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

[Milos Rancic]

On 05/23/2011 10:55 AM, Nikola Smolenski wrote:
> 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.

That's living process in Chinese languages. While for phonetic
transcription of an old word Classical Chinese knowledge is required (or
learning pronunciation as-is), it is possible to create a dialectal
compound. However, I can just guess is it true or not. And our fellow
Chinese Wikimedians could give to us some information regarding that.