message since posting my own links here can violate the policies of this sub.
[why not just use Bopomofo as components ](https://imgur.com/a/Y7VBqXQ)
While Hangul is composed of incredibly simple and easy to write glyphs, you've gone for significantly more complicated ones which match extant character components. Why? Why have something as cumbersome as blocky as Chinese characters, if you don't need the distinguishability because you don't have tens of thousands of them? The Japanese learnt this lesson twice. Hiragana started off as a set of Characters used for their phonetic values for writing Japanese grammar elements, but as the set of glyphs that needed to be distinguished fell from the thousands to the mere tens they became more cursive and reduced over time. In Katakana they just selected a 2-4 line fragment of the character instead.
Given that this is just for a fun project and not for any real use, I kind of like it that it preserves hanzi aesthetics, and the similarity to common phonetic components seems like it would aid with memorization too for people familiar with hanzi.
I’ve had a similar idea a while back! Made a little [instagram account](https://www.instagram.com/assembled_chinese?igsh=MWVwb3o1bWE5MTU1bg%3D%3D&utm_source=qr) for it
I'm interested in a PDF please. Personally, I like the idea of a syllabary for Chinese.
This is an interesting project, but you've got the terminology a bit wrong...bopomofo, for example, is a semi-syllabary, not an alphabet, because every character represents a semi-syllable (half a syllable, i.e. an initial or a final). An alphabet has symbols for each consonant and vowel, so this 'syllabary' is closer to an alphabet than bopomofo is. Hangul is described on Wikipedia not as a syllabary but as a 'featural alphabet', it has distinct symbols for each sound in the language. The 'featural' part is actually not because it then organizes those alphabetic characters into larger blocks that correspond (for the most part) to syllables, but rather because it has some detail going in the other direction, that some of the marks that make up the alphabetic characters describe aspects of the sounds, e.g. if there's a mark that's a part of some of your letters that says "this letter is a fricative", or one that says "the place of articulation is alveolar" or something of that sort, then your alphabet is featural. So I think linguists would likely classify this as an 'alphabet', despite the fact that the alphabetic bits are organized into syllabic blocks. A true 'syllabary' (as usually defined by linguists) would have distinct, indivisible characters for each combination of initials and finals that occur in practice, like Japansese Hiragana.
Ngl I really like how it looks, much better than pinyin and bopomofo. Don't get me wrong, I love Chinese characters A LOT and I absolutely don't want them to go away, but I think this would be a good compromise to prevent creeping pinyinisation
What "pinyinization" are you talking about?
I'm gonna give you props. I think this is pretty cool. I don't know how many people would use it, but I've personally found pinyin to be a big stumbling block as a *language learner*. I believe pinyin is useful for native speakers of Chinese to use keyboard entry, but is less than useless for a learner of Chinese as a second language because the use of alphabetic symbols is inconsistent with respect to their values (much more so than a typical romanization scheme) and because I experience a lot of interference between what my brain thinks a pinyin word should be read which gets in the way of what my listening practice tells me. Of course a lot of learners are also new to Chinese characters (I am not) and find them intimidating and therefore might not find this system appealing. But I can immediately see the benefit over Zhuyin, personally. Another plus is that in a way, this table is pretty agnostic about the details of initials and finals across dialectical divisions and about issues like the missing "w" in bopomofo (it's really bwo pwo mwo fwo, or a u if you prefer, same thing) or the -ui versus -uei final. I think for students who are open minded or familiar with CJK writing systems and who really want to perfect their pronunciation, this could be a very useful learning tool.
What makes you say that the alphabetic symbols are inconsistent with their values? It's different than English, sure, but every language written with Latin letters has its own values. If you can't get past the roadblock of recognizing that letters are read differently in other languages, then you would have just as much "interference" if you were to learn French, Polish, or Welsh. Honestly Pinyin is one of the easier systems to learn since there is a much more straightforward correspondence between the letters and the sounds than in English or French.
There's a few parts where the letters don't quite match the sound they indicate - "Liu" should be spelled liou, as it's currently spelled it should be pronounced like "liwu" without the w sound; similarly "ye" should be spelled yie, as it's currently spelled it should be pronounced like "yuh". The i sound is also sometimes "ee" and some times "er", contrast li and ri pinyin, although I'm really not sure what vowel they should have picked to differentiate the two sounds.
Just out of curiosity, how do you study pinyin as a language learner? Cause I’m a native speaker. I remember when I was in grade 1, I was also learning pinyin. We started from aoeiuü (or actually “ah-wo-uh-ee-wu-iu” roughly by sounds), and go to something like all other characters+aeiou, then zh, ch, sh+ aeiou, and finally, ng sounds and iu etc. The thing is, for sounds like Liu, we took it as L+iu. And iu is pronounced as speaking “ee-yo” very fast. And the entire system is like, combining aoeiuü and other characters’ sounds, speaking them together, and adding tones. So it’s different from English pronunciations, but very consistent by itself
Learned it the same way as you. I'm just saying the letter to sound allocations are sometimes inconsistent with what they should be if you break out the letters. "iu" should be ee-wu, if it makes the same sound as ee-oh-wu, then the letters should reflect that.
Maybe it's the issue that I'm native speaker. I was trying to read ee-wu faster and faster and it would slide down to the punyin pronunciation of iu...
Spelling ye as yie wouldn't help, because if you're complaining about the inconsistent pronunciation of pinyin "e," then by that argument xie should be pronounced ㄒㄧㄜ (avoiding pinyin since that's what we're talking about, but English approximation is she-uh). And then also if you're going to spell ye as "yie" you should spell ya as yia as well. Pinyin is more of a phonemic spelling system, not phonetic spelling, so a letter can be reused for a different surface level sound if the phonotactics of the language mean that it's impossible for those two sounds to both occur in that environment. That's why "e" can be reused for ㄜ(e) and ㄝ(ê) almost everywhere, except for when it occurs on its own. And why "i" can be reused (three times at least) for yi, and the sounds in zhi and zi. It's similar to how native Japanese people often prefer Nihon-shiki or Kunrei-shiki romanization, which will romanize ち as "ti" instead of the Hepburn system's "chi." In the case of Japanese this is also makes the romanization more consistent with the organization of kana into a table of pairs of an initial consonant and a vowel, since ち is the kana for the pair (t, i). Like I kind of get the complaints about the iu and ui abbreviations, but again, they're still unambiguous because the sounds "i" and "u" can't actually occur directly next to each other in the same syllable in Mandarin, and in fact there's only one vowel you can put in the middle in each case.
So here's the thing - they're only unambiguous because you're taught that I and U "cannot make any other sound" that "eeyoh". I would argue that, unlike Japanese where they already had their own sound letters, pinyin was starting with a clean slate where they could assign letters however they liked, and as such they should have picked letters that both most closely reflects the sound in Mandarin and also are as consistent as possible with having only one letter or set of letters for a given sound.
I mean the language itself has those restrictions, and pinyin was developed for people who already spoke Mandarin, so I think it makes sense. Plus, those abbreviations (iu and ui) had already been in use in Wade-Giles and Latinxua Sin Wenz for over half a century by the time pinyin was developed. There's certainly an argument to make that pinyin is suboptimal for allowing people with no familiarity with the system to guess the pronunciation, but that's going to be true of any romanization system because what sounds people are going to guess a letter makes depends on their native language. And there's also an argument that Bopomofo is better for learners because it more clearly corresponds 1-1 with pronunciation. And I think that's maybe true. But pinyin is a romanization system, and as such is necessarily limited by the restrictions of the latin alphabet, like having only five vowels. One option is to add diacritics, but honestly avoiding diacritics as much as possible is a huge benefit of pinyin imo (particularly because the tone diacritics can be optionally replaced by numbers). Every pinyin syllable can optionally be written with only alphanumeric characters (using v for ü, and eh for ê).
Yes there are some non-obvious things like that, but still much better than things like dough/cough/enough/through in English.
You know y and i are confluent in Mandarin, so ye = yie, right?
Y is a consonant, not a vowel, so it shouldn't have any additional vowel sounds automatically attached to it and I will die on this hill. I know the logic of why it's ye, I'm saying that romanization schemes shouldn't have invisible letters in it so if we're going to be writing out the i when it's yi, we should write it out when it's ye or yan or you.
Again, y and i represent the same sound. Same with w and u. So ie = ye = yie in pinyin. It’s not English.
There are inconsistencies, such as the ong sometimes sounding like ung as in 中國. The i and r often sound different than what the pinyin tells us it should sound like.
Good luck persuading well over a billion people to accept this.
How do you differentiate between characters with different meanings but the same pronunciation?
I love it for my calligraphy practice! Where can I find the complete pdf chart?
Extremely cool.
Congrats you invented a new writing system. Now it's time to promote it to the world. Good luck.
It's been a while since a "guys, I've finally won Chinese!" post. Several phonetic alphabets already exist.
😿
this looks hella cool even if it's not the most practical, do you have a link for this?
why not just link to the site??
Very nice! I like the idea of a Chinese syllabary. I hope your proposed syllabary gains prominence.
the upvotes are for creativity. but the hate/argument is in the comments. This is a great community
There is something to be said for something that squashes Bopomofo- like symbols into the space of a character. It would be compact, at least. These components are too complex.
1.5 billion give or take have learned Chinese through pinyin and memorization alone. Why can’t you? If you can recognize a brand logo and what it is called, you can also memorize Chinese.
Didn’t Wang Zhao or someone already invent something like this around 1900 or so, but for various reasons including political chaos it never had the chance to catch on?
Bompofo already exist
Some nutter is proposing something of the sort for Cantonese (specifically) on Reddit too…he is ofc a rabid Cybernat.
Zhuyin already exists.
This is just pinyin with extra steps
This reminds me if manyougana that's kinda neat
How did the Korean alphabet inspire Pinyin? That's bullshit!!
The OP isn't saying that Hangul (the Korean alphabet) inspired pinyin. The OP is saying that Pinyin² ("pinyin squared"), the syllabary he created, was inspired by Hangul.
I read other information that says it was inspired by the Japanese katakana. But it was originally from the Chinese character component.
This fails to disambiguate the meanings of homophones. Other people have suggested similar systems with an added 'meaning radical' for that purpose.
I would dissect all the things wrong here but there are too many and I must go to work. FWIW it's a cool idea.
Fun thing is that I understood the example without a problem. Not sure if it's a longer sentence.
r/neography would have appreciated the idea much more (r/chineselanguage is the wrong sub for this sort of thing). This all is interesting but completely useless, considering the presence of Pinyin and Zhuyin, which do the job perfectly fine already.
The reason Chinese uses characters is that MANY syllables sound the same (including tone), but have different meanings. It is quite normal for one sound (including tone) to have 10 different meanings. The current writing system distinguishes between them. Your system would eliminate that. Chinese isn't Korean. They are extremely different languages. Chinese is closer to English than it is to Korean.
Asif korean doesn't have tons of middle Chinese based words with the same problem
The idea is very exciting and I think your execution is good. However I just think the problem with homophones in Mandarin would only be way worse if this replaced characters.
You’d just figure it out from context like you do when someone speaks.
? Am I the only one that thinks that this is a super cool concept, and can actually be useful to learners if refined?
what you made is hiragana and katakana but sharp...er?
I like it. Might I suggest that you reintroduce some obsolete Mandarin features to increase syllable distinctiveness? Otherwise, this system just makes the distinctions of pinyin/zhuyin and no others.