From owner-conlang@diku.dk Wed Jan 3 09:34:41 1996 Received: from odin.diku.dk (daemon@odin.diku.dk [130.225.96.221]) by locke.ccil.org (8.6.9/8.6.10) with ESMTP id JAA07076 for ; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 09:34:38 -0500 Received: (from daemon@localhost) by odin.diku.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) id OAA25949 for conlang-outgoing; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 14:53:21 +0100 Received: from eli.cphling.dk (eli.cphling.dk [130.225.123.244]) by odin.diku.dk (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id OAA25940 for ; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 14:53:11 +0100 Received: by eli.cphling.dk (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA07766; Wed, 3 Jan 1996 14:53:00 +0100 Date: Wed, 3 Jan 1996 14:53:00 +0100 (MET) From: Jens Stengaard Larsen To: Kai-hsu TAI Cc: conlang@diku.dk Subject: Re: CONLANG: Asian-based langs? In-Reply-To: <199601030046.QAA21862@puree.ugcs.caltech.edu> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: QUOTED-PRINTABLE Sender: owner-conlang@diku.dk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: Jens Stengaard Larsen Status: OR X-Mozilla-Status: 0011 Content-Length: 2136 On Tue, 2 Jan 1996, Kai-hsu TAI wrote: >=20 > Where is _the_ language we know as "Chinese"? The differences between=20 > languages are much more diverse than, say, Norwegian and Danish. The=20 > myth that all Han languages has the same script is also wrong. I=20 > think only a couple of Han languages such as Putonghua/Mandarin can be=20 > written completely in Kanji. The Kanji-ness decreases as you go farther= =20 > away from Beijing. I speak Holo Taiwanese which is not completely=20 > represented by Kanji, let alone non-Han languages such as Manchurian,=20 > Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, etc. >=20 Interesting point. I think the Chinese and we Europeans think about=20 language in very different ways, due to longstanding traditions of=20 logographic and alphabetic script respectively. Of course, language is not only script, but also speech. Nonetheless, phonetics as a science isn't much more than 100 years old, while diacronic (historical) linguistics has been around for ca. 200 years.=20 What's so fascinating about the Chinese characters (especially for one like me who knows next to nothing about them) is that they hardly rely on the pronunciation of the word. That makes them very difficult to learn, but fast to read, once you've mastered them. Of course, if they have been written in Japanese, and you only read Chinese, you will have difficulties to understand the text. But still it should be possible to get a greater part of the message than if it were written in a script based on pronunciation.=20 Hmmm... what about a Kanji dictionary of English? It could be interesting= =20 to see just how much a text in Chinese signs and English signs would=20 differ. English is after all rather poor in morphology, just like Chinese. /Jens Stengaard Larsen ( =3D jens@cphling.dk ) "Dio benu vin!" - diris la ateisto. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------= -- Esperanto parolata * English spoken * Deutsch wird gesprochen * Dansk t=E5= les ---------------------------------------------------------------------------= --