Re: CONLANG: Asian-based langs?

[Jens Stengaard Larsen <jens@cphling.dk>]

On Tue, 2 Jan 1996, Kai-hsu TAI wrote:

> 
> Where is _the_ language we know as "Chinese"?  The differences between 
> languages are much more diverse than, say, Norwegian and Danish.  The 
> myth that all Han languages has the same script is also wrong. I 
> think only a couple of Han languages such as Putonghua/Mandarin can be 
> written completely in Kanji.  The Kanji-ness decreases as you go farther 
> away from Beijing.  I speak Holo Taiwanese which is not completely 
> represented by Kanji, let alone non-Han languages such as Manchurian, 
> Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, etc.
> 

Interesting point. I think the Chinese and we Europeans think about 
language in very different ways, due to longstanding traditions of 
logographic and alphabetic script respectively.

Of course, language is not only script, but also speech. Nonetheless,
phonetics as a science isn't much more than 100 years old, while diacronic
(historical) linguistics has been around for ca. 200 years. 

What's so fascinating about the Chinese characters (especially for one
like me who knows next to nothing about them) is that they hardly rely on
the pronunciation of the word. That makes them very difficult to learn,
but fast to read, once you've mastered them. Of course, if they have been
written in Japanese, and you only read Chinese, you will have difficulties
to understand the text. But still it should be possible to get a greater
part of the message than if it were written in a script based on
pronunciation. 

Hmmm... what about a Kanji dictionary of English? It could be interesting 
to see just how much a text in Chinese signs and English signs would 
differ. English is after all rather poor in morphology, just like Chinese.

/Jens Stengaard Larsen ( = jens@cphling.dk )

"Dio benu vin!" - diris la ateisto.
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