CDR: Re: Treatment of subjugated people (and bagpipes)

[Jim Dixon]

On Tue, 5 Sep 2000 ocorrain at 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