On 05/23/2011 10:33 AM, Milos Rancic wrote:
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.
But different Chinese languages will still use the same character for different but related phonetic component.