I saw this sign in an office when waiting to hand in some paperwork. What really struck me was how much information you can squeeze into a small space using Chinese characters! Most everyday Chinese words are one or two characters, whereas most English words need four or five letters.
This sign is a great example. The English six-letter word, ‘closed’, while giving you the essential meaning, doesn’t match the information content of the Chinese. A literal translation of these six Chinese characters might be:
This counter is temporarily not accepting applications.
That’s a lot of meaning from six characters! Much more than from our six-letter word.
This is because Chinese characters are based on meaning rather than sound. They are ideographic, not phonetic.
English spelling is phonetic. The word “closed” is spelled C-L-O-S-E-D because that combination of letters explains how to make the sound of the word “closed”, and the sound gives the meaning that the counter is currently closed.
Chinese characters are ideographic, so each character brings meaning. In fact, before the standardisation efforts of the Chinese Communist Party, different dialects in China may have had wildly different pronunciations for each of these characters, to the extent that people from distant parts of China may not have been able to understand one another speaking this sentence aloud, but they would all write it down using the same six characters, because the characters define the meaning, not the sound.
此: this
台: counter
暂: temporary
不: not
受理: accepting
I love Chinese!