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Thread: Is the Chinese language dead?

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[quote=CHRISWAUGHBJ,39074]Traveller Mike, I thought I pointed out in my comments how Chinese can and does create new characters. The periodic table of the elements provides plenty of examples- all the elements that have been discovered in modern times have required their own unique character. This is done by recombining radicals.

Radicals, which as a student of Chinese you should be starting to become familiar with, are simple characters or stripped-down forms of simple characters which are combined to form more complex characters. A couple of examples would be curry and coffee, both imported probably in fairly recent times.
Curry is 咖喱. Notice that both characters have the 口 radical on the left. This means mouth and in these two characters indicate that the word refers to something you eat. The radicals 加 and 厘 provide the phonetic information. The combination comes out as 'gali', meaning curry.
Coffee, 咖啡 follows the exact same method.

"Clearly it has been demonstrated that the Chinese character set can be revised in a controlled manner (as in the simplification), but could the language accommodate many new characters if these did not come with new sound/stress combinations? Would it not be frightening if new characters were to be brought into being that necessitated use of more western sounds!! :-)"

What on earth do you mean? The new characters naturally come with their own pronunciation, first of all. Secondly, I've never heard of a language which imports foreign pronunciations with its loan words. Think of all the English words of a non-English origin: we never pronounce them as they were originally pronounced in the source language, we pronounce them as if they were English words (which they now are). Chinese is no different. With curry and coffee we can see how Chinese can assign new words sounds that approximate the pronunciation in the source language, but these sounds come from within the Chinese language.[/quote]

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