On Wed, 12 Feb 2003 03:58:28 -0500 (EST), Thomas Mueller wrote: > Excerpt from Bastiaan Edelman:
>> A Japanese and a Chinese can write to each other and understand most of >> it... but talking to each other is useless. > I didn't realize Japanese and Chinese written languages were so close. You > mean a Chinese could read a Japanese newspaper, and vice versa? But Korean has > a different look to me, I think I might tell Chinese from Korean printed matter, > but no way could I distinguish handwritten Chinese from handwritten Korean. > If intonation is such a critical part of spoken Chinese, I'd be really lost in > that language. Written Japanese is very complex. The characters it is written in were adapted from Chinese but through a long process came to symbolize Japanese words of similar sound and meaning. In the process the characters were simplified and made more cursive to the point where many characters retain little of nothing of their original shape. The characters (called Kanji) have two sets of meanings. One based on the sound of the original Chinese. Another is based on native Japanese words of similar meaning. The characters may also be used to represent the sounds of Japanese syllables. There are two systems of this syllabic representation. (hiragana and katakana) All three systems are used in modern Japanese and you couldn't read a newspaper without knowing all three. There are currently just under two thousand Kanji in common use and the phonetic representations have been modernized. I once thought of trying to learn Japanese and did a little reading about it. The spoken language is simpler than the writen, but the combination is quite daunting. Sam Ewalt Croswell, Michigan, USA -- Arachne V1.70;rev.3, NON-COMMERCIAL copy, http://arachne.cz/
