Re: German with Hanzi/Kanji/Hanja?

> [mailto:CONLANG@listserv.brown.edu] On Behalf Of Tristan McLeay
> I'm currently throwing up a few ideas with myself for Hanzi for
> English. My starting-point for it is that it irritates me when people
> pronounce words as they're spelt because they're spelt like  that, so a
> phonetic spelling reform probably isn't really what I want to do
> anyway. (Also writing the like the Chinese might have certain
> advantages.)
I really don't think that's easily possible. I've considered such a thing, not
as a spelling reform, but just relexing Hanzi symbols with English labels. The
problem is that the Hanzi are Semantically aligned with Chinese, that wouldn't
align well with the semantic system of English. Now, if your considering a new
logographic system designed specifically for English morphemes then the idea
would work, though I doubt it would be very easy to learn.

One of my many conlangs still in the conceptual stage would be to relex the Hanzi
with monosyllabic roots from Western languages, but keep the Chinese grammar
and semantics intact so it could be written in either Hanzi or a phonemic
script. I'm still not sure the Western labels would work well so in the end I
may just give them a priori names.

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