Chinese vs. Japanese

[Dragonblade]

While appreciate your opinion on this, Dragonblade... let's try to keep it within the context of the original question. Based on the ideas presented in the article, what are the implications for a campaign world?

Well, it would be interesting in a campaign world. But it would take a lot of work on the language side of things. Unless you are a linguistic scholar like Tolkien was.

 

[Lalato]

shadow... that sounds really cool.

Now I'm trying to think of a way to use that for my nefarious gaming purposes... hmmmm... It might be interesting to have two separate cultures, that are separated by an ocean instead of a sea, that use the same alphabet, but have completely separate meanings behind the words. If culture A gets a hold of a manuscript from culture B? Would it be gibberish? Would it make sense? If made sense... would it unleash some incredible power?

 

[Lalato]

Well, it would be interesting in a campaign world. But it would take a lot of work on the language side of things. Unless you are a linguistic scholar like Tolkien was.

I agree that to do something truly immersive one would have to really be a scholar. That said, I also think that some of these concepts can be made a bit more abstract for gaming purposes.

 

[tarchon]

attatched to words. Some Japanese word can have quite a few suffixes. For example kakaseraremaa is a single word meaning "was made to write". (The stem is the verb kak(u))

LOL - profanity filters. I ran into one once that got pissy about cum laude.

Wonder if that'll go through? Hmm.

 

[shadow]

Some Japanese word can have quite a few suffixes. For example kakaserarema a is a single word meaning "was made to write". (The stem is the verb kak(u))

LOL - profanity filters. I ran into one once that got pissy about cum laude.

Man, I never knew that Japanese was such a profane language! Maybe I should have used the plain form of the verb kakaserareta rather than the polite form which includes the letters s, h, i, and t!

 

[Liminal Syzygy]

Now I'm trying to think of a way to use that for my nefarious gaming purposes... hmmmm... It might be interesting to have two separate cultures, that are separated by an ocean instead of a sea, that use the same alphabet, but have completely separate meanings behind the words.

Yes there are false cognates (or false friends) between Japanese and Chinese using Chinese characters. For example, the Chinese chnaracters for (hand) (paper) mean letter in Japanese.

In China (well the PRC specficially it's different in Taiwan) those two characters mean toilet paper.

That leads many well meaning Japanese people to promise their friends in their simple chinese -- wo hui lai ri ben i hou, wo song gei ni shou zhi (When I go back to Japan I will send you a letter) With the Chinese people wondering why they are being promised toilet paper.

 

[Michael Tree]

Because of this, the Chinese language is well suited for a character based writing system. Contrary to popular belief, each Chinese character is not a word, rather each character represents a morpheme-a combination of sound and meaning. Most (although not all) Chinese words are made up of one or more characters. For example, the word for telephone is dìanhùa. It is made up of two characters - dìan (meaning electricity) and hùa (meaning speech or talking).

To expand on what Shadow wrote, in Chinese writing there is a character for each syllable, and most Chinese words are made of two syllables. However, a lot of the time, the two characters used to form a two-syllable word do not have meanings outside from the compound word. I don't know about the example above, but if it's typical of Chinese you couldn't say dìan and expect anyone to know you're talking about electricity. (This could be a bad example though.)

I'll use an analogy from English. If Chinese characters were used to write English, the words mother, father, brother, and sister would all be comprised of two characters, and the second character for all of them would be "er", defined in the dictionary as "family member". But the character "er" has no meaning aside from in combination with other characters. Nor would the character "fath", defined in the dictionary as "male parent", have any seperate meaning. You couldn't talk about ers or faths and expect anyone to have a clue what you're talking about.

 

[FireLance]

To expand on what Shadow wrote, in Chinese writing there is a character for each syllable, and most Chinese words are made of two syllables. However, a lot of the time, the two characters used to form a two-syllable word do not have meanings outside from the compound word. I don't know about the example above, but if it's typical of Chinese you couldn't say dìan and expect anyone to know you're talking about electricity. (This could be a bad example though.)

I have a passing familiarity with Chinese, having been required to study it as a second language for 11 years :\. It's not exactly true that most "component words" (for want of a better term) have no meaning outside of the compound words. Each component word has a general meaning, which combines with the general meaning of the other word to form a more specific meaning for the compound word.

For example: dian4* has the general meaning of electricity. It can be combined with "flash" or "fast" (shan3) to mean lightning (shan3 dian4). It can be combined with "reservoir" (ci2) to mean battery (dian4 ci2). It can be combined with "lamp" (deng1) to mean electric light (dian4 deng1).

In addition, not all compound words are exactly two letters long. The compound word dian4 deng1 pao4 ("electric lamp bubble") means "light bulb". It also has the connotative meaning of a third person who hangs around a couple, i.e. a gooseberry.

Chinese does have plenty of homonyms. The component word for electricity (dian4) also sounds the same as the component word for "shop" or "store", so if I just say the word dian4 without any modifiers or context, you wouldn't know what I was talking about.

* Note: Chinese words generally have four intonations. As I'm not sure how to get accented characters on my keyboard, I've fallen back on the convention of denoting intonation with a number after the word

 

[tarchon]

The situation with Chinese renderings of Western names is really no different from that between any two languages. It's just more obvious because the writing systems are very different. Take for example the German name "Goethe" - no English speaker without special training can pronounce it, simply because one of the sounds doesn't exist in English. People often delude themselves into thinking they're pronouncing it by saying "Gurta" or "Goatha" or "Goata," but what they're really pronouncing is an approximation of the German sounds with English sounds, no different from the approximation the Chinese make when they say "Bulang" for "Brown." Even with apparently pronounceable names like "Mozart," the English speaker is not really using German sounds, only English sounds that are close to the German or at least are conventionally considered equivalent because they're written with the same symbols. I can easily hear the difference between a German 'o' and an English 'o', and certainly the 'r' is totally different. More subtly, there are always differences between way sounds are combined and altered within the word, of which most speakers are unaware.

The degree to which borrowed names and words are altered depends a lot on the literacy of the culture and the frequency with which words are borrowed. English borrows words from French so routinely that we have standard ways to mispronounce them. On the other hand, American Indian words borrowed into English were very haphazardly adapted by sound alone, and thus often reanalyzed by early American settlers. Because of that we get words like "woodchuck" and "chipmunk," which don't resemble the originals very much but have clearly attempted to find familiar morphemes like "wood" and "chip."

 

[FireLance]

Anyway, to get back on topic. In game, language would be a good way to showcase the philosopical differences between cultures. For example, one could be willing to embrace and internalise new ideas, and so invents new terms in its language for foreign words and concepts. Or it might be portrayed as an empire that conquers and assimilates other nations, adding new words to its language, but forcing all its subject peoples to speak no other tongue.

Another might be obsessed with the idea of purity and keeping itself apart from the rest of the world. It might use one unchanging language exclusively amongst themselves (it is never taught to outsiders), and another to speak to members of other races. Perhaps it even isolates certain members of its society (children, females, peasants) as being unable to deal with the outside world and new ideas. Such members would only be taught one language, and teaching any other language to them might be a crime.

Or, to follow on from the same writing, different language idea above, perhaps two cultures clash over a myserious text that means one confusing thing in one language and something equally confusing in the other. However, there is a third unknown language that uses the same writing in which it makes sense.

Alternatively, two peoples may be separated and their language, but not writing, has diverged. In order to promote reconciliation, a deity has sent them a message that can only be deciphered by alternating words in each language.