But the problems begin, when chinese text is written on paper. http://www.zhongwen.com/wen.html
is the best help that I found yet with the character construction
in the bottom right half.
I have a Zodiac-calender at my wall and the first signs are nearly
the same like on Ang Pao -envelops.
jí xiáng rú yì (auspicious as wished, or Engl. "best wishes"),
but on the calender the last sign differs... (not only in it's
calligraphy ) and I didn't find it yet.
Otherwise it could show it here.
Are there any other online tools with character contruction
like ZhongWen.Com ?
Part Two:
According to Wikipedia and Omniglot Hokkien is a dialect of
Min Nan that is never written ... Now I understand that my
Singaporean friend was unable to answer my question how they
write... OK, English... or better Singlish, but not Hokkien.
This forum (and a few Singlish-dictionaries) seem to be some
"inofficial" sources for "Hokkien Wen" .
Part Three:
Having a pinyin pronounciation, eg. nian2, I get several
completely different translations, here the word that I assumed,
"year", but also "draw lots", "viscous", "sheat(fish)", "sticky",
depending on the used symbols, all with the same pronounciation,
nián. - How is a spoken communication possible, when there are
so many similar words? Written it's no problem, I think. All the
symbols in the example differ.
Especially in Hokkien (that's not written?) the listener has a
careful job...
_ _ _
Maybe all the above should have been posted in another thread??
Please don't hit me
Many,many langauges of china are never been written down including Beijing language and wu language.All those written down materials mainly are not the daily spoken version of it.
Minnan conversation has been written down in a 5th century book called 祖堂記。In Ming period we have 荔鏡記。
1. Your question is relevant for Hokkien, but applies in fact to all the Chinese languages/dialects.
2. In fact, the "problem" you describe applies less to Hokkien (and Cantonese, and a lot of the southern "dialects") than to Mandarin.
Let my try and explain both points a little. The explanation of the first point is rather long, but bear with me...
1. All the Chinese languages are famous for having a lot of homonyms, i.e. words which have a different meaning but which sound identical. If you look up a large pinyin-based dictionary of Mandarin, under yi4, I think you'll find more than 20 different characters all pronounced yi (in particular all in the 4th tone, which is so much more dramatic than the standard ma1, ma2, ma3, ma4 example which they always give in introductory descriptions of Mandarin). [The Microsoft Word input method offers 69 different characters in simplified characters and 201 in traditional for yi4! (Admittedly, many of them will probably be rather obscure.)]
All these words sounding the same is a result of sound change in Chinese in the last 2000 years, where initial consonant clusters (like English sh-, shr- etc) and final consonant clusters (like English -ns, -nts, etc) were reduced. [Not that Ancient Chinese ever really had *very* many consonant clusters, but it had in any case more than the present Chinese languages/dialects.]
Mandarin also went a step further and lost all final stops: words formerly ending in -p, -t, -k just lost their -p, -t, -k.
When you reduce consonant clusters (and lose final stops), then words which were formerly pronounced differently all become similarly pronounced. For example, if you had words "sop", "stop", "strop", "strops", and you reduce initial and final consonant clusters and lose final stops, then all of them become pronounced "so". (That's just a made up example, not from Chinese).
Anyway, loss of consonant clusters (and in the case of Mandarin, loss of final stops) was probably the most serious cause of many words becoming homonyms in Chinese.
Your question is: how do Chinese tell them apart in speaking?
Well, there are a number of answers to this.
a) Context.
English too has a lot of words which sound the same, but which can be distinguished in the written form: see/sea, meet/meat, pale/pail, doe/dough, etc. Hundreds of them, in fact. Perhaps the most dramatic of all is: right/rite/write/(play-)wright.
What happens when people speak is that there is always a context in which you say something (you know the person who is speaking, or you are physically present, so you know the surroundings, what could be being spoken about etc).
So, for example, if you hear someone say "I've seen a lot of mails/males today", then if you were talking to a bird-watcher or a biologist then he/she probably meant "males", i.e. specimens spotted or examined, and if he/she was an internet specialist, then probably "mails" was what was meant, i.e. as opposed to "internet pages", "jpg-files", "pdf-files".
Probably, all languages have homonyms (some more than others), and context is the normal way of resolving them.
b) Disambiguators
When two words sound identical, another word can be added before or after either of the words (or both), which, help to tell the listener which of the two identically-sounding words is meant.
In English, we might do this with the word "nail". It can mean either "the protective covering at the tips of the fingers", or "the sharp metal object hammered into wood".
Usually, context tells you which nail is meant, but if one wants to be explicit, then instead of saying: "Blast! That's the third time I've bent that nail", one might say "Blast! That's the third time I've bent that fingernail". Here, the word "finger" helps to show which "nail" is meant.
Well, Chinese makes use of this method extensively (because it has so many more homonyms that context may not always help). Many nouns and verbs you learn are not just single syllables, but double characters: "table" (zuo zi), "to eat" (chi fan), etc. In theory, "zuo" already means "table", and "chi" already means "eat", but often these other words are added to help indicate which "zuo" and "chi" is being meant.
Hokkien also uses these disambiguators: we say "thi*7 teng2" for "sky" and "kia*7 lO7" for "walk", although "thi*1" alone means "sky", and "kia5" alone means "walk". In the first case, "sky TOP" helps to disambiguate which one of all the words pronounced "thi*1" is meant, and in the second case, "walk ROAD" helps to disambiguate which one of all the words pronounced "kia*5" is meant.
This is the tricky thing about Chinese. These "disambuguators" are needed in some contexts, but in others they aren't. For example, if you wanted to say "the sky has gone dark", then you'd only need to say: "thi*1 am3 liau2" - the "am3" (dark) is sufficient to indicate that "sky" is the "thi*1" which is meant. Or, if one wanted to say: "let's go out for a walk", one only needs to say: "lang2 khi2 kia*5, ho2 bo5?" - the "khi3" (to go) is sufficient to indicate that "walk" is the "kia*5" which is meant. It's often quite subtle when a disambiguator is needed and when it isn't.
Hope that makes sense to you as an answer to your basic question of how Chinese people can distinguish which word is meant when so many of them sound alike.
2. I mentioned at the start that this "problem" of homonyms is actually less for the Southern Chinese dialects/languages than for Mandarin.
This is because the Southern Chinese dialects/languages have had less loss of final consonants than Mandarin. Whereas Mandarin syllables can only end in a vowel or -n or -ng, those of the Southern Chinese dialects/languages can end in more sounds. For example, Hokkien syllables can end in a vowel, or -p, -t, -k, -h, -m, -n, -ng. This means that there are more distinct syllables in Hokkien than in Mandarin.
I personally believe that this is reflected in the fact that Hokkien uses less diambiguators than Mandarin. Here are two small list of words I collected, where Mandarin uses (normally) a disambiguator, but Hokkien doesn't:
Mandarin uses zi0:
- "lion" 狮子shi1 zi0 (M) is just 狮 sai1 (H)
- "pigeon" 鸽子 ge1 zi0 (M) is just 鸽 kap3 (H)
- "mosquito" 蚊子wen2 zi0 (M) is just 蚊 bang4 (H)
- "hat, cap" 帽子 mao4 zi0 (M) is just 帽bo3 (H)
- "name" 名字 ming2 zi0 (M) is just 名mia2 (H)
- "trousers" 裤子ku4 zi0 (M) is just 裤khO3 (H)
Mandarin uses another word:
- "cave" 山洞 shan1 dong4 (M) is just 洞 tong3 (H)
- "to shake" 摇动yao2 dong4 (M) is just 摇 io2 (H)
- "wood" 木材 mu4 cai2 (M) is just 材 cha2 (H)
- "tortoise" 乌龟wu1 gui1 (M) is just 龟ku1 (H)
- "tongue" 舌头 she2 tou0 (M) is just舌cih1 (H)
- "to vomit" 呕吐ou3 tu4 (M) is just either 呕 au4 (H) or 吐 tO3 (H)
[Mark: please forgive me if I got incorrect characters for the Hokkien words. Here I am really the poor amateur!! And everyone also please excuse me if my examples are not completely accurate for Mandarin: I'm only just *starting* to learn Mandarin. The examples may not be completely accurate, but the *idea* is, I think, not too far wrong]
Anyway, all that notwithstanding, Hokkien still "suffers" from having lots of homonyms, so it still also uses disambiguators in the same way as Mandarin, just (I believe) to a lesser extent. [However, an extensive statistical analysis is the only way to prove it either way.]
1. As so often, I forgot to put my name in "username", so I'm only "guest" in the previous reply.
2. I forgot to say that my long reply was an attempt to answer Part Three of Harald's initial post:
>> Part Three:
>> Having a pinyin pronounciation, eg. nian2, I get several
>> completely different translations, here the word that I assumed,
>> "year", but also "draw lots", "viscous", "sheat(fish)", "sticky",
>> depending on the used symbols, all with the same pronounciation,
>> nián. - How is a spoken communication possible, when there are
>> so many similar words?
I'm impressed by the particularity of your explanations. hehe, that reminds me on
" In England the left side is the right side, and
on the right side you are left . "
(meaning the traffic on the streets)
Ok, due to the dropping of the end-sounds, I understand why a
transliteration (not translation) of my name was so difficult even
for an expert: http://www.harald-zappe.de/me/cn-note1.html
_ _ _
Please any comments about the "human OCR"-problem
(OCR = optical character recognition), means finding a written
(yet unknown) symbol in a dictionary.
It is nice to see that you had your name translated into so many languages. However, it is a shame though, to note that you did not have a complete Chinese name. (There is no surname.) The reason is quite obvious because there is no suitable word (with good meaning) to fit in your surname "Zappe". I think if you compromise to have "zha" instead of "za" in your Chinese surname, then you may have the surname of "Zha 查 ". This is the surname of a well-known Chinese writer, Mr. Zha Liangyong.
Please note that in a normal Chinese name, generally it consists of one word for the surname and two words for the given name. So we cut "Zappe" to "Za" and twist it into "Zha". Since you already have the given names as " 哈 乐 " (this "le4" is in the simplified form.) ( My Chinese character input is limited to only the simplified form, sorry). Now you will have a complete name of "Zha Ha Le, 查 哈 乐 ".
This is only a suggestion. If you do not like it, just ignore this, okay?
many thanks for your ideas.
Yes, I have seen both, 樂(traditional on my stamp) and 乐 (simplified).
On my search for names in general I found a chinese translation for
"Zapp": http://www.chinesenames.org/name-translation/z/z02.htm
扎普 (zha2 pu3) - ?universal binding?
It seems that in foreign names the chinese rule might be broken, that
there is only a limited set of family (clan) names.
In German, the "Z" is different to the soft English "Z", we pronounce it
"ts", so I also tried to find something useful with "tsa"...
not found yet.
Anyway I have learnt that transliteration is not easy
, I was verifying the Zodiac-Signs.
) and I didn't find it yet. 
