Re: Language comparison
| From: | Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, January 8, 2005, 2:28 |
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On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 05:44:40PM -0800, Sai Emrys wrote:
> > That's not the aim of writing narrowly considered, but of graphics
> > in general (as my art teacher was fond of saying). We do have methods
> > of conveying specific meaning outside of speech; they're called icons,
> > the use of many of which are just as standardized as ordinary grammar.
>
> Then would you consider writing that only incidentally conveys speech
> - like Chinese - to be "real" writing? It's not phonetic; it cannot be
> said to be "writing down" speech any better than speech could be said
> to be "speaking out" the writing.
What does phoneticity have to do with it? One Chinese character = one
word of the spoken languages. The order of the characters is determined
by the order in which you say the words. There's an exact
correspondence. It's not one-to-one, because there's more than one
language whose words you can use, but it's nevertheless the case that
Chinese writing is written language. Which is very different from
other forms of pictorial representation of meaning.
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