5 Point Languages

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Gollum

That seems so strange to me ... And it also sounds to contradict the fact that the same ideogram can be pronounced so differently depending on the language (Hànyǔ, Wúyǔ, Japanese and so on) ...

A pronunciation radical only has to give the same pronunciation for different characters within one language.

Have you got some examples or, at least some bibliography to help me improve my general knowledge about that topic?

Japanese, not Chinese, but this demonstrates the principle:

This character, 剣 (sword), is pronounced ken.

Many other characters containing the same radical from the left-side have the same pronunciation.
検 (examine)
険 (steepness)
倹 (economical)
験 (effect)

Examples from https://jisho.org/search/ken.

Also pronounced as ken:
建 (build)
健 (health)
腱 (tendon)
鍵 (key)

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Varyon

Yeah, the only sound unique to c is actually the one for ch

Unfortunately, I question that suggestion. These all feature a /tʃ/.

[Varyon]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

Unfortunately, I question that suggestion. These all feature a /tʃ/.

Good point. One could make an argument that all cases of the ch sound should be replaced with just a c, and other instances should have similar replacements made to them, but that's going to make things look odd. For example, your sentence would be written something like "Unforcunateli, I kwescun that sujescun. These all feecur a /tʃ/." My own sentence would look something like "Won kuld make an argument that all kases of the ch sound shuld be replased with just a c, and other instanses shuld have similar replasements made to them, but that's going to make things look odd."

[Gollum]

Originally Posted by Daigoro

A pronunciation radical only has to give the same pronunciation for different characters within one language.

Japanese, not Chinese, but this demonstrates the principle:

This character, 剣 (sword), is pronounced ken.

Many other characters containing the same radical from the left-side have the same pronunciation.
検 (examine)
険 (steepness)
倹 (economical)
験 (effect)

Examples from https://jisho.org/search/ken.

Also pronounced as ken:
建 (build)
健 (health)
腱 (tendon)
鍵 (key)

OK. Thank you very much! So it is inside the same language (that ideogram is pronounced Jiàn - something like "j'yen" - in Chinese).

But as you can see with my example above (好 hǎo, 女 Nǚ, 子 zi), it doesn't work for every ideogram. And I'm not sure it works for a lot of them. It may even work better with Japanese than with Chinese, in which there are a lot of different languages which use the same writing system.

木 (wood), for instance, can be read mù, ba or ma, depending on where you are in China.

[Daigoro]

Originally Posted by Gollum

But as you can see with my example above (好 hǎo, 女 Nǚ, 子 zi), it doesn't work for every ideogram. And I'm not sure it works for a lot of them. It may even work better with Japanese than with Chinese, in which there are a lot of different languages which use the same writing system.

木 (wood), for instance, can be read mù, ba or ma, depending on where you are in China.

No, you're right, it doesn't always happen, and it's inconsistent when it does. Nonetheless, a lot of characters are built with those rules. They might have drifted away from their original pronunciations or been mixed up with other words and meanings. It's probably more common for Chinese to rely on pronunciation radicals than Japanese, because the character set is so much larger.

[Jareth Valar]

Originally Posted by evileeyore

If we're going to be frank about, I blame the Germans. ;)

Now that was a groaner...lol

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Jareth Valar

Now that was a groaner...lol

Thank you, I'm here all night.


Because I'm banned everywhere else...

[Rasna]

Originally Posted by TGLS

This is just tooling around with things.

Normally you buy languages in three levels, marginal understanding, non-idiomatic understanding, and idiomatic understanding. You buy both Spoken and Written language at these levels. I don't understand how one could understand a language idiomatically in one sense (Written or Spoken) and not the other. So I've been wondering whether it would make sense to knock full fluency of a language down to five points, where having native understanding in one half applies to the other.

Basically, there are four areas of proficiency: listening, speaking, reading and writing. In GURPS this can be solved by dividing the Spoken language in "speaking" and "listening" and the Written language in "reading" and "writing", whit the use of the half-point (0.5 points for Broken, 1 point for Accented, 1.5 points for Native) to value each aspect.

Some example from my experience.

I can say that I "speak English" quite well. But the truth is that 1) I'm better at reading English than writing English; 2) I'm better at speaking English than listening English (I'm good at listening if the other person speaks not too fast and he/she doesn't speak in a slang or in a strongly accented way). Probably I'm Native at reading, between Accented and Native at writing, Accented at speaking (I've good fluency and vocabulary, but my native accent is very evident and I've some trouble to pronounce some words) and Accented at listening (up to almost Native if the speech is very clear and moderately slow, down to Broken or worse if the speech is very accented and slangish).

I can speak at Native level both the Italian and the dialect of my home city. I can understand at Native level most other dialects of my home region and even some dialects from neighbouring regions (in Lazio, the northern part up to Rome, Rome included; I can also understand at Accented level the dialects of the central part of Marche and the dialects of Umbria) but I can't speak them at Native level. For example, my girlfriend lives in a city, which is in the same region, that is roughly 120 km of distance from the city where I live. If we talk to each other in our respective city dialects, "heavy" as we can do, we understand everything of the other's speech except for the occasional strongly vernacular word of obscure meaning. But if I try to speak in her native dialect or viceversa, it doesn't work very well. Funny thing, if I speak in my dialect to people from other regions, most of them will have a level of comprehension of my speech between "Accented-to-Native" and Accented because the dialect of my home city is very close to standard Italian. But if I listen the speech of strongly dialectal Neapolitan, Sicilian or Venetian, for example, my level of comprehension will be between "Broken-to-Accented" and None (yep, my level of comprehension of French and Spanish is by far superior to my level of comprehension of Neapolitan, Lombard or Furlan).

Lastly, I can read Ancient Hebrew very well, but I'm not able at the same level in writing Ancient Hebrew, at least not without a dictionary.