RE: Pictures, words, info, glyphs, symbols, thoughts?

["Dick Margulis " <margulis -at- mail -dot- fiam -dot- net>]

"Jane Carnall" <jane -dot- carnall -at- digitalbridges -dot- com> wrote:

>According to the autobiography of the last Emperor of China, Chinese and
>Japanese can communicate with each other by writing. ... The spoken
>languages are as different as English and German, but the written languages
>are just similiar enough that a good reader of Chinese can "decode" a
>message written in Japanese characters.

I think it would be more accurate to say that the Chinese and Japanese languages are as different as English and Finnish, if I recall correctly from a linguistics course I took mumble years ago. The Japanese, not having a writing system of their own at the time, adopted the Chinese writing system. Because ideographs do contain any phonemic information (in the way that alphabetic writing systems do), this was a relatively easy thing to do and permitted correspondence between people who would not have been able to communicate orally.


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