On Tue, 5 Sep 2000 ocorrain@esatclear.ie wrote:
OTOH, hieroglyphs and similar ideographic writing systems do have some figurative characteristics which can help in their interpretation. Not so with syllabary/alphabet based ones, in which you would prefer at least a cursory understanding of the spoken form before going for an interpretation.
Chinese is interesting in this connexion. As far as I understand it, the 'language' is made up of different spoken forms, all of which are covered by the same writing system, are mutually incomprehensible when spoken. I don't know if there are other examples of this in human languages. Computer languages
There are a number of languages normally called Chinese that use the same characters. They are more or less mutually comprehensible when written but not when spoken. (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien, Fukien, etc) It takes some self-discipline to write Chinese that can be understood by speakers of other dialects. Vietnamese used to fall into this category before the French took over; they now use a phonetic alphabet, the usual alphabet used by European languages with additional marks that make it phonetic. Japanese, Korean, and possibly others use a mixture of the Chinese characters and phonetic symbols. In Japanese at least the phonetic symbols form two syllabaries. A syllabary is like an alphabet, but instead of representing sounds a symbol represents a syllable. So the Japanese syllabaries begin "kah, kee, koo, kay, koh, ..." -- Jim Dixon VBCnet GB Ltd http://www.vbc.net tel +44 117 929 1316 fax +44 117 927 2015