At Mon, 13 Jun 2011 17:16:10 -0400, C. Scott Ananian wrote: > > > given that most non-Chinese can't read Chinese writing, despite that many of > > these characters do actually resemble crude line-art drawings of various > > things and ideas. > > It is a common linguistic misperception that there is some one-to-one > correspondence between an ideogram and the idea it represents. The > english letter "A" was originally a drawing of an ox-head. > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A). It is as accurate to say that > English letters resemble "crude line-art drawings" as to say that > Chinese ideograms do. > > > and meanwhile, many Asian countries either have shifted to, or are in the > > process of shifting to, the use of phonetic writing systems (Koreans created > > Hangul, Kanji gradually erodes in favor of Hiragana, ...). even in some > > places in China (such as Canton) the traditional writing system is > > degrading, with many elements of their spoken dialect being incorporated > > into the written language. > > This is also playing fast and loose with linguistics. Let's be wary > of drawing analogies to fields where we are not expert.
Yup. Such as this: http://pugs.blogs.com/audrey/2009/10/our-paroqial-fermament-one-tide-on-another.html is mainly in the context of # of characters, but also illustrates the area it requires to convey the same amount of information. (And yup, I can tell you Japanese aren't erodes in favor of Hiragana...) -- Yoshiki _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
