Re: Mixed writing systems (WAS: Newbie says hi)

Florian wrote:
>
> >Surely, it's not so complicated as all that. It depends on what one
> >means by "dialect", I suppose. A large handful of new characters for
> >the major groups (Gan, Xiang, Wu, Yue...), plus a smaller handful of
> >stuff for the local language (I mean, really, how much Wuhan dialect
> >is not covered by already extant characters?). Non-natives moving in
> >would need to learn these as they would local idioms, tones, and
> >pronunciations while passers-through (tourists) could ignore them or
> >temporarily learn them and forget them.
>It is not complicated if the writing system is based on hanzi. just add a
>few ones for the local vocab, write in the actual oral language order, and
>that's it. I said it might be hard, because most people (maybe i am wrong,
>i do not realy pay attention to WHO post WHAT) who said each language
>(dialect) should have is writen form usualy also said alphabetic writing
>would be better. and with alphabetic, you have to do everything from the
>begining for each dialect (language or whatever)
Would you? Since neighbouring dialects presumeably has quite similar
phonemics and tonemics, one might expect that the same system, with minimal
modification could be used over quite large areas. If you couldn't design a
system that could, with small modifications, cover every variant of, say,
Cantonese, one has to start wondering if Cantonese can be considered a
single language.


                                                  Andreas

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