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0 pointsglobuous8y ago0 comments

Me too, but if they keeps their current one ^^. If my understanding is of chinese writing is correct, then you could put any pronunciation on their characters. So we could have a universal writing system. If french, english and russian all mapped their words to chinese symbols, then we could all communicate through writing while keeping our languages. In practice it's obviously not this easy since we have different grammars, but I think the basic principle holds and we'd all be able to somewhat read each other.

Numbers are a great example of that. We all have our own words for numbers, but can all communicate it with its associated symbols (which are different in arabic script for instance, though everyone's agreed on european script).

Mathematics is full of those symbols we communicate with regardless of their pronunciation in different languages, e.g. the 'for all' and 'there exist' symbols for instance, but also the equal sign and the integral, set notation etc etc. They're all concept, ideas, and have associated symbols.

So why wouldn't we all use chinese 'synbols' for our 'everyday' vocabulary when we write. It's be harder to learn to read 1 language, but so much easier to learn to read all of them.

When we communicate in western languages an idea I from person A to person B; then when A translate I into a translation t in a language l that both A and B understand. then B translates back t into I'. It's actually pretty hard to get I' to equal I. Where as with chinese characters, my understanding is their characters are closer to the ideas themselves. Potentially making it easier to communicate between each other across multiple languages.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

jcranmer8y ago· 1 in thread

That's not how Chinese script works (or translation for that matter).

Chinese script is logographic: each character roughly refers to a single morpheme. There is also a degree of phonetic component to the script (to some degree, it's a game of playing "what sounds like fish and has to do with food?") But morphemes are not universal across different languages, and phonetic games can quickly become obtuse: Japanese kanji is basically completely unintelligible to Chinese speakers, despite literally deriving from Chinese.

Even within the different Chinese topolects, the actual comprehensibility of the standard writing system without having been specifically taught it is I believe only in the region of trying to understand Spanish knowing only French.

seanmcdirmid8y ago

Japanese Chinese characters can have multiple morphemes, though they are still completely unintelligible even given the Chinese reading of a Japanese character.

megaman228y ago

This has been done before, with Mongolian, and Manchu, and pre-Hangul Korean, and Japanese, and virtually every other language that neighbored on and fell into the cultural orbit of pre-modern China. It never really worked out that well, and almost universally was replaced with alphabets of one variety or another eventually, because it is impossible for people to become fluent without an absurd number of years of study when reading and writing in ideographs; at least comparable to the very short time it takes to train someone in an alphabet.

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