Timeline for How Would Linguists Plan to Overcome the Language Barrier in a First Contact
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
11 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aug 17, 2023 at 2:18 | comment | added | Loren Pechtel | Beijing standardized the writing system long ago. When two Chinese speakers run into a dialect issue (most commonly Mandarin/Cantonese) they resort to writing because it will be the same even if the sounds are different. Finger on palm, it doesn't even need a piece of paper. Chinese movies are frequently subtitled in Chinese for this reason, also--it works in both the mainland and Hong Kong. Furthermore, my wife has taught herself to get by in Cantonese from such subtitles--she's a native Mandarin speaker. | |
| Aug 15, 2023 at 5:26 | history | edited | Kilisi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 136 characters in body
|
| Aug 15, 2023 at 5:24 | comment | added | Kilisi | Old Chinese each character was a word. There are still many symbols like that. It doesn't matter what language you applied it to it had the same meaning in any language. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 21:50 | comment | added | Stef | @AlexP Mainstream Chinese languages are mutually intelligible too. I've been learning mandarin for a few years and at some point I was looking for correspondents; one of my correspondents turned out to speak Cantonese, not Mandarin. So we had text-message conversations where she wrote Cantonese and I wrote Mandarin, and we understood each-other. Of course I could never read a newspaper article meant to be read by Cantonese speakers, but a text-message conversation is fine. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 21:23 | comment | added | Kilisi | @AlexP not something I'm going to argue about, feel free to look it up. I think where we differ is you're looking at the mainstream Chinese languages, which long had their own script rather than the more marginalised ones of which China has hundreds. But it's just an example, symbols can be used to communicate quite complex ideas regardless of language, especially mathematical ones. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 19:56 | comment | added | AlexP | Both English and Polish share the same writing system (Latin letters). I have no idea why Wikipedia would say that they are mutually intelligible in their written form. There is a degree of mutual intelligibility of written texts, but it is far from complete. Maybe they are thinking of Classical Chinese, which was used as the imperial written language? (And, in addition, Cantonese is usually written with traditional characters whereas in the People's Republic Modern Standard Mandarin is written with simplified characters, which makes it really awkward for the average person to read...) | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 19:52 | comment | added | Kilisi | @AlexP from Wikipedia on Chinese languages "share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form." This isn't all, your example is right, but enough to prove my premise is sound. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 19:49 | comment | added | AlexP | Yes, it does. And each of them has its own writing system. You cannot write a sentence in Mandarin and read it in Cantonese. Yes, both Mandarin and Cantonese use Sinitic characters. Yes, many of those characters are used by both languages. No, they are not read the same, nor do they mean the same, nor are they combined in the same ways. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 19:23 | comment | added | Kilisi | @AlexP China has hundreds of languages not just one. From at least 9 distinct language groups. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 15:52 | comment | added | AlexP | Chinese script is useful for writing Chinese. It cannot be used to write a different language unless specifically adapted. For example, Japanese script uses many of the same characters as Chinese, but when writing Japanese those characters (1) are supplemented with home-grown kana, and (2) they have different phonetic and semantic meanings. Only some very few ideographic characters can be used trans-lingually; for example, 93 means than same thing regardless if it is read ninety-three, dreiundneunzig, or quatre-vingt-treize. But the vast majority of words cannot be neatly mapped like this. | |
| Aug 14, 2023 at 11:30 | history | answered | Kilisi | CC BY-SA 4.0 |