[Foundation-l] 1.3 billion of humans don't have Wikipedia in their native...

[Casey Brown]

On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 12:42 PM,  <WJhonson at aol.com> wrote:
>> Aren't these languages written with Chinese characters and thus their
>> speakers can read and write the Chinese Wikipedia?
>>
>
> All the Latin languages: Italian, French, Spanish, English, and so on are
> written with Latin characters: a, b, c, d, e and so on.  And yet the French
> cannot pick up a book in Spanish and read it.
>
> Just because a language is written with Chinese characters does not mean
> that the words and meanings are spoken or comprehensible by any other language
> user using those same characters for other words and meanings.

Indeed, it doesn't mean that necessarily.  However, your analogy
doesn't apply in this situation and Nikola was right.  Many of the
Chinese languages share a common writing system and only differ in the
way the language is spoken.

-- 
Casey Brown
Cbrown1023