On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 7:13 PM, <wjhon...@aol.com> wrote: > You're missing my point. > All the Latin languages "share a common writing system" and "only differ in > the way the language is spoken". > > Address the point that the "words" within the system have the same semantic > *meaning* and are formed with the same syntactic rules. > > If Bo Dow Kah means "your dog is dead" in one language or dialect, but Bo > Dow Kah means "your mother is pretty" in another, than the fact that the > spelling is the same, has no relevance to the issue at hand.
In Chinese writing a character shows a word, irrespective of how the word is pronounced. So if we would use a Chinese style writing system, you could write [your] [dog] [is] [dead], and a Frenchman would write exactly the same, even though he would pronounce [your] [dog] [is] [dead] as "Votre chien est mort". Thus, different languages might write the same sentence the same in Chinese script. This does not mean that there are no differences - someone who spoke Latin would probably spell this line as [dog] [your] [dead] [is], and perhaps in yet another language this would be immensely crude, and the right thing to say would be "[prepare for bad news] [honorific person] [your] [dog] [is] [not] [alive]", but the mere difference of being in a different language with totally different sounds is not enough to conclude that in Chinese writing the actual written text will be different. -- André Engels, andreeng...@gmail.com _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
