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User:Vuara/Characters vs phonetic writing systems

 * http://www.chinaknowledge.de/Literature/cangjie.htm
 * http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-52/mail-archive/msg00016.html
 * http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=153

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wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 8:57 am   Post subject: Characters vs phonetic writing systems ChouDoufu wrote this another thread but I am quoting it here to start a new topic, because it is an interesting and important issue. Let the debate begin...

ChouDoufu wrote: Yes, learning Chinese characters are difficult. That's the only thing I agree with though. There are a lot of people who have a belief that writing systems should be phonetic (I find it incredibly ironic that a native English speaker is praising the English phonetic system. English phonetics don't make a lot of sense either--under pronunciation rules in english "ghoti" can sound like "fish). Well, obviously if a language had a phonetic alphabet, it makes it easier to write and read. But to say that All languages need to be phonetic is just ridiculous. What makes Chinese appealing to so many people are the characters. Without the characters, Chinese would be destroying thousands of years of history.

I don't think they should do that in order to appease people who want to learn the language. I've always found characters to be rewarding and intruiging.

Yes it's difficult, but it's the difficulties that make things interesting. kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 9:31 am   Post subject: I pretty much agree with Chou Doufu. Also I'd like to add that one advantage characters have over a phonetic writing system is that with characters, readers immediately get the meaning in his or her head. It's almost like looking at a painting rather than just text. Good examples can be found in Japanese where the writing system is a mixture of characters (Kanji) and phoentic letters (kanas).

However, a phoentic system is also extremely important and also has its advantages. This is why the Zhuyin Fuhao was first invented in the early 1900's and then later Hanyu Pinyin. roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 10:34 am   Post subject: Thanks for starting the thread wix, I hadn't had time to do it myself last night.

Quote: readers immediately get the meaning in his or her head

Sorry, but they don't. Nobody who hadn't studied Chinese (or any other simliar language could look at ? and think fish - it's only through repeated association of the symbol and the idea that the meaning comes into your head.

If readers immediately got the meaning in their head, we wouldn't need to learn Chinese - we would already know it.

Roddy jwarriner

Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Arizona Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 10:57 am   Post subject: Characters by sight Kind of an interesting paradox here. Sure written language came after spoken language but the pictographic or ideographic nature of Chinese characters says to me that the effort to develop the written language wasn't based entirely on the spoken word but also attempted to pictorially represent the thing, concept, idea, etc. So once you know what a character means it seems to me possible that at least some of its meaning is taken in visually rather than aurally. Even with my limited knowledge of Chinese, there are times when I remember what a character means but not how to say it. And the use in China of certain characters in art of various forms suggests that much of its meaning is indeed transferred visually. There's a big difference between having a painting on the wall with DAO and one with ?

cheers, john kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:00 am   Post subject: roddy wrote: Thanks for starting the thread wix, I hadn't had time to do it myself last night.

Quote: readers immediately get the meaning in his or her head

Sorry, but they don't. Nobody who hadn't studied Chinese (or any other simliar language could look at ? and think fish - it's only through repeated association of the symbol and the idea that the meaning comes into your head.

If readers immediately got the meaning in their head, we wouldn't need to learn Chinese - we would already know it.

Roddy

Uhm, you're kidding right? Although I didn't specify but I assumed people would know that I was talking about people who know the characters. Of course the modern Hanzi won't look like anything but scribbles to those who don't know Chinese... sudasana

Joined: 05 Jun 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu sheng Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:21 am   Post subject: Written relics You can't say that characters have a natural association with the idea they represent: even the ideographic class of characters is opaque to anyone who hasn't learned their meaning. In both character and phonetic writing you have a sign which corresponds to an idea. With characters, you have a vast number of signs, the pronounciation of which is bascially arbitrary, and varies by dialaect and time period. With phonetic writing, you have a small set of signs that indicate sounds.

The Chinese writing system is ineffecient in that it requires a lot of investment in order to master written communication; in the past this helped keep the literati in power, by maintaining a monopoly on the creation and spread of texts. Regardless of its artistic or historical value, the character system has no benefits over a phonetic system. It's only the massive inertia of the character system that keeps it alive; Vietnam and Korea were successful in developing phonetic systems to write their languages, whereas in the past they used Chinese characters.

I was pretty excited about Chinese characters too until I read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. If you strip away the exoticism that comes with a 'strange' method of writing, you may realize that, at best, hanzi solve many of the problems that they themselves cause. roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 12:10 pm   Post subject: Quote: one advantage characters have over a phonetic writing system is that with characters, readers immediately get the meaning in his or her head

This means readers of phonetic scripts don't immediately get the meaning in their head, which is simply not true - I can't believe reading ? is any more immediate than reading fish.

I'd also like to agree with what sudsana wrote - and thanks for saving me the bother of typing it all.

Roddy confucius

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 273 Location: China Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 1:21 pm   Post subject: Using the Chinese character for fish is a horrible example to make a point for phonetics. The key to learning new words in Chinese is understanding the importance of compound meanings. This allows you to guess at the meaning of new words by immediately analyzing the two characters it's comprised of. For example, if I just write "nankan" in pinyin phonetics then a Chinese guy won't have any clue what it means. Yet when he sees the characters for "nan" and "kan" then at least he knows the new word means "something that is difficult to look at" and concludes that those two characters together mean "ugly" roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 1:30 pm   Post subject: Yeah, I agree that once you've learnt the characters Chinese isn't so difficult - and like the ugly example, Chinese vocabulary can be beautifully logical.

It's learning the characters in the first place that's the problem - not just for us, but for generations of Chinese people.

Roddy roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 1:41 pm   Post subject: And. . .(forgot this)

I've been told that it's impossible to create an adequate phonetic system for Chinese, as there are so few phonemes you have too many homonyns.

Sounds like rubbish to me. A phonetic script is simply one that includes all the information given by the spoken language - if you have a spoken language that works, then you can have a phonetic system. You just need a consistent orthagraphy - whether you do this with tone marks above vowels, numbers after syllables, or whatever, it'll work.

Sure, you might have problems with words in isolation - context won't help you - but how often do you have words in isolation?

Roddy wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 2:05 pm   Post subject: Re: Written relics sudasana wrote: I was pretty excited about Chinese characters too until I read Asia's Orthographic Dilemma. If you strip away the exoticism that comes with a 'strange' method of writing, you may realize that, at best, hanzi solve many of the problems that they themselves cause.

There is a sample chapter of Asia's Orthographic Dilemma available online for those who are interested. I strongly suggest that everyone reads it in order to be better informed about this debate. It also dispels many common myths about Chinese characters and Chinese languages.

Appropriateness to East Asian Languages -- sample chapter

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The first writing systems that evolved were ideographic or pictographic. These kind of writing systems probably were invented independently in two or three places, China being one of them. Subsequently the Sumerians invented the alphabet in about 3,000 BC(???). The idea of the alphabet then spread around the world. It was so successful that it was adopted almost everywhere. Only in East Asia did a character based writing system persist.

Even in East Asia there has been a trend towards alphabetic writing systems. Vietnam used to use Chinese characters, but abandoned them in favour of romanisation (although the French can probably take some of the credit for that). The Koreans invented their own alphabet (Hangul) and Chinese characters only have a very small place in modern Korea. The Japanese also invented their own alphabetic systems (Katakana and Hiragana) and also use Roman script (Romaji). They maintain the use of Chinese characters in a kind of half and half system. Only in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong have Chinese characters persisted in a pure form.

There are probably a few reasons why characters survived in China. Namely, the conservatism of the society, the low levels of literacy in the general population until recently, and the myth about the unification of Chinese "dialects". i.e. that although people throughout China spoke many languages they were united by a single written language.

It is also important to note that the vast majority of Chinese characters are phonemics (although phonetic shifts and variations in pronunciation mean they are not always reliable). They contain a radical indicating the sound and often a meaning radical. Very few characters express the meaning and even when they do it is usually quite abstract.

There is no reason why pinyin or some other alphabetical system should be more difficult to read than Chinese characters. In fact it should be easier. Even Chinese people sometimes forget how to write a character. With an alphabetical system the worst you can do is make a spelling mistake.

Basically I can see no good reason for the Chinese not to adopt some form of alphabetical writing system. This doesn't mean abolishing Chinese characters, but simply relegating them to a secondary role. confucius

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 273 Location: China Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 2:36 pm   Post subject: Know what a "blenny" is? Betcha don't. Looking it up in your alphabetic phonetic dictionary, eh? Yet if you saw the Chinese word for "blenny" you would at least know from the left radical that it's likely a type of fish! Confucius says: "If you see how it's writ, then you must acquit" roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 3:09 pm   Post subject: Quote: Sure, you might have problems with words in isolation - context won't help you - but how often do you have words in isolation?

Like I said, you might occassionally have problems with words in isolation - like when a madman comes up to you on the street and says 'hey, d'you know what a blenny is?'

Roddy kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 6:29 pm   Post subject: confucius wrote: The key to learning new words in Chinese is understanding the importance of compound meanings. This allows you to guess at the meaning of new words by immediately analyzing the two characters it's comprised of.

For example, if I just write "nankan" in pinyin phonetics then a Chinese guy won't have any clue what it means. Yet when he sees the characters for "nan" and "kan" then at least he knows the new word means "something that is difficult to look at" and concludes that those two characters together mean "ugly"

Actually this was the point I was trying to express. I had a long day, couldn't really concentrate well earlier. jwarriner

Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Arizona Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 9:33 pm   Post subject: roddy wrote:

Sure, you might have problems with words in isolation - context won't help you - but how often do you have words in isolation?

Roddy

I think we would also have to consider the effects of phonetization on the Chinese written word, literature. Passing down from the style of ??? (wen yan wen), modern literature still retains a bit of the flavor of ? ?. The written word is not entirely a reproduction of the spoken word and the use of single characters is not uncommon. In addition, Chinese is full of wonderful word play which depends at least in part on the hanzi representation of the words involved. john ChouDoufu

Joined: 22 Jul 2003 Posts: 87 Location: Zai Beijing.. gei wo lianxi ba! Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 10:36 pm   Post subject: Some people on this thread have mentioned giving Chinese characters a secondary role in the writing system. This would kill them, making them available only to Chinese Scholars.

I'd be very sad to see the day when Chinese students studied a romanization system to the neglect of Characters. A newspaper in pinyin? Chinese ancestors would roll in their graves.

I won't argue the fact that Chinese characters are inefficient to learn compared to a phonetic system. That's true. But what I strongly believe is that the most efficient way, the fastest way is not necessarily the best way to do something. I take up this argument for purely cultural reasons. Removing the cultural legacy (in this case Chinese characters which have grown and changed over millenia) of something essentially turns it into something completely different.

Let me take a different tack to explain that last point. I'm a first generation American citizen (ie. my parents were born in a foreign country and came to the US, where I was born). Like many parents, mine had to decide how much of my cultural heritage they would teach their children (in my case, there wasn't a second language as my parents came from an english speaking country). Some parents make the decision not to teach their children about their heritage and language at all. So then you have a child who is XXXX-American (chinese/japanese/ghanian/polish/whatever) by name only. What does it mean to be a young a Polish-American if you don't know anything about Poland, don't speak Polish, and don't know any Polish History? All it means is that your parents came from Poland. But for all intents and purposes, you're just American. Contrasting that, someone who has learned about their heritage is much richer in that they have generations of history to look back upon as well as their knowledge of American Culture. I see the Chinese language in much the same way, by taking out characters, you're removing the history and the cultural legacy that took so long to create.

Language is about so much more than efficiency. It's culture; it's history; it's communication. If efficiency and simplicity was truly what was important in a language, then everyone in the world would be speaking Esperanto--the easiset language in the world to learn. I think the governments that use Chinese characters should protect that use at all cost... sudasana

Joined: 05 Jun 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu sheng Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:07 pm   Post subject: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo ChouDoufu wrote: Some people on this thread have mentioned giving Chinese characters a secondary role in the writing system. This would kill them, making them available only to Chinese Scholars.

I'd be very sad to see the day when Chinese students studied a romanization system to the neglect of Characters. A newspaper in pinyin? Chinese ancestors would roll in their graves. By that logic we should all be using Latin instead of English on this board, because of its long history and cultural significance. I don't think any Chinese ancestor would fault a modern person for trying to make things better for themselves or other Chinese-speaking/writing peoples.

I think the only arguments in favour of the character system are emotional in nature. That said, these emotions are powerful enough that characters aren't going anywhere for a while. I don't hate characters, I just hate the effect they seem to have on the people who are forced to use them. You've got to wonder if a more widely availbile written system of Chinese wouldn't bring with it social change.

But isn't that one reason why even the CCP didn't banish characters? There are hundreds of dialects in China, different enough to be considered separate languages, but they can all be written using the same set of characters. If you start writing phonectically, you've just removed a unifying factor. Not something which the CCP would relish. kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:18 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo sudasana wrote: By that logic we should all be using Latin instead of English on this board, because of its long history and cultural significance. I don't think any Chinese ancestor would fault a modern person for trying to make things better for themselves or other Chinese-speaking/writing peoples.

It makes no sense to compare Latin and English with Hanzi and Pinyin (or some other kind of phoentic writing system). Latin and English are two different languages, though many English words derived from Latin. Also Hanzi and the whole Chinese writing system has received a great deal of "improvements" over the years. The three most significant "updates" were, in chronological order, the switch from Wenyen Wen to Baihua Wen, the invention of Zhuyin Fuhao (and later Hanyu Pinyin), and finally the simplication of Hanzi (Simplified Chinese). Note that Zhuyin Fuhao and Hanyu Pinyin were invented to work as aids to Hanzi and not to replace them. So in fact the modern Chinese has made things better for themselves. They have made improvements and updates to the Chinese writing system but not completely change it.

Quote: But isn't that one reason why even the CCP didn't banish characters? There are hundreds of dialects in China, different enough to be considered separate languages, but they can all be written using the same set of characters. If you start writing phonectically, you've just removed a unifying factor. Not something which the CCP would relish.

I don't believe *ANY* Chinese person (in their right mind) would like to see China disunified, whether they're from the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or the oversea Chinese community. wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:25 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo sudasana wrote: There are hundreds of dialects in China, different enough to be considered separate languages, but they can all be written using the same set of characters. If you start writing phonectically, you've just removed a unifying factor. Not something which the CCP would relish.

sudasana, this is not correct. Written Chinese is based on the way Mandarin is spoken. To say a Cantonese person can read standard Chinese and it is the same as their language is wrong. The Cantonese person has had to learn to read standard Chinese. This is discussed in the chapter of Asia's Orthographic Dilemma that I linked to in an earlier post. If you are still in doubt just pick up a newspaper in Hong Kong that is written in Cantonese. The differences go far beyond simplified/traditional characters. Indeed there are many characters that are not even used in standard Chinese.

ChouDoufu, great post, but I still disagree with you. The Vietnamese made the switch from characters to romanisation and do you ever hear them complaining about their culture being lost. The Koreans invented their own alphabet which is a source of cultural pride. If you are really worried about Chinese culture being lost then you should be concerned by the increasing dominance of Mandarin/putonghua at the expense of regional languages and dialects.

While language is an important part of culture it is also something that, like culture, is continually evolving. Nobody is complaining that typewriters have been superseded by word processors or oil burning lamps replaced by electric lights. Also Chinese do not need to totally abandon characters. If some sort of alphabetic writing system was adopted I am sure that people would still continue to learn some characters and those who wished to go on to higher education would no doubt still become fully literate in characters.

kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:44 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo wix wrote: The differences go far beyond simplified/traditional characters. Indeed there are many characters that are not even used in standard Chinese.

There are actually about 100+ characters that were "invented" just to "write" Cantonese. However, the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese (in writing) is still *MUCH* closer than the difference between Mandarin and other languages that use/used characters, Japanese for example. I've actually been to Shenzhen and saw a Hong Kong magazine that's "written" in Cantonese and I understood it much better than a Japanese magazine I read on a plane.

Quote: ChouDoufu, great post, but I still disagree with you. The Vietnamese made the switch from characters to romanisation and do you ever hear them complaining about their culture being lost.

Actually I have. I live in Houston, TX. We have one of the largest Vietnamese communities in the U.S. (second only to L.A. I believe). I have many Vietnamese friends, some of them even took Chinese at the University of Houston. Many of them took pride in that their culture is so close to the Chinese culture and that they once used Hanzi as well. Almost all of them either learned how to write their names in Hanzi or wish they could. However, I've never seen any of them as ethusiastic about their own language as they are with Chinese, not saying that they aren't proud of their culture in general (which they are). Also there's an Vietnamese organization based in New York who is trying to preserve and hopefully revive the Ngu Nam (sp?) writing system. The Ngu Nam writing system is pretty much Hanzi modified to fit the Vietnamese language.

Quote: The Koreans invented their own alphabet which is a source of cultural pride.

The Korean culture has become pretty much what you described the Chinese culture should become. While Hangul is used in everyday life, most scholars still learn Hanzi. Also, I heard from a couple Korean students I met in Beijing that they teach Hanzi, or what they call Hanja, in school as well. However, this is only happening because Hanzi is still in full use in Chinese-speaking nations (China, Taiwan, Singapore, oversea Chinese communities... etc.). If China dropped the usage of Hanzi, I seriously doubt that Korea would even bother with it. In the end, Hanzi would just be lost completely.

Quote: If you are really worried about Chinese culture being lost then you should be concerned by the increasing dominance of Mandarin/putonghua at the expense of regional languages and dialects.

Are you suggesting that the spread of Mandarin and having a unified standard language is a bad thing for China? I don't believe a large nation can be and remain powerful without a standard language. Usually foreigners in the U.S. are frowned upon when speaking their native language in public because Americans feel threatened. Don't get me wrong though, I am totally for preserving Chinese dialects but I believe everyone should be able to speak Mandarin (even as a second language). wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:51 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo kulong wrote: Are you suggesting that the spread of Mandarin and having a unified standard language is a bad thing for China? I don't believe a large nation can be and remain powerful without a standard language. Usually foreigners in the U.S. are frowned upon when speaking their native language in public because Americans feel threatened. Don't get me wrong though, I am totally for preserving Chinese dialects but I believe everyone should be able to speak Mandarin (even as a second language).

I agree there is a need for a common language in China, but problems arise when that language becomes too dominant and marginalises other languages or dialects.

ChouDoufu

Joined: 22 Jul 2003 Posts: 87 Location: Zai Beijing.. gei wo lianxi ba! Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:53 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo wix wrote: ChouDoufu, great post, but I still disagree with you. The Vietnamese made the switch from characters to romanisation and do you ever hear them complaining about their culture being lost. The Koreans invented their own alphabet which is a source of cultural pride. If you are really worried about Chinese culture being lost then you should be concerned by the increasing dominance of Mandarin/putonghua at the expense of regional languages and dialects. The thing about Vietnam and Korea is that though they were once controlled by China, they maintained a seperate cultural identity. As a way of exploring this cultural identity, Korea developed their writing system. That's a natural progression for a culture to want a system that it created, not a system that was forced upon it.

I am very concerned by the loss of regional languages and dialects. Not just in China, but also around the world (many Native American Languages have fewer than fluent 60 speakers-- these languages unfortunately won't survive). I view diversity as something that makes everyone better off, so the loss of these languages is a loss for humanity. But I don't believe the disappearence of these dialects can be blamed only on the "dominance of Mandarin". Many languages are fading because the younger generation doesn't see the need to speak it. It's not useful; it's not cool; it won't get you a job. I feel both situations (trying to replace Chinese characters, and the disappearence of local dialects) are symptoms of the same problem, a desire in humans to fit in, to be the same, to not stick out. Rather than just accepting the fact that Chinese Characters are difficult but that it's a perfectly valid method, people (and I'm mostly reading stuff by and from non-native speakers) who don't like the system are trying to change it into something more like their own. [it's a ridiculous analogy, but: Some people try to change another person's behavior because it doesn't fit it, because it's different, rather than just accepting a person for who they are.] I'm not a fan of any movement to remove distinctness from cultures.

Quote: Also Chinese do not need to totally abandon characters. If some sort of alphabetic writing system was adopted I am sure that people would still continue to learn some characters and those who wished to go on to higher education would no doubt still become fully literate in characters.

And maybe not. I still believe that most people wouldn't learn the characters, so you'd end up with a small minority who did and Chinese Characters would be lost to the Chinese people. I base this belief off the fact that in America, a higher and higher percentage of "old works" are getting translated into English. Many classes read Shakespeare in english, not Shakespearean-english. Many more read Chaucer in english rather than middle english. Very few read Beowulf in it's original form. There is the belief that they are too hard and so aren't worth learning. But here is where I disagree again. Yes it's more difficult than standard english, but I feel that the look back into the past provides some intangible benefit. It links people with the past and enriches them whether they realize it or not. People are inevitably looking for the way to do the most with the least amount of effort, and if you remove characters from newspapers, and everyday life then you will kill them for the majority of Chinese people.

Again my two points: 1) Holding onto cultural links, cultural identity, and diversity are essential. and 2) Simplification does not necessarily mean better. kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Jul 29, 2003 11:57 pm   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo wix wrote: I agree there is a need for a common language in China, but problems arise when that language becomes too dominant and marginalises other languages or dialects.

I don't believe the problem is that serious yet. I've been to many parts of China, mostly on tours but I have stayed for an extended period of time in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen. When I was in Shanghai, the locals usually speak Shanghaihua with each other and only Mandarin to non-Shanghairen. Same with Shenzhen, Cantonese is still the dominant language/dialect though most people spoke Mandarin fluently as well. Not only is the Uyghur language spoken in Xinjiang but it's also written alongside with Hanzi on all public signs, whether government-owned or private. Same with Yunnan, all the ethnic minorities I saw still speak in their own native languages (and even taught us some).

If we have to worry about a single language being too dominant it should be English. Not only is it the dominant language in the U.S. (just like ChouDoufu said, many second-generation Americans don't even speak their own language) but it's also gaining dominance in the world.

jwarriner

Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Arizona Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 12:32 am   Post subject: Re: ai hanzi, ai Zhongguo wix wrote: If you are still in doubt just pick up a newspaper in Hong Kong that is written in Cantonese. The differences go far beyond simplified/traditional characters. Indeed there are many characters that are not even used in standard Chinese.

Oh yes, and what about newspapers. Is it not correct that "newspaper-hua" ;-) is sort of a foreshortened version of baihua, or a mixture of baihua and wenyan which is highly dependent on the use of hanzi for clarity? john sudasana

Joined: 05 Jun 2003 Posts: 19 Location: Nanjing, Jiangsu sheng Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 1:00 am   Post subject: Quote: It makes no sense to compare Latin and English with Hanzi and Pinyin (or some other kind of phoentic writing system). Latin and English are two different languages, though many English words derived from Latin.

My point was simply that it is possible for a culture to change the way it thinks about the relationship between the vulgar, spoken language and the written language of scholarship and history.

Quote: sudasana, this is not correct. Written Chinese is based on the way Mandarin is spoken. To say a Cantonese person can read standard Chinese and it is the same as their language is wrong. The Cantonese person has had to learn to read standard Chinese.

But both languages use the same set of characters to write. Regardless of grammar or vocabulary, Cantonese uses the same written signs as other dialects.

I don't think I have much else to add to this discussion, but I just wanted to clear up those two points. However you feel, characters are here and in use, and we've all got to live with them. As my 1st year Chinese teacher said; ?????????? Or something like that; it's been a while. wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Wed Jul 30, 2003 7:53 am   Post subject: sudasana wrote: Quote: sudasana, this is not correct. Written Chinese is based on the way Mandarin is spoken. To say a Cantonese person can read standard Chinese and it is the same as their language is wrong. The Cantonese person has had to learn to read standard Chinese.

But both languages use the same set of characters to write. Regardless of grammar or vocabulary, Cantonese uses the same written signs as other dialects.

English, French, Indonesian and dozens of other languages also use the same "signs" for writing... but this doesn't mean the written languages are the same. Sure ? means big regardless of whether something is in Cantonese, Taiwanese or Mandarin, but many alternative characters are used in writing other languages plus the syntax is often completely different. However, maybe this is getting off topic.

jwarriner wrote: I think we would also have to consider the effects of phonetization on the Chinese written word, literature. Passing down from the style of ??? (wen yan wen), modern literature still retains a bit of the flavor of ? ?. The written word is not entirely a reproduction of the spoken word and the use of single characters is not uncommon. In addition, Chinese is full of wonderful word play which depends at least in part on the hanzi representation of the words involved. john

Classical Chinese is very different from modern standard Chinese. Additional modifications to the way Chinese is written would be needed if characters were abandoned in favour of a phonetic script, although these modifications would not be so great. The main change would be that when writing characters a single character can often be used to replace poly-syllabic word. Although any text that could be understood when read aloud could be phoneticised directly. wix

Joined: 25 May 2003 Posts: 177 Location: Australia Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2003 11:08 am   Post subject: This website is about the Japanese language, but it contains many references to Chinese and is very relevant to the topic being discussed.

Japanese in the Age of Technology kulong Guest

Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2003 2:56 am   Post subject: channamasala wrote: I can guarantee, kulong, that native speakers DO NOT see the character and know what it means automatically.

I believe you misunderstood what I meant. Of course, even native speakers need to acquier at least the basic understanding of the Chinese language. However, once a person has acquired a good amount of Hanzi, he or she would start noticing that they can guess the meaning of a word without having learned it, and by word I mean "ci", not "zi". Since most Chinese words (ci) are made up of zi, one can guess the meaning of the ci if he or she knows the meaning of the zi which makes up the said ci.

Last edited by kulong on Tue Aug 26, 2003 7:36 am; edited 2 times in total jwarriner

Joined: 27 May 2003 Posts: 10 Location: Arizona Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2003 7:17 am   Post subject: Re: Characters vs phonetic writing systems wix wrote: ChouDoufu wrote this another thread but I am quoting it here to start a new topic, because it is an interesting and important issue. Let the debate begin...

One of the arguments I've heard from some Americans is that the Chinese character system makes collation, cataloging, and retrieval of documents cumbersome at best. I think the advent of computer has taken care of that problem however. As near as I can tell, with computer encoding of characters, these archiving tasks are accomplished without significant problem. channamasala

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 93 Location: Not at home, which is the important part Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2003 10:17 pm   Post subject: OK, that makes more sense. Then again, you can do that in English too. The prefixes, suffixes, and affixes are more mishy-mashy but you can still make good, educated guesses as to what words mean, and usually be right. But hearing the Chinese compound words spoken should have the same effect as reading the zi strung together to make up a word. As a matter of fact, that's how I learned a lot of the words I know that were not in my textbook...by listening, hearing compound words made up of words I already know, and using basic logic.

It is a lot easier to do in Chinese, too. Chinese is much less messy than any IE language!

The radicals in Chinese writing help decipher the meaning of a zi, but they don't necessarily give a meaning...example: the character for "gasoline", if I remember correctly, and my reading skills are shite so please bear with me, is the water radical paired with the "qi" (essence, air, spirit) character, which makes sense when you know the meaning and can do some reverse "explain why this happened" hindsight logic, but not if you don't already know the meaning of it. kulong Guest

Posted: Wed Aug 27, 2003 2:42 am   Post subject: channamasala wrote: OK, that makes more sense. Then again, you can do that in English too. The prefixes, suffixes, and affixes are more mishy-mashy but you can still make good, educated guesses as to what words mean, and usually be right.

Many of these prefixes, suffixes, and affixes came from Latin, which is a whole different language. Also, many English vocabularies actually came from other languages as well. English is much like Japanese, where the language is deeply affected by another. Chinese, however, has *mostly* been developed on its own, therefore to truly understand Chinese, one doesn't need to learn another language. jjcox

Joined: 22 Aug 2003 Posts: 3

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 1:43 am   Post subject: I'm new to this board, just read it allo through for the first time - really interesting. I have two points, one based on a practical argument and the other a cultural one.

1) something that has not yet been mentioned on the board is the effect of the increasing use of computers versus pens and pencils when writing/typing chinese in everyday life.

One effect of this trend is the declining ability of the Chinese themselves to physically write the characters as they are so used to typing in pinyin using software such as NJStar. Any foreigner who has studied Mandarin knows that being able to read a hanzi and being able to write a hanzi are two very different things and personally I find typing Chinese with a computer (typing in pinyin which converts into hanzi) incredibly easy. The "written chinese is so difficult to learn" argument for moving to a purely phonetic system is somewhat mitigated by the fact that writing on a computer makes it so much easier. The development of such computer software has made learning and using Hanzi in everyday life much easier as you can get away with a less than perfect memory of all the characters.

2) I'm with Choudoufu on the cultural argument. Language is culture. Language is history. And you get so much more meaning from characters than phonetic alphabets. For example, the character for "tired" namely "lei" is made up of radicals symbolising silk and a field. In ancient times the men used to plough the fields and the women used to make silk. In doing so they got tired. So "lei" is soooo much more than just "tired". It is a window on the traditional chinese agrarian way of life. It hints at the dominance of silk production in the Ancient Chinese economy. Its not just a boring, efficient and purposeful "word". The same goes for "hao" comprising of the radicals for a woman and a child. For a chinese several thousand years ago, "good" was a woman who had got pregnant. I could go on and on...

So, I think the advent of computers makes chinese far more efficient and for us waiguorens far easier to write. In addition, I am of the opinion that Hanzi make the Chinese who they are, and contain meaning going far beyond their obvious beauty.

Cheers, Jon kulong Guest

Posted: Thu Aug 28, 2003 1:53 am   Post subject:

jjcox wrote: 1) something that has not yet been mentioned on the board is the effect of the increasing use of computers versus pens and pencils when writing/typing chinese in everyday life.

One effect of this trend is the declining ability of the Chinese themselves to physically write the characters as they are so used to typing in pinyin using software such as NJStar. Any foreigner who has studied Mandarin knows that being able to read a hanzi and being able to write a hanzi are two very different things and personally I find typing Chinese with a computer (typing in pinyin which converts into hanzi) incredibly easy. The "written chinese is so difficult to learn" argument for moving to a purely phonetic system is somewhat mitigated by the fact that writing on a computer makes it so much easier. The development of such computer software has made learning and using Hanzi in everyday life much easier as you can get away with a less than perfect memory of all the characters.

I picked up Hanyu Pinyin in a matter of days because I couldn't find a keyboard that has Zhuyin Fuhao marks. After typing Chinese with Hanyu Pinyin for over five years, I've started to feel that my "writing" skills has decreased, thoguh my reading skills stayed the same, if not improved. However, during the same time, I've also started typing English increasingly (thanks to those darn papers) and my handwriting in English has decreased as well. Not only does my handwriting in English has become more sloppy but also my spelling skills has decreased due to the reliance on spell check. Therefore I believe the negative effect of the increasing usage of typing doesn't apply to just Chinese but almost any language.

Quote: 2) I'm with Choudoufu on the cultural argument. Language is culture. Language is history. And you get so much more meaning from characters than phonetic alphabets. For example, the character for "tired" namely "lei" is made up of radicals symbolising silk and a field. In ancient times the men used to plough the fields and the women used to make silk. In doing so they got tired. So "lei" is soooo much more than just "tired". It is a window on the traditional chinese agrarian way of life. It hints at the dominance of silk production in the Ancient Chinese economy. Its not just a boring, efficient and purposeful "word". The same goes for "hao" comprising of the radicals for a woman and a child. For a chinese several thousand years ago, "good" was a woman who had got pregnant. I could go on and on...

So, I think the advent of computers makes chinese far more efficient and for us waiguorens far easier to write. In addition, I am of the opinion that Hanzi make the Chinese who they are, and contain meaning going far beyond their obvious beauty.

I completely agree.

roddy Site Admin

Joined: 24 May 2003 Posts: 798 Location: Beijing Posted: Sun Aug 31, 2003 10:44 am   Post subject:

I've moved the recent posts on Chinese Character Input Methods to a new topic in the Textbooks and Resources forum, shortly to be renamed the Textbooks, Resources and Computing forum. http://www.roddyflagg.34sp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=211

The posts on the difficulty or otherwise of learning Chinese are now in a new topic in this forum. http://www.roddyflagg.34sp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=212

Kulong's query as to why some of us learn Hanzi if we hate them and responses to it have also been split http://www.roddyflagg.34sp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=213

This thread is getting so long it would be hard for a newcomer to digest - it would be a good idea to keep posts on the topic of Characters vs Phonetic writing systems - otherwise, please start a new topic.

Thanks for everyones contributions to this topic - I've reviewed them all in the process of moving the above posts around, and I should probably go and read them in more detail when I have time. Keep them coming. . . Roddy

Last edited by roddy on Sun Aug 31, 2003 11:11 am; edited 2 times in total +++

[MUD-Dev] Phonetic and Ideographic languages (was Hangul) From : "Nathan F. Yospe"  To :  Subject : [MUD-Dev] Phonetic and Ideographic languages (was Hangul) Date : Wed, 31 Jul 2002 20:08:34 -0000

Travis Casey  said: > On Thursday 25 July 2002 3:01, Damion Schubert wrote:

>> I don't know exactly what the language font for Korean is, but if >> you go into any Korean Lineage server, you'll see a lot of >> symbols above the heads of characters which aren't latin >> Characters by any stretch of the imagination.

> The major writing system in Korea is called Hangul. It is a > syllabary -- each symbol represents a particular syllable. This > means it has a lot more characters than English (which builds > syllables from multiple characters), but nowhere near as many as > traditional Chinese writing, in which a symbol corresponds to a > particular word.

> Hangul has exactly 140 characters. Each of these is a consonant + > vowel combination. There are also separate symbols for the > consonants (of which there are 14) and the vowels (of which there > are 10).

The unicode standard provides, for Hangul Jamo (the consonant and vowels combined to make the 10K plus Hangul) 96 noncombinable, of which only 51 are in use as modern letters, and what's called the Hangul Jamo combining alphabet, with 60 (0x1100 - 0x1159) initial consonants, 66 (0x1161 - 0x11A2) vowels, and 82 (0x11A8 - 0x11F9) final consonants...

The standard states that the compatibility section is the portion of Hangul Jamo that cannot be algorithmicly decomposed to normal, standardized Jamo.

Of the Hangul Jamo letters, 19 leading, 27 trailing, and 21 vowel characters are listed as being in common modern use. That's much more than 14 consonants and 10 vowels, and results in a total set of 11,172 complete Hangul in modern use. That's not counting the Hangul produced by the less standard 51 Jamo or the degenerate or unused products involving one of the remaining other 140 odd Jamo in the normal block. The Johab set (the 11K formed sylables) are unquestionably going to be typed using combined keystrokes. With a shift or control key, I'm sure all modern Jamo could easilly be typed with one stroke. It may even be possible to automate parts of each Hangul in sequence - initial jamo, vowel jamo, and final, if present, spacebar (maybe) to move on if not. I don't know how it's actually done, but that would seem a sensible approach...

What you describe sounds closer to Hiragana, which has (really) a total of fourteen consonants (five accessed only by accents added to similar sounding consonants, eg ka -> ga, ha -> ba -> pa), but only five vowels, with a few others formed by combining vowels to get long forms ("yaw" would be ia -> "eee" + "ah") and a few sets of combining sounds are neglected (y is only "yah", "yoo", "yoh"; w is only "wah, "woh"; tsu replaces "too", chi replaces "tee", ji replaces "zee", and there is a vowelless "n" that doesn't start a new word, but can end one), and the vowels exist as unadorned but seperate characters. There's also a rare case of a plain u "ooh" getting accented to become a vu "vooh", but I've only seen it one or two times, ever.

Mind, there's also a complete parallel alphabet, Katakana, with a slightly different, less fluid shape, used for foreign words, and a majority of Nihongo is written in Kanji, which is analogous to, and ultimately derived from, Han ideographs, the chinese writing. Clasical writing is in Kanzi, which retains archaic flourishes, a bit like gothic scripts in english.

Korean was, until sometime in the last century, also written with a Han derived ideographic form. Several of the nonstandard Jamo, ultimately, reflect that root. Purely Han derived characters are called Hanja and look just like Han.

Again, I don't know how that would be handled in Korean typing.

What gets particularly complex is the integration of dictation in a combined phonetic/ideographic typed environ. Worse still, when dealing with Han (pretty much the last pure ideographic language) there are actually multiple spoken languages mapped to one print, and the only phonetic standards format is something refered to as BoPoMoFo. It isn't used in writing, but does provide for a basic standard mapping from phonetic (keep in mind that this includes a set of tonal elements used for differentiation of meaning) to Han for a given language.

If a MMOG were to attempt to support, on the same server, a large set of languages, written and spoken, it would have to overcome a great deal of incompatibility between languages. Were the goal a more modest portability - single release of software, but servers for each language supported - it would simply be a case of having operating system support tie-ins and (probably) internal unicode, or at the very least multilingual encoding, support.

If it also had voice input support, or even worse, mixed mode and unified presentation (recipient chooses to see text or hear voice independant of what originator chose to use), something better in the way of phoneme encoding would have to be developed, and there would have to be a pretty advanced context-aware mapping resolver figuring out what each phoneme-set was *supposed* to mean... just as much, figuring out which _word_ a given ideographic symbol was meant to be, not to mention unmangling typos and horrific typing, u know, 2 b kewl?

I'd like to propose now, should anyone ever do this, that l33t be translated to a spoken form that resembles an especially retarded hillbilly just after a run-in with a large mallet. Or Elmer Fudd just after getting shot with his own rifle.

--

Nathan F. Yospe - Programmer, Scientist, Artist, JOAT with a SAK yospe#kanga.nu  Home: nathanfyospe#mac.com  Work: nyospe#a2i.com

https://www.kanga.nu/lists/listinfo/mud-dev

From : "David Kennerly"  To :  Subject : RE: Hangul (was Re: Réf. : RE: [MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM***s) Date : Wed, 31 Jul 2002 19:18:04 +0900

Korean is the easiest alphabet in the world to learn. It's phonetic. With a few exceptions, it's logical and sounds exactly like it's written. Each one of those blocks contain King Sejong created it around the 1500s in order to improve literacy rate, because Chinese language is too hard. In many people's opinion, he (or whoever he's taking credit from) did a good job. It has nuances too. It's vowels have yin or yang, each one is male or female. Some of the consonants are ideograms related to the position of the mouth to make the syllable.

The standard Korean keyboard map is intuitive. Korean has more like 40 common characters when practically used, so all can be typed on a western keyboard using only the letter keys and the shift key. The shift key combos are intuitive. If you wanted to try the keyboard map, you could try AsianSuite (http://www.unionway.com), or install Korean language system if your OS supports it. However, Korean language, beyond the alphabet, is a monster for a Westerner to learn (and vice versa), because it shares no roots. Western language has an alien philosophy, grammar, and alphabet from Korean.

Incidentally, I'm ending a four month business stay in Korea, and a four and a half year job with a Korean company, tomorrow. For the last four months, I've seen and typed a lot of those funny symbols.

David

From : Sean Kelly  To : mud-dev@kanga.nu Subject : [MUD-Dev] =?X-UNKNOWN?Q?Re=3A_Hangul_=28was_Re=3A_R=E9f=2E_=3A_RE=3A_?==?X-UNKNOWN?Q?=5BMUD-Dev=5D_Mass__customization__in_MM***s=29?= Date : Wed, 31 Jul 2002 09:35:25 -0700 (PDT)

On Tue, 30 Jul 2002, Travis Casey wrote: > On Thursday 25 July 2002 3:01, Damion Schubert wrote:

>> I don't know exactly what the language font for Korean is, but if >> you go into any Korean Lineage server, you'll see a lot of >> symbols above the heads of characters which aren't latin >> Characters by any stretch of the imagination. > The major writing system in Korea is called Hangul. It is a > syllabary -- each symbol represents a particular syllable. This > means it has a lot more characters than English (which builds > syllables from multiple characters), but nowhere near as many as > traditional Chinese writing, in which a symbol corresponds to a > particular word.

However Chinese is monosyllabic and the base part of each symbol represents the phonetic sound. This is the same, so far as I know, for all words represented by this sound. The rest of the word (some added bits in the upper right, I think) represents meaning or context modifiers to the symbol to differentiate each word from its generic phonetic base.

Japanese is odd because it is a polysyllabic language but they adapted the Chinese writing system for their use, so they have multiple symbols per word (even for the non purely phonetic writing form... I can never keep the names straight).

Interestingly enough, the Mayan language is much like Chinese. There's a book out about the decipherment of Mayan that's fascinating, if you're interested in that sort of thing.

Sean


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User:Vuara/The Bandwidth Capital of the World

RE: Réf. : RE: [MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM*** s From : "John Buehler"  To :  Subject : RE: Réf. : RE: [MUD-Dev] Mass customization in MM*** s Date : Thu, 25 Jul 2002 07:13:47 -0400 Jeff Lindsey writes: > John Buehler wrote:

>> Recall that we have a pretty ugly barrier to entry for >> socialization - the inability to talk. I don't know what Koreans >> use to talk to each other, but I suspect that it's either painful >> to enter it as text or they use English. That is, their barrier >> may be greater than in cultures that fit the ISO-LATIN 1 'culture'.

> Actually, there's a pretty good article in the latest Wired ("The > Bandwidth Capital of the World", August 2002) that indicates many > Korean players actually do talk while playing, as they tend to > group up based on being in the same 'internet cafe'. It's a very > interesting read if you get the time.

It was an interesting read and only goes to support my theory that players want to communicate verbally. Well, South Korean players, anyway. The South Koreans are very social players and they like to play together in the same room. As you mention, groups of players tend to take over an Internet cafe in order to play Lineage as a group and they don't message each other - they yell at each other. This is a model that I've speculated on for American gamers so that we can socialize effectively during gameplay, but we're a different society. It might just be a bad idea for Americans.

Here's a link to the article that you referenced:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.08/korea.html

JB

-- -- The Bandwidth Capital of the World

In Seoul, the broadband age is in full swing - online games have become a national sport, and cybercafes are the new singles bars.

By J. C. Herz

AT FIRST GLANCE, Seoul seems like just another sprawling metropolis: Its buildings, hastily constructed with dubious financing in the months leading up to South Korea's 1997 economic crisis, are the sort of blocky, concrete-and-glass high-rises that give many modern cities the air of prefab homogeneity. Wide boulevards are choked with the oppressive traffic common in East Asia or, for that matter, Silicon Valley. Megamalls and underground shopping centers filled with Body Shops and Burger Kings cater to teens and young professionals. There's none of the high tech visual overload you see in Tokyo, or the clean-scrubbed, old-meets-new urbanism of Scandinavia - nothing to indicate that Seoul is the most wired city on the planet.

Burrow a bit, though, down the alleys, up flights of stairs, or into the corners of malls, and you find something that sets Seoul apart and fosters its passion for broadband: online game rooms, or PC baangs, as they are called here. There are 26,000 of them, tucked into every spare sliver of real estate. Filled with late-model PCs packed tightly into rows, these rabbit warrens of high-bandwidth connectivity are where young adults gather to play games, video-chat, hang out, and hook up.

They are known as "third places" - not home, not work - where teens and twentysomethings go to socialize, to be part of a group in a culture where group interaction is overwhelmingly important. As elsewhere, technology scratches a cultural itch. It is the social infrastructure, as much as the hardware and software infrastructure, that's driving the statistics.

And the numbers are impressive - South Korea has the highest per capita broadband penetration in the world. Slightly more than half of its households have high-bandwidth connections, compared to less than 10 percent in the US. The growth in broadband has surged in the last three years from a few hundred thousand subscribers to 8.5 million.

When it comes to rolling out bandwidth, South Korea's population density is an advantage. Seventy percent of its citizens live in the seven largest cities, in residential towers nestled close to DSL switching stations. The capital city of Seoul itself accounts for a quarter of the population. To put this in perspective, consider that South Korea's national communications backbone consists of 13,670 miles of optical fiber. Last year, Verizon laid down 20,500 miles of optical fiber in West Virginia alone. This fact doesn't make the Korean information infrastructure any less impressive. But the country does have an easier job on its hands than say, Indonesia, or the Philippines, or Mexico.

As luck would have it, urban apartment dwellers have a lot of broadband capacity right under their noses, courtesy of Kepco, the public power utility, which developed a network of fiber-optic cables for its own use years ago. In 1996, South Korea allowed Kepco to lease the unused 90 percent of its capacity, giving upstart providers a cheap, instant last-mile solution. Sharp competition with Korea Telecom, which the government forced to open its network in the early '90s, has driven broadband prices down to the world's lowest levels. All-you-can-eat service is available for as little as $25 a month.

The government has even set up a certification program to rate buildings based on the quality of their data lines. Developers who install fatter pipes take the opportunity to bump up their prices - not an insignificant policy in a country where 50 percent of the population lives in large apartment complexes. Fast connections are even getting bundled into the rent, as construction companies repackage minuscule high-rise people-boxes as cyber-apartments. (A typical four-bedroom is 1,150 square feet and costs $2,000 a month, not counting utilities, cyber or otherwise). Built by conglomerates like Daelim Industrial and Samsung in partnership with broadband carriers and content providers, the sales pitch is oddly reminiscent of 1950s American suburbia - except that instead of lawns and trees, developers promise an endless expanse of bandwidth allowing residents to buy flowers, chat with neighbors, and search for the perfect kimchi recipe on the local Ethernet. It's all very Epcot.

DESPITE THIS UTOPIAN vision of e-domesticity, the real allure of high-rise broadband is escape from the constraints of real estate. Escape into the wide horizons of a computer game, or into the welcoming company of other micro-apartment dwellers - preferably at the same time. Not only is South Korea a more wired country than the US, it is also a more gregarious one. Even if most Koreans had an American-style mega home-theater cocoon, they would still go out. These people do not bowl alone, particularly if they're single (most don't move out of their parents' place until they get married). They want to be with their friends.

And right now, the place to be with your friends is a PC baang in downtown Seoul upholstered in Romper Room hues. A hundred monitors glow with the candy colors of computer games. There are also a handful of "love seat" stations, outfitted with two computers and a double-wide bench. Theoretically, this is so guys can play videogames while their girlfriends video-chat with pals.

If you really watch the love seats, though, it becomes apparent that they're not so much a porch swing as an Internet-mediated bar stool. Every so often a girl will saunter by one of the stations, eye the occupant, and then sit down - or not. As it turns out, singles are video-chatting in game rooms all over town. If they hit it off, the guy says something like, "I'm sitting at love seat number 47 at this particular PC baang, if you'd care to join me." If the girl is sufficiently intrigued, she hops on the subway or walks - nothing is more than 20 minutes away in central Seoul. She cruises by, checks him out, and if she likes the look of him in person she sits down, hoping the lighting and shading algorithms she used to enhance her features in the video chat don't make her seem unglamorous in person.

Young-Baek Kim, 50, the proprietor of this PC baang, spends his days watching these scenarios play out. A former pharmacist, Kim used to work in a PC baang as a second job. Now he's the boss, and the business has expanded to seven locations staffed by his aunt, uncle, and cousins. Overhead is low, and margins are high - two years ago, South Korea's PC baangs raked in $6 billion. They are a great small-business opportunity.

But they are also the product of a huge business crisis. In 1997, when the Korean economy imploded, thousands of middle managers were laid off, with no hope of finding new suit-and-tie jobs. They had tightly knit extended families, though, and as a result, access to moderate amounts of capital from relatives (the cornerstone of the nation's small-business culture). A lot of them opened PC baangs - it cost the same as opening a restaurant, and it was less sweaty. Their out-of-work compatriots needed an inexpensive way to spend time. Tech-savvy students wanted to get out of the house. All the PC baang owners needed was something to draw people in groups and keep them paying a buck an hour while laying down extra cash for sodas and instant noodles.

THAT SOMETHING was online computer games. Because Korea was a Japanese colony for 40 years, until the end of World War II, it has had an acrimonious relationship with Japan. The latter's consumer electronics have traditionally been all but verboten thanks to both trade policy and cultural resentment. No PlayStations, no Sega, no Nintendo. As a result, PCs have become the dominant game platform in South Korea - unlike in the rest of the world, where consoles rule. And in 1998, with Starcraft the most popular game on the market, PC baang owners started hosting tournaments to boost business.

That snowball has now reached the bottom of the hill. Starcraft is not just a game in South Korea, it is a national sport, what football was in America in the 1970s. Five million people - equivalent to 30 million in the US - play. And three cable stations broadcast competitive gaming full-time to a TV audience.

Why watch gaming on TV? Partly for the same reason millions of fans tune in for golf - if you play, it's compelling to see the pros do their thing. But largely it's about production values. There is so much insane enthusiasm staged around an event, it takes on a kind of obsessive allure - seeing a subject this arcane, broadcast with such a degree of adrenaline, described in frenzied, masterful detail, is riveting.

As an Enigma-esque theme song introduces the broadcast, a three-camera studio crew stands by in a PC baang in the basement of one of Seoul's largest malls. Two opponents decked out in metallic vinyl armor face each other across flat-screen workstations, steeling themselves for a five-game session of Kingdom Under Fire. Dry-ice fog rolls across the floor. As the music builds to a gothic intensity, YES or NO appears on the TV screen, giving at-home viewers a chance to vote online for the contestants: Maxim, a two-time winner from the Cherry Clan, versus Fusion, a rising star from the Saint Clan. Their faces zoom briefly onto the screen as the commentator, sequestered in an adjacent room, announces the Korean equivalent of "Let's get ready to rumble."

Kingdom Under Fire, like many real-time strategy games, is a mixture of Tolkienesque imagery and resource allocation. Players micromanage supply chains staffed by tiny serfs while casting flashy magical spells to vanquish their opponents. Televised games are played in fast-forward, like speed chess, creating a spectacle of medieval Europe on Benzedrine: villagers frantically mining, keystone-cop masons bricking up buildings in seconds, antlike armies on the march. The excitement builds. The villagers are smelting! Six minutes in, swarms of little soldiers are wreaking micromayhem. Flocks of bats and fire-breathing dragons are on the wing - all accompanied by color commentary and a soundtrack.

The music reaches a crescendo as the challenger finishes off the defending champion in round one. Cut to a commercial: sexy teens on the run, snacking on Atlas candy bars. Then the commentators are back, trading banter and postgame analysis, replaying the highlights and gearing up for round two. More music. More frenzied medieval villagers. One hour and 55 minutes later, the defending champ prevails.

"We had a 41 share last week of people who watch cable TV at that time," says Chong Il Hun, 32, the lead announcer, who has become a celebrity TV personality in the three years he's been covering game tournaments. His station also airs online tutorials - playback footage of pro players along with voice-over commentary ("In this situation, I chose to go for the Yamato Gun, as opposed to the Optic Flare").

Chong points out a 20-year-old in an orange sweatshirt, immersed in online tactical warfare. "He's a pro gamer. Most of them practice 10 hours every day, like musicians," he says. "In Korea, people play games using the Internet like that. It's a kind of boom. It's the culture, it accelerates things. The first person gets something, other people get jealous, it spreads to the mainstream." Seventy percent of the country's Internet users are also online gamers, as opposed to 20 percent in the US.

SOUTH KOREA'S hypersocial culture affects how people connect in virtual space. Lineage, a homegrown online world, is a testament to the overlay of virtual and physical environments. It hosts more than 3 million players. On any given night, 150,000 of them are signed on simultaneously. Most play from PC baangs, which buy Lineage access for 20 cents an hour and sell it for a dollar, but an increasing number - those with wives and families - pay $25 a month to subscribe from home.

Like its Western counterparts EverQuest and Ultima Online, Lineage is a role-playing game set in the Middle Ages. Based on a comic book, the story involves the efforts of an evil king's stepson (the rightful heir) to rally a group of faithful followers (the Blood Pledge) and topple the usurper. In practice, it unfolds like a massively multiplayer king of the hill. The goal is to capture the castle, which allows you to raise money by levying tariffs on chain mail and mead. That enables you to buy more weapons and recruit soldiers to guard the castle against the onslaught of other attackers who want to do the same thing. Competing Blood Pledges - large gangs of players that can number in the hundreds - lay siege to one another's castles for hours at a time on fat broadband connections that allow the battles to play out in full glory.

What makes Lineage a distinctively Korean experience is that when players assemble to take down a castle, they do so in person, commandeering a local PC baang for as long as it takes. In the middle of a battle, these people aren't text-chatting. They're yelling across the room. Platoons sit at adjacent computers, coordinating among themselves and taking orders from the Blood Pledge leader. Lineage has a fixed hierarchy, unlike American role-playing games, in which leadership structures emerge organically. At the outset, you choose to be either royalty or a commoner. If you're a prince or princess, your job is to put together an army and lead it. If you're a commoner, your job is to find a leader. You pledge loyalty and fight to take over castles, and no matter how great you are at it, you can never be in charge.

This kind of tightly defined clan structure, which mirrors the Confucian hierarchy of Korean society, would be anathema to American players, who generally want to be the hero-king Lone Ranger. "In Korea, everyone is very comfortable with taking on subordinate roles," says Richard Garriott, who created Ultima and now runs the US division of Lineage's developer, NCsoft. "Their groups are extremely well structured, to the point where they march in lines, attack in waves, and have a style of coordination that you could not possible match in the United States."

Arguably, it is the tight-knittedness of Korean society, and its people's tendency to physically gather around technology, that makes Lineage and the PC baangs a success. Unsurprisingly, Lineage hasn't taken off in North America, partly because it's a game in which not everyone can be the boss. More fundamentally, the distance between Americans, physically and socially, makes it impossible to replicate the contagiousness of the game, which is also the contagiousness of PC baangs in South Korea and of broadband overall in the country. In the US, going online is not generally a group social experience and almost never a face-to-face social experience - in fact, we presume that if you're online, you're not talking to someone who's in the room.

The merging of virtual and physical space has huge implications, not just for the players but also for the way companies operate and where their costs are carried. NCsoft has only a few dozen customer-service reps to deal with 3 million gamers. Why? Because if a guy in a PC baang has a question, he can turn to someone next to him and ask "What is this about?" or "How do you do that?" If the person doesn't know, there's always the proprietor, who's been trained by NCsoft to troubleshoot. Afterward, not only has the question been answered, but the person who asked it is that much more of an expert, in case the player next to him ever has the same question. Essentially, customer support has been completely decentralized, because players help one another - and also market to one another. Buzz across the room sells broadband better than any targeted advertisement can.

IN THE US and Europe, where media companies are obsessed with pumping copyrighted content into living rooms, online games are not acknowledged as the market driver for broadband. But in other parts of the world, especially where population density is high and PC game rooms are giving millions of people their first taste of connectivity, online games are becoming the hottest high-bandwidth ticket in town.

"We're talking to Singapore, Thailand, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, South America," says Heo Hong, NCsoft's CFO. In Taiwan, there are a million Lineage players, most of whom play from home. In Japan, NCsoft has a joint venture with Yahoo! and Softbank to package Lineage as a subscription service. Last year, the game launched in Hong Kong. This year, a Chinese partner will roll it out in Beijing.

In Asia, where copyright law is only loosely enforced, massively multiplayer online games are less risky for media developers than movies, music, TV programs, or console games. Unlike freestanding content, online worlds are almost impossible to pirate. Someone could copy the client application, but the game itself lives on a centrally maintained network. Even if that person were able to duplicate the backend system (it costs millions to run Lineage as a reliable service), there is no way to replicate the presence of 2 million people and the dynamics that occur in a human system of that scale. The value isn't bound up in the content. It's bound up in the interactions - in the group experience.

South Korea's broadband commons challenges North American assumptions about what bandwidth is for and why it's relevant. In the US, cable, telephone, and media companies spin visions of set-top boxes and online jukeboxes, trying to "leverage content" and turn old archives into new media streams. There is a profound fear of empowering consumers to share media in a self-organizing way on a mass scale. Yet this is precisely what makes South Korea the broadband capital of the world. It's not a futuristic fantasy that caters to alienated couch potatoes; it's a present-day reality that meets the needs of a culture of joiners - a place where physical and virtual are not mutually exclusive categories.

When NCsoft, originally a systems integrator, decided to move into broadband media, it could have chosen to distribute "webisodes," or online animation. After all, South Korea is the third-largest producer of animation after the US and Japan. Instead, NCsoft's Heo says, the company "wanted to focus on interaction. And what is more interactive than games? We made this market. We made new sectors. American media companies were just using online capacity to distribute offline media."

So what about those of us in channel-surfing American cocoon-land? The vision of streaming media piped into the home, video-on-demand 24/7, and needle-narrow target markets is heralded as the way forward. Yet it is possible that this vision is holding us back. Perhaps the real market opportunities have nothing to do with connecting people to the Universal back catalog and everything to do with connecting people to each other. If Seoul is any kind of signpost, the way forward does not lie in the single servings of media we consume but in the playgrounds we share - no matter who's manning the turrets and storming the castles.

J. C. Herz (jnhq@yahoo.com) wrote about Star Wars Galaxies in Wired 10.06. -- --


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User:Vuara/Books by Henry Rogers

An Introduction to Writing Systems (Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics) by Henry Rogers

Paperback $39.95 Hardcover:  $74.95 This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. See details. Availability: This item has not yet been released. You may order it now and we will ship it to you when it arrives.

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The Sounds of Language: An Introduction to Phonetics by Henry Rogers (Author)

Price:  $32.00 & This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. See details. Availability: This title usually ships within 2 to 3 days. Please note that special order titles occasionally go out of print, or publishers run out of stock. These hard-to-find titles are not discounted and are subject to an additional charge of $1.99 per book due to the extra cost of ordering them. We will notify you within 2-3 weeks if we have trouble obtaining this title

6 used & new from $28.09

Paperback: 350 pages ; Dimensions (in inches): 0.75 x 9.00 x 6.00 Publisher: Pearson ESL; 1st edition (September 6, 2000)

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Theoretical and Practical Phonetics by Henry Rogers

Availability: Usually ships within 1-2 business days 5 used & new from $10.00

Edition: Paperback Paperback: ; Dimensions (in inches): 1.00 x 9.25 x 6.00 Publisher: Copp Clark Pitman; (May 1991)

title: User:Vuara/Books by Henry Rogers


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User:Vuara/Linguistics Courses

SGS Calendar 2003-2004

Linguistics LIN

Graduate Faculty

Full Members

P. M. Bhatt, BA, MA, PhD/French R. I. Binnick, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics E. N. Burstynsky, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics J. K. Chambers, BA, MA, PhD, DipEd/Linguistics E. A. Cowper, BA, AM, PhD/Linguistics B. E. Dresher, BA, PhD/Linguistics D. M. James, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics A. Johns, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics D. Massam, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics (Chair) A. T. Perez-Leroux, BA, MA, PhD/Spanish P. A. Reich, BS, MS, PhD/Linguistics K. D. Rice, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics Y. Roberge, BA, MA, PhD/French H. Rogers, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics R. H. Smyth, BA, MSc, PhD/Linguistics (Coordinator of Graduate Studies) S. Tagliamonte, BA, MA, PhD/Linguistics

Associate Members

G. B. Alboiu, BA, PhD L. M. Colantoni, MA, PhD D. McKercher, BSc, BEd, MA, PhD

Address: Sixth Floor, Robarts Library Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 3H1

Telephone: (416) 978-4029 Fax: (416) 971-2688 E-mail: lingdept@chass.utoronto.ca Web: www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/

Course descriptions and other information are available each spring from the Coordinator of Graduate Studies.

Degree of Master of Arts Applicants must have at least a B+ average to be considered for admission. Applicants whose academic background does not include courses in introductory phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntax are normally not admissible. If the applicant's academic background is limited to these courses, or the equivalent, consideration may be given for admission to a two-year program.

The M.A. program includes courses LIN 1121H, 1131H, 1181H, 1290Y, and JAL 1145H, or their equivalents, if not already taken, plus other requirements as determined by the Department. LIN 1290Y is taken in the final year of the degree. LIN 1121H, 1131H, and 1181H are normally taken in the first year. Students will be admitted to a one-year (normally four course) or two-year (normally eight course) program depending on their background.

All students must demonstrate an ability to read professionally in two languages other than English. The choice of languages must be approved by the graduate coordinator, having regard to the student's field of research. In some circumstances, demonstrated competence in computer programming may satisfy the requirement.

Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Candidates will be considered for admission if they have completed the University of Toronto M.A. in linguistics, or its equivalent, with at least an A- average.

Students are normally required to complete three full-course equivalents during the first year. Generals papers (LIN 2201H and LIN 2202H) in two areas of concentration must be completed by September of the second year. During these two years students are normally required to be on campus full-time for a residence period which entails being in such geographical proximity as to be able to visit the campus regularly and to participate fully in the Department's activities associated with the program.

Language requirements as outlined for the M.A. degree must be satisfied, and other requirements are determined in consultation with the graduate coordinator.

Candidates are required to present a thesis which must be an original contribution to linguistic knowledge. Both the preparation for and the writing of the thesis will be carried out under the supervision of members of the Department.

Courses of Instruction Not all courses are offered in any given year. Students should consult the departmental Web site.

JAL 1145H Introduction to Field Methods JAL 1155H Language and Gender JAL 1170H Language Typology JAL 1171Y Dialectology JIL 1140H Semiotics JLP 2450H Psycholinguistics JLP 2451H Language Acquisition JLP 2452H Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory JRL 1100Y Introduction to Romance Philology LIN 1000Y Introduction to Linguistics LIN 1005H Quantitative Methods in Linguistics (Credit/No Credit) LIN 1028H Phonetics LIN 1029H Sound Patterns in Language LIN 1031H Morphological Patterns in Language LIN 1032H Syntactic Patterns LIN 1105H Linguistic Structures LIN 1106Y Linguistic Structures LIN 1115H Second Language Acquisition LIN 1121H Phonological Theory LIN 1126H Phonetics LIN 1127H Phonetic Analysis LIN 1131H Introduction to Syntactic Theory LIN 1133H Morphology: Morphosyntactic Issues LIN 1145H Semantics LIN 1154H Sociology of Language LIN 1162H Comparative-Historical Linguistics I LIN 1172H Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics LIN 1180H History of Linguistic Thought LIN 1181H Introduction to Analysis and Argumentation LIN 1182H Language and Mind LIN 1200Y Current Issues in Linguistic Theory LIN 1201H Current Issues in Linguistic Theory LIN 1221H Advanced Phonology I LIN 1222H Advanced Phonology II LIN 1223H Advanced Phonology III LIN 1224H Advanced Phonology IV LIN 1231H Advanced Syntax I LIN 1232H Advanced Syntax II LIN 1233H Advanced Syntax III LIN 1234H Advanced Syntax IV LIN 1245H Advanced Semantics I LIN 1246H Advanced Semantics II LIN 1251H Variation Theory LIN 1254H Sociolinguistic Methods LIN 1256H Grammatical Variation LIN 1270H Models of Language Behaviour LIN 1290Y Linguistic Forum LIN 1321H Research in Phonology LIN 1331H Research in Syntax LIN 1502Y Reading Seminar LIN 1503H Reading Seminar LIN 1504Y Research Seminar LIN 1505H Research Seminar LIN 1507H Individual Readings I LIN 1509H Individual Readings II LIN 2201H Generals Paper I LIN 2202H Generals Paper II

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Linguistics Courses See page 27 for Key to Course Descriptions. For Distribution Requirement purposes (see page 22), LIN courses are classified as HUMANITIES or SOCIAL SCIENCE courses; check individual course listings below.

HUM199Y1 First Year Seminar       52S

Undergraduate seminar that focuses on specific ideas, questions, phenomena or controversies, taught by a regular Faculty member deeply engaged in the discipline. Open only to newly admitted first year students. It may serve as a Humanities course; see page 40.

LIN100Y1 Introduction to General Linguistics       52L, 26T

Lectures on fundamental principles with illustrations from English and from a broad spectrum of other languages. Practice in elementary analytic techniques. This is a Humanities course

LIN200H1 Introduction to Language       26L

A general-interest course on language. Possible topics include: the structure of language; how language changes over time, the social and psychological aspects of language, language and culture, the origin of language, writing systems, and language acquisition. (This course cannot be used as an entrance to programs in linguistics, and cannot be used be used as a Prerequisite to any linguistics courses unless otherwise indicated.)

Exclusion: LIN100Y1 This is a Humanities course

LIN201H1 Canadian English       26L

A study of the structures of several dialects of English spoken in Canada, and of their history and affiliations. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN100Y1/LIN200H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN203H1 English Words (formerly LIN202Y1)       26L

An analysis of English words, the history of their development and the variation in their use across the English-speaking world. Topics include the history and structure of words, the relation between sound and spelling, dialect variation and the development of dictionaries.

Exclusion: LIN202Y1 This is a Humanities course

LIN204H1 English Grammar (formerly LIN202Y1)       26L

How the English language works: students analyze a wide variety of English grammatical structures and learn how they vary across dialects and change through time.

Exclusion: LIN202Y1 This is a Humanities course

LIN228H1 Phonetics       26L, 13T

Investigation of the sounds most commonly used in languages from an articulatory and acoustic point of view, with practice in their recognition and production. Recommended preparation: LIN100Y1/LIN200H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN229H1 Sound Patterns in Language       26L, 13T

The nature and organization of phonological systems, with practical work in analysis. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1, LIN228H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN231H1 Morphological Patterns in Language       26L, 13T

The nature and organization of morphological systems, with practical work in analysis. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1 This is a Humanities course

LIN232H1 Syntactic Patterns in Language       26L, 13T

The nature and organization of syntactic systems; their relation to semantic systems and the linguistic organization of discourse; practical work in analysis. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1 This is a Humanities course

LIN256H1 Sociolinguistics       26L

An introduction to linguistic variation and its social implications, especially the quantitative study of phonological and grammatical features and their correlations with age, sex, ethnicity, and other social variables. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1 This is a Social Science course.

LIN299Y1 Research Opportunity Program

Credit course for supervised participation in faculty research project. See page 40 for details.

LIN305H1 Quantitative Methods in Linguistics       39L

Principles of research design, data collection, and a wide variety of statistical techniques for research in various subfields of linguistics. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1 and one full course in LIN/JAL/JFL/JLP This is a Social Science course

LIN306H1 Language Diversity and Language Universals       26L

This course examines cross-linguistic typological features found in the languages of the world. Special attention is given to describing morphological and syntactic patterns found cross-linguistically. The goal of the course is to draw on the range of variation in order to uncover language universals. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN231H1, LIN232H1 This is a Humanities course

JLP315H1 Language Acquisition       39L

Infants' abilities at birth, prelinguistic development, the first words, phonological, syntactic and semantic development. Social variables influencing development of language, bilingualism, models of development, language play. (Given by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology) Prerequisite: One full course equivalent at the 200-level in LIN/JAL/JUP/PSL/PSY This is a Science course

LIN322H1 Phonological Theory       39L

Basic issues in current phonological theory. Problems focusing on analysis and theory. (Students who want to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly advised to include this course in their program.) Prerequisite: LIN229H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN323H1 Acoustic Phonetics       26L

Introduction to acoustics, with particular reference to the vocal tract; acoustic properties of speech; instrumental techniques for speech analysis.

Exclusion: LIN321H1 Prerequisite: LIN228H1 This is a Humanities course

JAL328H1 Writing Systems (formerly JAL328Y1)       26L

Introduction to writing system: their historical development, their relationship to language, and their role in culture and society. (Given by the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics) Prerequisite: ANT100Y1/LIN100Y1/LIN200H1 This is a Social Science course

LIN331H1 Syntactic Theory       39L

An introduction to the foundations and formal framework of current generative grammar, concentrating on Chomsky's Minimalist theory. (Students who want to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly advised to include this course in their program.) Prerequisite: LIN232H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN341H1 Semantics       26L

The study of meaning within linguistics. Areas of interest include word meaning, the interpretation of syntactic units such as the sentence, the logic of semantic properties, and the interaction of meaning and the use of language. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN232H1 This is a Humanities course

JAL355H1 Language and Gender       26L

Ways in which women and men differ in their use of language and in their behaviour in conversational interaction; ways in which language reflects cultural beliefs about women and men. (Given by the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics) Prerequisite: Two full course equivalents at the 200-level in LIN/ANT/JAL/SOC Recommended preparation: ANT204Y1/JAL253H1/254H1/NEW261Y1/SOC200Y1/ 202Y1/SOC214Y1/SOC215Y1 This is a Social Science course

LIN356H1 Language Variation       26L

The theory and practice of sociolinguistics. The inter-relationship between language and society from the perspective of collecting, organizing, and analyzing patterns in natural speech data, including field methods and quantitative methods for correlating linguistic and social variables. Prerequisite: JAL254H1/LIN256H1 This is a Social Science course

LIN362H1 Historical Linguistics       26L

An introduction to diachronic linguistics. Theories of language change; the comparative method, internal reconstruction, linguistic geography, the origin of languages; language death. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN229H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN372H1 Introduction to Cognitive Linguistics       39L

Articulation of speech sounds, morphology, syntax, structure of the lexicon, comprehension of speech in noise, slips of the tongue, choice of vocabulary and sentence form when speaking. Prerequisite: LIN100Y1/(LIN231H1, LIN232H1)/ JLP315H1/JLP374H1/JUP250Y1/PSY270H1/PSY290H1/295H1 This is a Humanities course

JLP374H1 Psychology of Language       39L

Experimental approaches to the comprehension and production of languages. Topics include perception of speech sounds, storage and retrieval of words from the mental lexicon, processing of grammatical information, discourse comprehension and memory, models of language production, and the role of cognitive and perceptual systems. (Given by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology) Prerequisite: One full course equivalent at the 200-level in LIN/JAL/JUP/PSY/PSL This is a Science course

LIN398H0/399Y0 Independent Experiential Study Project

An instructor-supervised group project in an off-campus setting. See page 40 for details.

JAL401H1 Field Linguistics       52P

Practice in language analysis based on elicited data from a native speaker of a foreign language, emphasizing procedures and techniques. (Given by the Departments of Anthropology and Linguistics) (Students who want to pursue graduate studies in linguistics are strongly advised to include this course in their program.) Prerequisite: Completion of LIN322H1, LIN331H1, except for students in their final year where LIN331H1/332H1 is a corequisite. This is a Social Science course

LIN423H1 Phonetic Analysis       26L

Theoretical discussion of the acoustic correlates of various types of sounds found in language. Practical experience in the acoustic analysis of speech. (Not offered every year)

Exclusion: LIN321H1 Prerequisite: LIN323H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN432H1 Advanced Morphology: Morphosyntax       39L

Current research involving morphology, including the role of morphology in the grammar, the nature of inflectional paradigms, affixes affecting grammatical relations. Each year one topic will be a special focus and will be dealt with at length. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN231H1 Co-requisite: LIN331H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN458H1 Revitalizing Languages       26L

A study of language endangerment and language revitalization efforts, focusing on Aboriginal languages of Canada. Topics nclude language classification and a survey of major features of the languages, what it means for a language to be endangered, the factors that contribute to language shift, and efforts to reverse language shift, including discussion of literacy and dictionaries. Prerequisites: LIN100Y1Y plus at least two full course equivalents drawn from LIN/JAL. This is a Humanities course.

JLP471H1 Advanced Psycholinguistics       39L

Seminar in advanced topics in psycholinguistics. Content will vary from year to year. (Given by the Departments of Linguistics and Psychology) (Not offered every year) Prerequisite:JLP374H1, LIN322H1/LIN331H1 This is a Science course

JLS474H1 Disorders of Speech and Language       39L

An introduction to normal and deviant development of speech and language; the disintegration of human communication skills; remediation of disorders of speech, voice, language and hearing; the effects of human communication handicaps on the individual, family, and community; theoretical and philosophical aspects of disordered communication. (Given by the Departments of Linguistics and Speech Pathology) Prerequisite: JLP315H1/JLP374H1 This is a Science course

JFL477H1 Issues in French and Linguistics I       26S

An advanced seminar on issues of current theoretical relevance in linguistics with special reference to French. This course is taught in English. Prerequisite: Any 300+series FRE or LIN course

JFL478H1 Issues in French and Linguistics II       26S

An advanced seminar on issues of current theoretical relevance in linguistics with special reference to French. This course is taught in English. Prerequisite: Any 300+series FRE or LIN course

LIN480H1 History of Linguistics        26L

A survey of linguistic thought from Panini to the present, focussing primarily on the 20th century. Three approaches are used: linguistic schools, major personalities and their works, and concepts. (Not offered every year) Prerequisite: LIN100Y1 Recommended preparation: Reading knowledge of another European language This is a Humanities course

LIN481H1 Introduction to Analysis and Argumentation       39L

Argumentation, practice in constructing and evaluating hypotheses, and critical evaluation of representative articles. Emphasis on the structure of arguments rather than on the analysis of a particular language. Prerequisite: LIN322H1/LIN331H1 This is a Humanities course

LIN495Y1/497Y1 Individual Project       TBA

A research or reading project undertaken by the student under the supervision of a staff member. Open only when a faculty member is willing and available to supervise. Prerequisite: Permission of the Department

LIN496H1/498H1/499H1 Individual Project       TBA

A research or reading project undertaken by the student under the supervision of a staff member. Open only when a faculty member is willing and available to supervise. Prerequisite: Permission of the Department

title: User:Vuara/Linguistics Courses


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User:Vuara/UT Linguistics fees

General enquiries: graduate.information@utoronto.ca

Financial support enquiries: graduate.awards@utoronto.ca

Specific enquiries: relevant graduate unit

Mail School of Graduate Studies University of Toronto 63/65 St. George Street Toronto, Ontario Canada M5S 2Z9

Telephone 416-978-6614

Admission Requirements

The School of Graduate Studies sets minimum admission requirements as outlined below. However, some departments require a higher average. For specific information on departmental admission requirements, please contact the department that offers the program.

Master's Programs and Full-time Special Students An appropriate four-year bachelor's degree with a final year average of at least mid-B from the University of Toronto, or its equivalent from another recognized university.

Doctoral Programs An appropriate University of Toronto master's degree, or its equivalent, with an average of at least B+, or demonstrated comparable research competence.

Some departments admit directly to the doctoral program from a bachelor's degree, for exceptional students with a minimum final-year average of A-.

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UT Linguistics

Program Description The Department offers programmes in linguistics, as well as combined programmes with languages other than English and with Philosophy, as shown in the Programmes of Study.

In addition to the undergraduate curriculum within the Department of Linguistics, there are courses relating to linguistics offered in other departments, such as the language departments, Anthropology, Computer Science, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Psychology, and in the Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence programme.

Program Requirements http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/SWU/grad/programmes.shtml

Research http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/Wr/index.shtml

Faculty http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/FYI/who.html#faculty

Related Programs http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/linguistics/SWU/grad/programmes.shtml Program: Linguistics MA or PhD One Year Full-time Fees - 2003-2004 [1] Doctoral and Doctoral-Stream Master’s – St. George Campus: MA, PhD: 5,442.00 + 705.62 = 6147.62 Doctoral and Doctoral-Stream Master’s – Mississauga Campus             5,442.00 + 632.14 = 6074.14 Doctoral and Doctoral-Stream Master’s – Scarborough Campus:           5,442.00 + 653.82 = 6095.82

UofT Financial Aid http://www.utaps.utoronto.ca/fa/default.htm

Visiting U of T

St. George Campus Walking tours on the St. George campus depart from the Nona Macdonald Visitors Centre, located at 25 King's College Circle. General tours are offered daily Monday through Friday at 11 a.m. and 2 p.m., and on Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.

During the summer months of June, July and August. historical walking tours of the campus are also offered Monday through Friday.

March Break activities begin on Saturday March 13 and run to Friday March 19, 2004. For a detailed schedule, visit the March Break website.

University of Toronto Discovery Day will be on Saturday October 16, 2004.

Prospective applicants are also invited to take part in a St. George Campus Visit starting at 9:30 am on Thursdays and Fridays during the months of October, November, and February through March. In addition to an extensive tour of the campus, these visits include an opportunity for admissions counseling and a residence tour, until March 28.

Please note the following dates tours will not be offered on all campuses as the University is closed:

2004: Friday Apr. 9, 2004 - Sunday April 11, 2004 (inclusive) Saturday May 22, 2004 - Monday May 24, 2004 (inclusive) Saturday July 31, 2004 - Monday Aug. 2, 2004 (inclusive) Thursday July 1, 2004 - Sunday July 4, 2004 (inclusive) Saturday Sept. 4, 2004 - Monday Sept. 6, 2004 (inclusive) Saturday Oct. 9, 2004 - Monday Oct. 11, 2004 (inclusive)

All tours are free of charge. Bookings are not required for groups under 10 people; for larger groups we would be delighted to arrange a special tour. To book a St. George tour, or for more information, please call (416) 978-5000.

title: User:Vuara/UT Linguistics fees