Transcriber: Zhuo Wang Reviewer: Denise RQ
So what if it was possible to take the world's most popular second language,
and write it in the writing script of the world's most popular language?
That would be English and Chinese characters.
You may wonder why would we want to do that?
As a Chinese learner and an English speaker learning Chinese,
I have to tell you that having letters,
having letters letting me into the Chinese language sound system.
So "ren" spells r-e-n.
The fact that I can use the writing script that I grew up with,
that I feel comfortable with,
that's intuitive and natural for me
to learn the speech sounds of another language
is called phonetic localization.
The romanization of Chinese gives me that bridge.
For almost 200 years, people have been using Chinese characters
to approximate the sounds of the English language.
Two years ago, I came to TED and presented to the audience
a little history about English written in Chinese characters,
as well as a few of my own projects, including an opera I wrote,
entitled "Yingelishi" or "English".
Yingelishi uses Chinese characters, writing Chinese poetry in those characters
but when sang out loud, it becomes an English libretto.
Another project of mine was called "Pinyin".
(Chinese) Pinyin is the phonetic spelling.
Pinyin is the world's first designed system specifically for Chinese people
to learn the American English pronunciation learning system.
(English) Pinyin is the first pronunciation learning system
designed specifically for the needs of Chinese speakers.
It does this by doing away with the idea of right and wrong
and attacking the problems of interlanguage at its core, in its code.
You see, Chinese characters are entire syllable sounds.
Each one of them has a vowel.
So when you spell a word like "please", which is one syllable in English,
becomes "pu", "lì", and "sī", three syllables in Chinese.
With other words you have
other substitutions, deletions; the stress, intonation, right?
All of these are distrupted by Chinese characters.
But you see, the problems that Chinese characters create
can be best solved behind Chinese characters.
Pinyin uses an ancient idea called "fèn qiē"
derived from the rime tables, "The Yunjing", over a 1,500 years old.
What it does is it separates
Chinese characters into the front and back or the top and bottom,
the consonant and the vowel.
It works like this.
We want the sound "e" as in "pet."
We can find it in the Chinese character "ye",
but we have to parse it, we have to pop it,
take off the "y" sound and only concentrate on the vowel.
What about the consonant?
We need the "f" sound. We take it from "fa".
We are popping off and leaving behind the vowel sound.
What about "sh"? "Sh" from "sha"?
Again, popping it, taking only the consonant;
leaving off the vowel.
But what about those sounds
that are really difficult for Chinese learners to pronounce?
Like "v" as in "love"?
In Chinese English, that's "lawu", with the "w" -- substitution.
But this character, you have the "f" from "fa"
and a new character, "zhou", meaning vibrate the larynx.
What happens when you make an "f" sound and vibrate your larynx at the same time?
"v"; try it, "v"; that's a "v".
This is a phonosemantic compound unique to the Chinese writing system.
What about the sound "pleasure?" "Pleasure?"
That's "sh" with the vibrating larynx.
"Sh", right?
So rather than an abstract symbol like IPA or letters
which are disconnected and people can't pronounce,
Chinese characters give you the sound system you're familiar with,
and use the semantic part of the brain
to tell you what to do with your vocal organs
to produce a precise sound.
What about a really hard sound like "th?"
"Th" here, you have the "th" or the IPA symbol.
But this character says, "bite your tongue".
So the letter tells you what to do with your speech organs.
What about a "the" sound?
Bite your tongue, vibrate your larynx.
Testing the system in China, taxi drivers, security guards,
those who don't have any English at all are able to pronounce these English words
perfectly, within ten minutes,
every single time they read English encoded in Chinese characters in this way.
And of course, why not?
The Chinese characters tell you precisely what to do with your speech organs
to make the exact sound that they're targeting.
In other words,
Chinese characters are the most sophisticated phonetic writing script
the world has never used.
Because it's the first time the characters are employed in this manner.
Once the English language has been parsed into all the sounds,
or the Chinese characters have been parsed
to show all of the different English sounds
by popping them in this way,
we algorithmically reconnect them into proper sequences.
Once this is done,
you have a perfect convergence of English and Chinese.
The word convergence is now as much at home in Chinese characters
as it has ever been in the Roman alphabet.
But how do you learn the system?
Well, here you have a Chinese student trying out the system,
and it is the only way to learn it, even to believe in it.
The idea sounds a little too crazy until you try it for yourself.
They are trying to spell out the word "thousand"
choosing the word of the character "bite the tongue" for "th";
"ou", - there are two "ou" characters -
you see, that's the stress.
"Thousand", like all bi-syllabic or multi-syllabic English words
has a stress, which means a longer vowel.
There's two characters for the longer vowel.
Notice the "s" sound is really a "z" sound,
and the "a" sound in "thousand" is actually a schwa sound.
All of that is precisely encoded in Chinese characters,
but completely ambiguous in English letters.
Here's the writing of the word "Zulu".
It's not "Zúlu," but "Zulú".
So they have it wrong
because they didn't encode the two "u" sounds.
So the computer tells them, "You have this error,
you should've stressed the first not the second syllable."
To stress precise vowels, consonant blends, consonant clusters,
are clearly indicated in Chinese characters
in ways that letters couldn't ever do, and can never do,
because Chinese characters work better.
Drawing inspiration from classical Chinese poetics and phonology,
reinvigorated by algorithmic processing, embodied in three-dimensional,
multi-dimensional mobile applications that can spread far and wide,
the hope for pinyin is
that it can empower one of the world's greatest natural resources:
the 350 million plus English learners in China.
Thank you.
(Applause)