| > e.g. movie subtitles As I said, only ppl from HK insist doing this. And I have zero problem with that. But I have yet to see any formal text or software UIs writing in this style. > It's not like you can compare what the person was saying and what the person ended up writing. That the point I was trying to make. The Chinese "text" unification was done two millennials ago, but people "speak" differently of every individual "character", as dialects or mutually unintelligible or whatever. I'd argue Chinese characters don't actually represent a sound, there isn't any alphabet in Chinese, you are doing it wrong to find every pronouciation a Chinese character. It's an ideogram system afterall. When a Chinese person 睇 a large chunk of text (e.g. not HK subtitles), they parse the symbols visually and link to the meaning directly. When a chinese person think of something, they don't do a subvocal monologue inside their head, they just recall the "shape" of the characters and combine the reasoning in lines of "symbols". Like when you do math you use a "formula" in your head, not the English vocal description of a formula. Go back to the topic of this thread, when a Chinese person 睇 some software UI, they link the "text" directly to their function, they don't think twice of the "pronouciation". Interestingly, if a person reads a "character" completely wrong, he/she may never realize until some awkward moment happens during a speech or a conversation. But the meaning of the word/character was 100% correct anyway. You can ask the question "have you read something characters wrong in your childhood and only found out much later" to any Chinese. It happens a lot |
It's like Latin in Middle Ages. Everyone speaks differently (in Old English, Old High German, Old French, etc.), but people write things in the same way (in Latin). And often don't even learn to write their native language.
> I'd argue Chinese characters don't actually represent a sound
If this were true, people wouldn't need to switch from Classical Chinese to Written Mandarin.
If Chinese writing didn't represent sound, it wouldn't matter if you wrote 學而時習之，不亦說乎？ or 學習知識以後，常常溫習它，不也很快樂嗎？
But people stopped writing in the first style, and started using the second one, to better represents Mandarin speech.
> if a person reads a "character" completely wrong, he/she may never realize until some awkward moment happens during a speech or a conversation
This happens in most languages, just to a smaller degree. E.g. for a long time I thought Septuagint was Septugiant, because I've only encountered this word in writing and never cared to read it letter-by-letter.