> All ideographic writing systems are a horrible mistake.
Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation.
There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a strange sensation, but very efficient.
Thanks for using your very specific phrase in describing the research you recall. That helped me Google up a later study (I also had vague memories of the earlier study) that found that there is no particular difference in brain processing to the advantage of traditional Chinese script.
as a checklist of what to look for in experimental research.
Because everyone who is neurologically normal and with good hearing can speak, and understand speech, we can be reasonably confident that there are powerful brain short-cuts for dealing with phonological processing. Cross-cultural comparisons do show a variety of societally relevant efficiencies from writing systems being more rather than less user-friendly in representing speech sounds. The long argument on this point is given by John DeFrancis's book Visible Speech.
I narrowly escape embarrassment, because "phonetic activation" was a mistake. It's phonological activation, but I excuse myself if you were successful with that term :)
Now that I see this abstract, the "vaguely recalled" paper could have been on kana vs kanji processing. It's quite a no-brainer actually, because kanji stresses pattern recognition far more than kana, so it's only natural that phonological activation comes later, at which point semantic activation may have been activated.
Regarding the linked research, however, I can make a few observations. First, both as heavily-practiced scripts it isn't surprising that the same areas are recruited. We are looking at areas of phonological and semantic processing. Second, as these are heavily-practiced skills, pattern recognition is very efficient; you could probably get substantial differences if you compared bopomofo-trained readers vs. pinyin-trained readers, reading each others' scripts. In this case, you could predict, again, the same areas recruited for processing, but significant timing differences. Third, this is obviously not an RSVP paradigm. If it were, you'd be able to tweak how fast the subject needs to perceive the symbols, and it could be possible to get slightly different results between order of processing for the symbols. And under the RSVP paradigm, I would make the risky prediction that hanzi would win out in cognitive overload situations.
Just to clarify, I'm not commenting on the relative advantages in processing (nor do I think the bottleneck is in the script -- and hence it's silly to proclaim the superiority of semantic power of one script over another for the language trolls and apologists). It's more of a "language engineer's" look at scripts.
Efficiency above is in the context of me reading, not in the context of a nation or culture's literacy.
Here are two more tangible examples: consider a traffic light that has no colors, but flashes "stop" and "go" in text. The analogous "efficient" in my comment is the colored light, in which you don't think about the phonology of the words but understand its meaning.
Other example: a digital vs. an analog clock. This doesn't apply to everyone, but it is plausible that you can tell "oh, it's late!" by looking at the shape of the analog clock, whereas in the digital clock you'd have to parse the numbers. "Efficient" would be the analog clock. Again, this example is suspect; it doesn't apply to myself (I read digital much faster).
But in any case I'm not using "efficiency" to describe the writing system; I'm using it to describe a mechanism in reading comprehension.
Literacy rates and speaking proficiency are slightly different problems.
Speaking proficiency is a combination of existing dialects carrying social and linguistic prestige in addition to their historical existence. (Can you imagine forcing the entire United States to begin speaking some other romance language? It'd probably be a hideous transition.)
Also I imagine there are economic and practical factors related to China's literacy rate. Compare for example Japan which has a literacy rate that is probably the same as the United States (I'm having difficulty coming up with any good statistics for functional illiteracy). To say ideographic languages cause low literacy rates and limit speaking proficiency in the national language is probably a bit silly ;)
Also I imagine there are economic and practical factors related to China's literacy rate. Compare for example Japan
Japan is of course more prosperous than China, and long has been. But Japan also has pervasive use of syllabic writing (the katakana and hiragana syllabaries that are each capable of exhaustively writing anything a speaker of Japanese can speak, with very few written characters).
Prosperity may actually have more to do with effectiveness in spreading a standard national spoken language. The paradigmatic example here is Taiwan. When the Nationalist (KMT) regime from China fled to Taiwan (formerly occupied by Japan) after World War II, hardly anyone on Taiwan could speak Mandarin. Mandarin is about as cognate with Taiwanese (or Hakka, the other main language of Taiwan) as English is with German, or arguably even less cognate. But today anyone my age (fifty) or younger in Taiwan is conversant in Mandarin, even though the great majority of families living in Taiwan have older relatives who didn't speak that language at all. Prosperity brings telephone conversations and radio and TV broadcasting and travel and other human activities that converge language usage to a common standard. By contrast, the population of (mainland) China has long included a sizeable number of people whose native language is within the dialect category of 北方官話 (Mandarin) but that initial seed value hasn't resulted in a very impressive increase in the percentage of Mandarin speakers in China during the post-war years. That's a sign of the stark difference in prosperity between Taiwan and China.
China has a higher literacy rate than countries of similar economic development that use alphabets such as Brazil. In both Taiwan and Japan, literacy is very nearly 100%. The US doesn't fare as well.
Blaming China's "low levels of speaking proficiency in the national language" on characters doesn't make much sense either. Dozens of languages are spoken in China and Mandarin has only really been a standard for about a hundred years. You might as well be condemning the EU for having so many people who don't speak English well.
Three of my four grandparents were born (in the United States) in non-English-speaking homes. The huge degree of immigration that the United States has long experienced makes it quite remarkable that the United States today has such unity in using a national language (named after another country, no less) that we are all using here to communicate with one another. I possess the reading textbooks used by two of my grandparents' families (who spoke two different languages in that generation). Alphabetic writing was enormously helpful in making English the main generally understood language in the diverse population of the United States, and lack of it may be one thing that is holding back the always diligent people of China from even greater prosperity and unity in their spoken language.
I'd appreciate a source citation for the statement that China has a higher literacy rate than Brazil, as I'm quite sure that statement is based on a fallacy of equivocation: a different definition of "literacy" in the two countries.
After the turmoil of the Revolutionary War, there was a Great Lull remarkably similar to the one earlier this century. For nearly fifty years, there was practically no immigration at all. The U.S. grew rapidly through natural increase. But the make-up of the white population remained about what it had been in the 1790 Census: largely (60 per cent) English, heavily (80 per cent) British, and overwhelmingly (98 per cent) Protestant. This was the nation Alexis de Tocqueville described in Democracy in America (1835)
China has far, far more 2nd language speakers than the US does. Outside of Dongbei, it's a good bet that most over 50 speak Mandarin as a second language if at all. A lack of capitalism held China back, not its writing system. A fair comparison would be India, also a large country that's very divided linguistically. Three decades ago, the average Indian was significantly wealthier than the average Chinese. Both countries put a strong focus on education and both have been trying hard to modernize. Now, China is far wealthier and has far higher literacy.
Also, consider Taiwan and Hong Kong. Both went from being destitute to having higher per capita GDPs than Australia or many European states within the past generation or two. The idea that characters "hold" people back is ridiculous. Elementary school children here in Taiwan can read their native language as well if not better than their peers back in the states. It would take quite a bit of evidence to make a strong case against characters. Even MacArthur's misled experiment in Japan failed. Simplifications were forced through and kanji were reduced, but people never stopped using them. In fact, the Japanese have been using more kanji in general publication each decade since the end of the occupation.
“Do you know what it means to sinter something? I didn’t; but the kanji are so clear: 焼結 “burn + join”.”
I could believe that because specialized vocabulary is transparently made of simple characters put together, there is much less of a jargon/terminology barrier, so those that become literate actually can read specialized language just fine. This is not true of English.
Wait, to sinter is to roast something that's been tied with cooking twine? 焼 is used for roasting and barbecuing, and 結 gives the image of being tied together by a knot or thread, which is why it's part of 結婚 (marriage)
I'm being a little obtuse, I know, but while it is often possible to guess a general meaning by looking at the kanji for any given compound, there are just too many different ways for the meanings of each character to be combined. Add to that the sheer pile of words that derive their meaning from literature or poetry, and you're probably better off taking a peek at the dictionary when the meaning isn't obvious from context.
Native speakers of English can pick up a lot of Greek and Latin etymology, even if they don't formally study Greek and Latin etymology (which is a pretty good idea, by the way) so that they can find many technical terms to be every bit that transparent.
How transparent is the term 車床 ? It doesn't mean "chassis," nor does it mean "flatbed of a pickup truck," nor anything else that a speaker of another language might guess. Some terms in any language are just plain arbitrary, even if they are made up of simpler morphemes.
I think you need to consider that the character 車 is far, far older than the automobile. If you think of what kind of bed a carriage would be on, it makes a bit more sense.
The real problem is that few people even know what a lathe is nowadays.
Practically, yes; functionally, no. I recall there was research on the phonetic activation (and thus dependence) during reading of Chinese hieroglyphs: as predicted, there was less phonetic activation.
There are some characters I cannot pronounce, but know the meaning of. It's a strange sensation, but very efficient.