Who Else Knoes a Secret Language?

[Clark Addison]

Is anyone as special as me?

All the show-offs with their Spanish and whatever else that was in the Religion forum reminded me of something. I know a (written) language that can, in my estimation, be read by only a few thousand people on the earth. As many returned missionaries from Asian missions know, you don’t start out learning the characters, but instead use a Romanization system, which represents each character with a alphabetized word. So the character 我, for example, which means “I”, is transcribed as “Wo” in Mandarin or “Ngoh” in Cantonese (ignoring the accent marks that the systems use). Native speakers never use this system, of course, and even native speakers who speak English can almost never look at a Romanized string of text and decipher it (we used to try sometimes).

So I went to Hong Kong, and learned Cantonese. Native speaking Chinese people cannot read the Romanization. Of foreigners who learn to speak Chinese, the vast majority learn Mandarin, so Cantonese Romanization (for a couple of linguistic reasons) is completely unintelligible to them. Also, unlike Mandarin, which has a standardized Romanization system, Cantonese has 3 or 4 systems in fairly wide use, so there are even a lot of foreigners who have learned Cantonese who cannot read my Romanization system. So outside of Mormon missionaries, I really can’t see there being more than a few thousand people who could read what I write in Romanization. For example, the sentence:

Bingo fongpei?

is immediately familiar to any Hong Kong RM, but a mystery to the rest of the world (it has nothing to do with Mormonism).

No real point to this. I just wanted to put you Spanish speakers in your place. I have had a persistent dream since my mission that the US gets in a war with Russia or Islamists or Martians, doesn’t matter the enemy, who is able to decipher all of the US codes until, reminiscent of the Navajo Windtalkers, the military recruits Hong Kong RMs to save the day by sending written communications in Cantonese Romanization.

[Pheidippides]

Is anyone as special as me?

All the show-offs with their Spanish and whatever else that was in the Religion forum reminded me of something. I know a (written) language that can, in my estimation, be read by only a few thousand people on the earth. As many returned missionaries from Asian missions know, you don’t start out learning the characters, but instead use a Romanization system, which represents each character with a alphabetized word. So the character 我, for example, which means “I”, is transcribed as “Wo” in Mandarin or “Ngoh” in Cantonese (ignoring the accent marks that the systems use). Native speakers never use this system, of course, and even native speakers who speak English can almost never look at a Romanized string of text and decipher it (we used to try sometimes).

So I went to Hong Kong, and learned Cantonese. Native speaking Chinese people cannot read the Romanization. Of foreigners who learn to speak Chinese, the vast majority learn Mandarin, so Cantonese Romanization (for a couple of linguistic reasons) is completely unintelligible to them. Also, unlike Mandarin, which has a standardized Romanization system, Cantonese has 3 or 4 systems in fairly wide use, so there are even a lot of foreigners who have learned Cantonese who cannot read my Romanization system. So outside of Mormon missionaries, I really can’t see there being more than a few thousand people who could read what I write in Romanization. For example, the sentence:

Bingo fongpei?

is immediately familiar to any Hong Kong RM, but a mystery to the rest of the world (it has nothing to do with Mormonism).

No real point to this. I just wanted to put you Spanish speakers in your place. I have had a persistent dream since my mission that the US gets in a war with Russia or Islamists or Martians, doesn’t matter the enemy, who is able to decipher all of the US codes until, reminiscent of the Navajo Windtalkers, the military recruits Hong Kong RMs to save the day by sending written communications in Cantonese Romanization.

Japanese. But the romanization is pretty standard, even though there are a few different types. I use a modified Hepburn/kunreishiki, for those who care (I hate the one most missionaries use).

My understanding (and with the disclaimer that I don't know either Mandarin or Cantonese) is that I had to learn fewer kanji (I don't know what y'all call them) than the average Mandarin/Cantonese speaking native (only about 2500 for me) but that the interaction with the phonetic syllabary (and the fact that some of them can have up to 20 or more readings) makes the writing more complex than the Chinese counterpart. Either way, I have to hide my disdain for the Romantic and Germanic Languages. Latin roots? I don't think so.

Interestingly enough, I have been able to communicate in China (Beijing) by use of Kanji with some modification.

[Tim]

Japanese. But the romanization is pretty standard, even though there are a few different types. I use a modified Hepburn/kunreishiki, for those who care (I hate the one most missionaries use).

My understanding (and with the disclaimer that I don't know either Mandarin or Cantonese) is that I had to learn fewer kanji (I don't know what y'all call them) than the average Mandarin/Cantonese speaking native (only about 2500 for me) but that the interaction with the phonetic syllabary (and the fact that some of them can have up to 20 or more readings) makes the writing more complex than the Chinese counterpart. Either way, I have to hide my disdain for the Romantic and Germanic Languages. Latin roots? I don't think so.

Interestingly enough, I have been able to communicate in China (Beijing) by use of Kanji with some modification.

Missionaries don't use Hepburn? What do they use? Isn't Hepburn government-sponsored? Why use any other romanization?

[Donuthole]

And no, the secret language is not misspelling words like "Knows" as "Knoes". Stupid vBullitin with uneditable titles.

If you "go Advanced" i'm pretty sure you can edit the title.

[Jeff Lebowski]

I went to Japan and my buddy went to Sweden. After our missions we swapped a bunch of words so that we could speak in a combination of Swedish and Japanese when we wanted to comment on girls, etc. in public. We figured we would be pretty safe with that combination.

[TripletDaddy]

I learned Quechua on my mission and worked in a Quechua area for about 5 months exclusively.

Try finding someone in the US that speaks Quechua. Actually, try finding someone in Bolivia that speaks Quechua.

[Solon]

Is anyone as special as me?

All the show-offs with their Spanish and whatever else that was in the Religion forum reminded me of something. I know a (written) language that can, in my estimation, be read by only a few thousand people on the earth. As many returned missionaries from Asian missions know, you don’t start out learning the characters, but instead use a Romanization system, which represents each character with a alphabetized word. So the character 我, for example, which means “I”, is transcribed as “Wo” in Mandarin or “Ngoh” in Cantonese (ignoring the accent marks that the systems use). Native speakers never use this system, of course, and even native speakers who speak English can almost never look at a Romanized string of text and decipher it (we used to try sometimes).

So I went to Hong Kong, and learned Cantonese. Native speaking Chinese people cannot read the Romanization. Of foreigners who learn to speak Chinese, the vast majority learn Mandarin, so Cantonese Romanization (for a couple of linguistic reasons) is completely unintelligible to them. Also, unlike Mandarin, which has a standardized Romanization system, Cantonese has 3 or 4 systems in fairly wide use, so there are even a lot of foreigners who have learned Cantonese who cannot read my Romanization system. So outside of Mormon missionaries, I really can’t see there being more than a few thousand people who could read what I write in Romanization. For example, the sentence:

Bingo fongpei?

is immediately familiar to any Hong Kong RM, but a mystery to the rest of the world (it has nothing to do with Mormonism).

No real point to this. I just wanted to put you Spanish speakers in your place. I have had a persistent dream since my mission that the US gets in a war with Russia or Islamists or Martians, doesn’t matter the enemy, who is able to decipher all of the US codes until, reminiscent of the Navajo Windtalkers, the military recruits Hong Kong RMs to save the day by sending written communications in Cantonese Romanization.

Is this Wade-Giles transliteration, or was that used exclusively for Mandarin? (I don't know any Asian languages).

I know ancient Greek. Not exactly a secret language. In fact, it's dead.

[Clark Addison]

Japanese. But the romanization is pretty standard, even though there are a few different types. I use a modified Hepburn/kunreishiki, for those who care (I hate the one most missionaries use).

My understanding (and with the disclaimer that I don't know either Mandarin or Cantonese) is that I had to learn fewer kanji (I don't know what y'all call them) than the average Mandarin/Cantonese speaking native (only about 2500 for me) but that the interaction with the phonetic syllabary (and the fact that some of them can have up to 20 or more readings) makes the writing more complex than the Chinese counterpart. Either way, I have to hide my disdain for the Romantic and Germanic Languages. Latin roots? I don't think so.

Interestingly enough, I have been able to communicate in China (Beijing) by use of Kanji with some modification.

If you learn 2,500 Chinese Characters, you should do fine. That's about how many I learned, I think (I never counted exactly), and it lets you read the paper and most any book you want. You can actually read the Book of Mormon pretty well on about 1,500.

Your last sentence reminds me of a BYU story. I decided to take Japanese one semester after my mission, and ended up hating it. Partly because it was not nearly as similar to Chinese as I thought it would be, and partly because it was at the ungodly hour of 8:00 AM. So I almost always skipped it, and didn't study at all, and learned almost no Japanese. Yet, despite it being my lowest post-mission grade, I still managed get a C in the class. I did this because we had a clueless TA teaching the class. Most of her tests would have a lot of questions like "What is the Japanese work for fish". This was Japanese 101, so we weren't getting into Kanji at all; she expected the answer in Katakana or Hiragana or whatever it was we were learning. I, however, would simply write in the Chinese character for Fish, and she would mark it correct. I guess it didn't occur to her that even though I was writing it, I had no clue how to pronounce it in Japanese.

[Clark Addison]

Is this Wade-Giles transliteration, or was that used exclusively for Mandarin? (I don't know any Asian languages).

I know ancient Greek. Not exactly a secret language. In fact, it's dead.

Wade Giles, to my knowledge, is just Mandarin. My example is in the Yale system, which the missionaries learn, or at least did as late as 1993.

[Pheidippides]

Missionaries don't use Hepburn? What do they use? Isn't Hepburn government-sponsored? Why use any other romanization?

Missionaries use a hodgepodge. I hate all romanization, so I try not to use any. Maybe I'm getting them mixed up (it has been a while) but the ones that use "shi" and "chi" are inferior to the one that uses "si" and "ti". I also prefer using ou instead of the o with the line over it (and heaven forbid no distinguishing characteristic at all, which I have seen).

The reasons are purely linguistic. I firmly believe that people who use romanization have a harder time distinguishing between the proper pronunciation and the americanized version (and there ARE great differences, to be sure, especially with the nasal n). I only use romanization at all when communicating words to people who don't know how to read hiragana/katakana (or for convenience in a forum like this).

Again, I am a Japanese language geek. Uber-geek. I know more about the language itself than most native Japanese people do (cuz I studied).

[YOhio]

Try finding someone in the US that speaks Quechua. Actually, try finding someone in Bolivia that speaks Quechua.

I'm on it. I'll let you know when I find someone.

[wuapinmon]

Is anyone as special as me?

That depends on your definition of "special."

All the show-offs with their Spanish and whatever else that was in the Religion forum reminded me of something. I know a (written) language that can, in my estimation, be read by only a few thousand people on the earth.

I don't get the antagonism towards using another language....especially among people such as yourself who are bilingual. What's wrong with using another language if people can understand you? Sure, not everyone can, but maybe some people (e.g. Donuthole) want to get better, or practice, or learn something new....see if they can figure out what's being said. Why the antagonism? It's not showing-off. I have spoken Spanish for two hours already today and have another two to go later. It's not showing-off; it's simply using another form of communication. Consider this, I am using Romanized letters to signify the phonemes we string together when speaking to represent the abstract ideas seen in our mind's eye. That's three interpretations we've made right there. How is typing in Spanish that much different? You talk about your secret language, which I think is really cool, and wish you had posted more of it so I could try and figure even a little bit of it out, but you belittle others for using their other knowledge set.

No real point to this. I just wanted to put you Spanish speakers in your place. I have had a persistent dream since my mission that the US gets in a war with Russia or Islamists or Martians, doesn’t matter the enemy, who is able to decipher all of the US codes until, reminiscent of the Navajo Windtalkers, the military recruits Hong Kong RMs to save the day by sending written communications in Cantonese Romanization.

I think it would be awesome for Mormon HKRMs to be the new Windtalkers.

As far as putting me in my place goes, don't be like that. If I had gone to HK, I would've mastered your 'secret' script too.....don't assume superiority because of location selection al azar. Tim will come back from Japan in two years fluent in Japanese, Spanish, English, and fairly-damned-good at Catalán. I will be in awe of his mastery of three languages, three different families (2 protos-) and probably four different scripts. If you hadn't said "put in place," I would've thought this post was frickin' awesome. I congratulate you on your knowledge of such a select script.

[TripletDaddy]

I'm on it. I'll let you know when I find someone.

Start with places like Sucre or Vallegrande. There were several Quechua speakers living there at the time.

[myboynoah]

Missionaries use a hodgepodge. I hate all romanization, so I try not to use any. Maybe I'm getting them mixed up (it has been a while) but the ones that use "shi" and "chi" are inferior to the one that uses "si" and "ti". I also prefer using ou instead of the o with the line over it (and heaven forbid no distinguishing characteristic at all, which I have seen).

The reasons are purely linguistic. I firmly believe that people who use romanization have a harder time distinguishing between the proper pronunciation and the americanized version (and there ARE great differences, to be sure, especially with the nasal n). I only use romanization at all when communicating words to people who don't know how to read hiragana/katakana (or for convenience in a forum like this).

Again, I am a Japanese language geek. Uber-geek. I know more about the language itself than most native Japanese people do (cuz I studied).

These don't seem to track very well. It seems that using "ti" instead of "chi" with people that don't know how to read hiragana/katakana would only serve to confuse them ("Okay, now remember, "ti" is pronounced "chi", even thought I write it "ti".). I would be opposite, but then what is the point of using the romanized "ti" with someone that speaks and reads Japanese?

Yes, you are an uber-geek. But at least I know where to come if I have a question.

[Solon]

Start with places like Sucre or Vallegrande. There were several Quechua speakers living there at the time.

Is it true that Quechua speakers can talk while both inhaling and exhaling? I've been to La Paz (twice) and heard that the traditional derby hat the women wear used to be a symbol of their bilingualism (Spanish and Quechua), but I can't prove it. Now, I suppose it's more tradition than anything else.

I'm still mad I didn't chew any coca leaves, but I was a teenager and the parents were watching me.