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

[Milos Rancic]

On 05/22/2011 07:39 PM, Andre Engels wrote:
> On Sun, May 22, 2011 at 7:13 PM,  <WJhonson at 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.

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.