On 05/22/2011 07:39 PM, Andre Engels wrote: > 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.
Andre, that's not accurate explanation. Chinese script is not purely logographic, but logo-syllabic (or logo-phonetic). There are *phonetic* parts inside of the writing system. From the article [1]: By far the most numerous category are the phono-semantic compounds, also called semantic-phonetic compounds or pictophonetic compounds. These characters are composed of two parts: one of a limited set of pictographs, often graphically simplified, which suggests the general meaning of the character, and an existing character pronounced approximately as the new target word. Examples are 河 hé "river", 湖 hú "lake", 流 liú "stream", 沖 chōng "riptide" (or "flush"), 滑 huá "slippery". All these characters have on the left a radical of three short strokes, which is a simplified pictograph for a river, indicating that the character has a semantic connection with water; the right-hand side in each case is a phonetic indicator. For example, in the case of 沖 chōng (Old Chinese /druŋ/[46]), the phonetic indicator is 中 zhōng (Old Chinese /truŋ/[47]), which by itself means "middle". In this case it can be seen that the pronunciation of the character is slightly different from that of its phonetic indicator; this process means that the composition of such characters can sometimes seem arbitrary today. Further, the choice of radicals may also seem arbitrary in some cases; for example, the radical of 貓 māo "cat" is 豸 zhì, originally a pictograph for worms,[citation needed] but in characters of this sort indicating an animal of any kind. Xu Shen (c. 100 CE) placed approximately 82% of characters into this category, while in the Kangxi Dictionary (1716 CE) the number is closer to 90%, due to the extremely productive use of this technique to extend the Chinese vocabulary. This method is still sometimes used to form new characters, for example 钚 bù "plutonium") is the metal radical 金 jīn plus the phonetic component 不 bù, described in Chinese as "不 gives sound, 金 gives meaning". Many Chinese names of elements in the periodic table and many other chemistry-related characters were formed this way. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_script#Phono-semantic_compounds _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l
