Really? Can you cite any examples? I’m genuinely curious.
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Uh… Western Europe? Portugal? The Sweden/Norway/nynorsk issue?
[quote][quote]
If you, Bu Lai En, can comprehend anything in Hokkien written with the Latin alphabet, without beforehand having known it, then we can talk about whether that makes it Latin, mmkay? [/quote]
Can a Mandarin (and only Mandarin) speaker fully understand Taiwanese as it might be transcribed using Chinese characters? If not, you’re doing a great job of proving Bu En Lai’s point. [/quote]
Refer to <a href="Phonetic, but not phonemic Chinese script compromise - #60 by zeugmite post or to puiwaihin’s post here:
Puiwaihin’s right that this is about the most colloquial example of Cantonese you’ll get (I.M. like), with lots of slang (and probably bad orthography) thrown in. But a reader of Chinese can still get the point. It’s about the difficulty that a standard English reader would have in reading slang-ridden Ebonics. Yet great minds here would have me believe that Ebonics is somehow not English:
My bf is so good looking that he’s worth a fight?, he already knows my older guy [i.e. brother] dislikes him, he said it’s not possible to have the whole world to like him, so long as we ourselves are happy then it’s fine! Possibly he doesn’t mind same-house-peoples’ feelings (for him) aren’t this deep, because in the end his older guy [brother], older sister have all married, and they don’t see (each other) every day, the one who interacts with his family the most is me. He doesn’t even take notice of his daddy, just gives him some money every month?..
I don’t speak Cantonese. The parts in question mark I am probably wrong. The parts in brackets are dialect specific but not hard to learn because they are limited in number.
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Chinese occupies a unique place among world languages. It’s a closely related set of languages, and it’s one language as well. The ability of Chinese symbols to carry a semantic value independent of pronunciation is what allows this to take place.
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Chinese isn’t unique even in this respect. Individuals speaking Spanish, Japanese, and Finnish would all understand the semantics behind the numeral “2” and yet speak it aloud in their own mutually unintelligible languages.[/quote]
Then take this to nearly all words and let it be for a couple millenia and what do you get?
Exactly as puiwaihin says, it’s not any better or worse adapted either way. It’s just a script. The important thing was that it got airtime. You have a fundamental misunderstanding about how two-/three- character words are constructed to begin with. They come together in modern usage but are not stuck together.
[quote]There’s a big difference between “could” and “should”. You seem to tacitly concede the linguistic question–whether they “could”–and now address the political question of whether they “should”.
But our politics are different than yours, don’t you see? [/quote]
As I have pointed out, cultural unity and character script are both realities, an imposed replacement of the character script for the purpose of breaking cultural unity, and official demoting the status of the character script, is the only blatantly political activity being discussed here. Not to mention none except the Masaotakashi kind of T.I.er would accept this. Many underestimate Chinese cultural unity and affinity for political unity.