Name: Anonymous 2009-08-28 7:33
1. 'Script' means the writing system. I'm not dealing with its sounds whatnot here. And I believe it's the same script across the different dialects like Mandarin, Cantonese, etc.
2. My idea of Chinese script includes all variants like traditional, simplified, kanji, hanja, and any I may have missed out. They're all based on the same concept of pictographs or whatever.
So. Main discussion. The current Chinese writing system is derived from pictographs used thousands of years ago by some holy(read:mad) people who tried to make messages from spirits out of cracks in a burning piece of bone. It's undergone many changes for ease of writing, standardisation and stuff like that. Now the characters look nothing like what they were supposed to be. Also, the characters only carry meaning, not pronunciation. The Chinese script has no fixed set of, er, 'characters' for you to mix and match and put together to form meaningful strings. It's closer to repetitive drawing than writing than so many other scripts found throughout the world.
The Latin alphabet and its derivatives work with a bunch of letters that represent sounds and together form meaningful words. All those Indian and Southeast Asian languages, too. Korea has left Hanja in favour of Hangul, which also works on this principle. So do the Japanese syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana. Heck, you can form a simple sentence out of Hiragana alone. However, Japan has yet to forsake Kanji, but that is an issue better left for another thread.
Isn't the Chinese script such a PAIN when learning Chinese or Japanese? Why is it that the rest of the (surviving) world went with phonetics, but not China? Even the Japanese made those syllabaries to make things easier when they acquired the Chinese script. What system would you prefer?
tl;dr: None! I'm only taking responses from people who bother to read through the whole thing.
2. My idea of Chinese script includes all variants like traditional, simplified, kanji, hanja, and any I may have missed out. They're all based on the same concept of pictographs or whatever.
So. Main discussion. The current Chinese writing system is derived from pictographs used thousands of years ago by some holy(read:mad) people who tried to make messages from spirits out of cracks in a burning piece of bone. It's undergone many changes for ease of writing, standardisation and stuff like that. Now the characters look nothing like what they were supposed to be. Also, the characters only carry meaning, not pronunciation. The Chinese script has no fixed set of, er, 'characters' for you to mix and match and put together to form meaningful strings. It's closer to repetitive drawing than writing than so many other scripts found throughout the world.
The Latin alphabet and its derivatives work with a bunch of letters that represent sounds and together form meaningful words. All those Indian and Southeast Asian languages, too. Korea has left Hanja in favour of Hangul, which also works on this principle. So do the Japanese syllabaries, Hiragana and Katakana. Heck, you can form a simple sentence out of Hiragana alone. However, Japan has yet to forsake Kanji, but that is an issue better left for another thread.
Isn't the Chinese script such a PAIN when learning Chinese or Japanese? Why is it that the rest of the (surviving) world went with phonetics, but not China? Even the Japanese made those syllabaries to make things easier when they acquired the Chinese script. What system would you prefer?
tl;dr: None! I'm only taking responses from people who bother to read through the whole thing.