Adopting Chinese/Kanji characters into English

[Ash]

So I've been thinking, what if we started using Chinese characters in English? There is a large amount of overlap between Kanji and Hanzi/Chinese. For example "車" means "car" in both Japanese and Traditional Chinese, so there is no reason why it couldn't mean that in English too.

China also has multiple spoken languages that can't understand each other, but if they write something down it is mutually intelligible. Japan already uses three (four if you count Romaji) writing systems together, so mixing different systems wouldn't be a problem either.

Start teaching kids Chinese characters in school and we could probably have people reading it in one or two generations in the west.

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

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Adopting Chinese/Kanji characters into English

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Software would have to be written to accommodate it and the English language is kind of bastardised enough.

Unicode seems to handle that just fine. I can even post right to left ... in the middle of LTR English text, along with some 漢字 all in the same sentence. Add in some ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ for good measure.

Yes, it does but if we're going to rely on the computer to handle complicated stuff for us just fine then we should develop a full set of symbols to use in place of a variety of ideas.
Emoji sort of does this.
While there's a lot that could be done to improve the interfaces & ease of access of the emoji keyboards in smart-phones, it's off to a very good start.

The point of language is to communicate but communication & the psychology there-of actually entails much more than just the words, ideas, & alphabets of all languages.


Graphic Design.
We are a symbol oriented species that communicates & understands the world best with simple symbols. A symbol is a bit different than a photo or illustration in that it plays on the psychology of the mind & represents things in simplified ways that the mind expects rather than how they actually are.

It often would take too long to draw a symbol (like a car or a dancer) beyond very basic symbols such as the symbol of an eye (which is just a circle inside of a horizontal ellipse, with the edges of the ellipse, which are nearest to the foci, pulling outward to pointed angles), plus writing typically only is done with a single color - but now, we can represent slightly more complicated symbols & ideas with slightly more complicated "text" characters.

They're also less aggravating on the eyes to look at, making it easier to "read" them, as they look more interesting & pleasant than many paragraphs, sentences, or even [just] full words, of single color, sans-serif Arial text, where you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase l & an uppercase I. (salt emoticon, deadpan emoticon)

(To illustrate this point, I will include Steam emoticons in the rest of my post - not even to be used as part of the sentences but simply to act as "landmarks" which make it easier for your eyes to keep track of which part of an otherwise, quite painful to read, elaboration of ideas is.)
(Compare the ease & feasibility of reading below... to reading above.)

At the touch of a button, this allows us to fit a lot of information - entire ideas, into very small spaces, very quickly.



If we have to hand-write stuff, then a simple set with the least amount of angles, curves & strokes would be preferable because it allows the information to be written down as quick as possible. Every character in the English alphabet only takes between 1 to 4 lines & / or curves to complete - we can simplify things further with acronyms & abbreviations. This allows us to choose precision... or speed, while maintaining relatively little ambiguity so long as we mind the context. ✏️


Any symbol from other languages which represents a complex idea & follows the 1 to 4 strokes rule, is a symbol I like & would be glad to see included in the lexicon ...but not all foreign symbols are so practical. The one which you included in the OP, which represents the idea of "car" (車) is actually really quite impractical in my opinion. I believe I already listed some of my reasons for that in my previous post:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/3135044721715176632/?tscn=1619569813#c3135044721716014070
. . . in short, the word "car" is actually better / more practical than the Chinese symbol for car.

Something, like "hito" however, is 2 strokes, & represents a whole word / idea: 人
(...and it also doesn't look like any of the pre-existing characters in the English alphabet)
...making it a VERY useful & valuable character for mixed language purposes.

This is also a word that you would expect people to use very frequently,
[as it means]: "people" or "person".





The only other thing that people are missing is representing ideas with numbers - technically the computer already does this internally with each value that it assigns each character, but we can actually come up with our own definitions for assigning meaning to numerical sets that are displayed as numerical sets.

To some degree, you already see this, with the numbers, 4, 7, 8, 42, 69, 420, 666, & so on - (there's more that the Japanese have actually used as part of their common culture in the days of text-speak, when you didn't have auto-fill & such: https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+number+used+as+word+in+texting )

...but no one has really used it in any sort of serious manner, except for the codes that authorities & military bases use - & those still aren't very useful for day to day application. However... if all you had was a key-pad with numbers to input data... having a way to represent more complex ideas in a numerical format would be useful.
Even if you have access to a full alphabet, numerical codes can often be quite a bit shorter than the words you want them to represent.


All of the important aspects as to how we can grow & evolve our methods of communication, go well beyond the scope of any particular pre-existing language's character set.
In fact, I'd even say this is perhaps too narrow-minded when considering what the best next adaptation to language would be.

There are some useful points I could make as to how we could adapt to learn new languages, & perhaps I'll add that to the conversation later -
I happen to like sotaponi's idea, but it relies a little too heavily on relying / being dependent upon the computer, rather than having a generalized understanding & allowing the computer to fill in the blanks:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/3135044721715176632/?tscn=1619569813#c3135044721715536620
...but it's a very good start to considering what might be a convenient & practical solution to the advancement of communication between different languages in the future.

[iceman1980]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

Oprindeligt skrevet af 🌈☆🎀 𝒜𝓈𝒽𝑒:

Adopting Chinese/Kanji characters into English

Oprindeligt skrevet af 🌈☆🎀 𝒜𝓈𝒽𝑒:

Unicode seems to handle that just fine. I can even post right to left ... in the middle of LTR English text, along with some 漢字 all in the same sentence. Add in some ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ for good measure.

Yes, it does but if we're going to rely on the computer to handle complicated stuff for us just fine then we should develop a full set of symbols to use in place of a variety of ideas.
Emoji sort of does this.
While there's a lot that could be done to improve the interfaces & ease of access of the emoji keyboards in smart-phones, it's off to a very good start.

The point of language is to communicate but communication & the psychology there-of actually entails much more than just the words, ideas, & alphabets of all languages.


Graphic Design.
We are a symbol oriented species that communicates & understands the world best with simple symbols. A symbol is a bit different than a photo or illustration in that it plays on the psychology of the mind & represents things in simplified ways that the mind expects rather than how they actually are.

It often would take too long to draw a symbol (like a car or a dancer) beyond very basic symbols such as the symbol of an eye (which is just a circle inside of a horizontal ellipse, with the edges of the ellipse, which are nearest to the foci, pulling outward to pointed angles), plus writing typically only is done with a single color - but now, we can represent slightly more complicated symbols & ideas with slightly more complicated "text" characters.

They're also less aggravating on the eyes to look at, making it easier to "read" them, as they look more interesting & pleasant than many paragraphs, sentences, or even [just] full words, of single color, sans-serif Arial text, where you can't even tell the difference between a lowercase l & an uppercase I. (salt emoticon, deadpan emoticon)

(To illustrate this point, I will include Steam emoticons in the rest of my post - not even to be used as part of the sentences but simply to act as "landmarks" which make it easier for your eyes to keep track of which part of an otherwise, quite painful to read, elaboration of ideas is.)
(Compare the ease & feasibility of reading below... to reading above.)

At the touch of a button, this allows us to fit a lot of information - entire ideas, into very small spaces, very quickly. :yubi: :ns_bigredbutton:


:secret_book: :anopenbook:
If we have to hand-write stuff, then a simple set with the least amount of angles, curves & strokes would be preferable because it allows the information to be written down as quick as possible. Every character in the English alphabet only takes between 1 to 4 lines & / or curves to complete - we can simplify things further with acronyms & abbreviations. This allows us to choose precision... or speed, while maintaining relatively little ambiguity so long as we mind the context. :sugar_reload: :hentaigirlangel_confirm: :hentaigirlangel_confirm: :frame07: ✏️

:brain: :thoughts: :red_car:
Any symbol from other languages which represents a complex idea & follows the 1 to 4 strokes rule, is a symbol I like & would be glad to see included in the lexicon ...but not all foreign symbols are so practical. The one which you included in the OP, which represents the idea of "car" (車) is actually really quite impractical in my opinion. I believe I already listed some of my reasons for that in my previous post:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/3135044721715176632/?tscn=1619569813#c3135044721716014070
. . . in short, the word "car" is actually better / more practical than the Chinese symbol for car.

Something, like "hito" however, is 2 strokes, & represents a whole word / idea: 人
(...and it also doesn't look like any of the pre-existing characters in the English alphabet)
...making it a VERY useful & valuable character for mixed language purposes.

This is also a word that you would expect people to use very frequently,
[as it means]: "people" or "person".
:agpplayer:



:b2b: :dice2: :b2b:
The only other thing that people are missing is representing ideas with numbers - technically the computer already does this internally with each value that it assigns each character, but we can actually come up with our own definitions for assigning meaning to numerical sets that are displayed as numerical sets. :B2Papers:

To some degree, you already see this, with the numbers, 4, 7, 8, 42, 69, 420, 666, & so on - (there's more that the Japanese have actually used as part of their common culture in the days of text-speak, when you didn't have auto-fill & such: https://www.google.com/search?q=japanese+number+used+as+word+in+texting ) :gravestone: :4: :graveyard:

...but no one has really used it in any sort of serious manner, except for the codes that authorities & military bases use - & those still aren't very useful for day to day application. However... if all you had was a key-pad with numbers to input data... having a way to represent more complex ideas in a numerical format would be useful.
Even if you have access to a full alphabet, numerical codes can often be quite a bit shorter than the words you want them to represent. :spy: :Hackingart: :checklist:

:id2em: :speech_alert:
All of the important aspects as to how we can grow & evolve our methods of communication, go well beyond the scope of any particular pre-existing language's character set.
In fact, I'd even say this is perhaps too narrow-minded when considering what the best next adaptation to language would be. :komsurprised::speech_musical: :siegrune:

There are some useful points I could make as to how we could adapt to learn new languages, & perhaps I'll add that to the conversation later - :ratsclock:
I happen to like sotaponi's idea, but it relies a little too heavily on relying / being dependent upon the computer, rather than having a generalized understanding & allowing the computer to fill in the blanks:
https://steamcommunity.com/discussions/forum/12/3135044721715176632/?tscn=1619569813#c3135044721715536620
...but it's a very good start to considering what might be a convenient & practical solution to the advancement of communication between different languages in the future. :pvdiary:


:seewhatyoudid:

Very verbose description for something very simple. smh...

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

...
Very verbose description for something very simple. smh...

Communication isn't simple.

More-over that's not just a description, it's points to add to a conversation.

There's over 170,000 words in the English language for a reason.
...and instead of using ANY of them... they opt to place symbols on restroom doors, & recycle bins, & such - instead of a word.

This topic is may be titled "Adopting Chinese/Kanji characters into English" but at it's core, it's really about "Adopting characters into language" ...& perhaps even beyond that: ...adopting ideas into language.



The spirit of the topic isn't about just one character or whether English or Chinese is better than each other or other languages... it's about finding ways to improve our communication... and improve understanding of each other.

[iceman1980]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

...
Very verbose description for something very simple. smh...

Communication isn't simple.

More-over that's not just a description, it's points to add to a conversation.

There's over 170,000 words in the English language for a reason.
...and instead of using ANY of them... they opt to place symbols on restroom doors, & recycle bins, & such - instead of a word.

This topic is may be titled "Adopting Chinese/Kanji characters into English" but at it's core, it's really about "Adopting characters into language" ...& perhaps even beyond that: ...adopting ideas into language.



The spirit of the topic isn't about just one character or whether English or Chinese is better than each other or other languages... it's about finding ways to improve our communication... and improve understanding of each other.


:seewhatyoudid:

You flatter yourself. Communication is about being clear to your audience or receiver, first things you learn in university, being "wordy / verbose" and unable to come up with a clear description for your ideas shows articulation immaturity and poor structure.

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

...
You flatter yourself. Communication is about being clear to your audience or receiver, first things you learn in university, being "wordy / verbose" and unable to come up with a clear description for your ideas shows articulation immaturity and poor structure.

You fail to realize that one response can contain multiple points & / or you suggest that multiple subjects can always meaningfully be reduced to a simple "non-verbose" message.

But let's just do what Walter does & just respond to every topic with just: "Okay." . . . eh?

[iceman1980]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

...
You flatter yourself. Communication is about being clear to your audience or receiver, first things you learn in university, being "wordy / verbose" and unable to come up with a clear description for your ideas shows articulation immaturity and poor structure.

You fail to realize that one response can contain multiple points & / or you suggest that multiple subjects can always meaningfully be reduced to a simple "non-verbose" message.

But let's just do what Walter does & just respond to every topic with just: "Okay." . . . eh?


:frenchcheese:

*sigh* so I am going to have to teach you...
https://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/WritingSkills.htm
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCS_99.htm
https://www.skillsyouneed.com/writing-skills.html

I've yet to see an actual sound inductive argument that Chinese characters should be introduced into the English language, the reasons given are vague, undefined and also not specific enough.

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

You fail to realize that one response can contain multiple points & / or you suggest that multiple subjects can always meaningfully be reduced to a simple "non-verbose" message.

But let's just do what Walter does & just respond to every topic with just: "Okay." . . . eh?

*sigh* so I am going to have to teach you...
https://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/WritingSkills.htm
https://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCS_99.htm
https://www.skillsyouneed.com/writing-skills.html

Okay.

[iceman1980]

Main reasons for learning other languages like Chinese come down to the tactical advantage in my books. Knowing how adversaries speak and communicate is of great value. Especially if these adversaries implement things in their own language. Where this then resulted in the need to reverse engineer the technology of adversaries.

So being multi-lingual is beneficial especially when it comes down to analysis.

[Ash]

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Product ∏:

...
You flatter yourself. Communication is about being clear to your audience or receiver, first things you learn in university, being "wordy / verbose" and unable to come up with a clear description for your ideas shows articulation immaturity and poor structure.

You fail to realize that one response can contain multiple points & / or you suggest that multiple subjects can always meaningfully be reduced to a simple "non-verbose" message.

But let's just do what Walter does & just respond to every topic with just: "Okay." . . . eh?


:frenchcheese:

Valid points. AI is a bit of a black swan when it comes to language, so we'll have to see how that turns out. Written language may be made largely obsolete in the coming centuries.

[Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at 🃏]

Oprindeligt skrevet af 🌈☆🎀 𝒜𝓈𝒽𝑒:

Oprindeligt skrevet af Kiddiec͕̤̱͋̿͑͠at:

...

Valid points. AI is a bit of a black swan when it comes to language, so we'll have to see how that turns out. Written language may be made largely obsolete in the coming centuries.

I doubt it but I do believe that if we actually progress & evolve culturally that we'll become a more pictorial oriented society, that uses mostly graphic symbols & finally stop treating graphic design as if it's so completely distinct & separate from written language that we refuse to use it as part of written language - in fact, I think it might become the dominant aspect of language, even written language.

Typography & fonts PROVE that graphic design isn't a completely distinct thing that you can completely separate from language.

This graphic design "meme" is a perfect example of how the visual representation of an idea can convey a very different tone & meaning:
https://www.google.com/search?q=fonts+matter&tbm=isch

...in fact, the tone is so distinct with these, non-neutral fonts, that adding any amount of more words isn't going to make the "sinister font" seem not sinister - no matter how much you try to reason that you are speaking to a lover or family-member & that you care, or anything of the sort.

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

Or they could learn to write like a civilized people with small alphabet instead of using convoluted method that is basically from early bronze age...