Posted on 05/29/2014 8:58:37 AM PDT by Signalman
Edited on 05/29/2014 9:18:35 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
(Excerpt) Read more at liveleak.com ...
Good Grief! I thought that pilots from all countries had to be able to conduct their business in English! (or is that racist and discriminatory?)
An accident looking for a place to happen.
I wonder how they managed to land the plane.
My high blood pressure keeps me from being a pilot. Given this conversation, it would keep me from being an air traffic controller as well.
The Chinese have 2,600 !!!! characters in their alphabet.
A well-educated Chinese reader today recognizes approximately 4,000–6,000 characters; approximately 3,000 characters are required to read a Mainland newspaper. The PRC government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, including obscure, variant, rare, and archaic characters; fewer than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
2,600?
That’s just the simplified form isn’t it?
The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 20,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are now commonly in use. However Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words; since most Chinese words are made up of two or more different characters, there are many times more Chinese words than there are characters.
Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian, a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including bone oracle versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions, and is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms and names of political figures, businesses and products. The 2009 version of the Webster’s Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD),[30] based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries.
The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary, the 12-volumed Hanyu Da Cidian, records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai, a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific and technical terms.
The latest 2012 6th edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian, an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 69,000 entries and defines 13,000 head characters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language
Is it fair to say that a Chinese character is more like a word or picture than a letter?
I think after the SFO 777 crash most Asian airlines were put under orders to use automation only.
hieroglyphics
Japan has hundreds themselves
Korean has fewer “letters” than English
I did my flight training in the north Phoenix and Scottsdale area. Many Chinese pilots train out of Deer Valley. I barely understood a word out of any of them on the radio.
Yessirree! Good on that controller!
If we were to investigate it more completely, I'm guessing we might find out that pilot was named Muhkaen, son of one of their admirals. He may be headed for a not-so-distinguished career in politics after he totally cracks up one of their planes, I imagine.
HF
Yeah, like grade-school characters. Full literacy is like 4-6,000 characters. IIRC there are more than 10,000 characters.
It is amazing they have developed to the extent they have really
Well there we go....thanks!
This is old news.
From what I have read in the past the Chinese language seems to be descended from Babylonian cuneiform which is also a pictograph language.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.