On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 7:13 PM, WJhonson@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.