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

[Nikola Smolenski]

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.