Re: languages vs dialects

[Neil Maclay <nmaclay@psi.prc.com>]

Poster: Neil Maclay <nmaclay@psi.prc.com>

Poster: "sholt@vt.edu" <sholt@vt.edu>
wrote
>A Korean and a Japanese person, if they met on a street corner, most
>likely would be unable to hold a conversation with each other.  But they
>could share a newspaper or other reading material and have no trouble at
>all.  The written languages are identical.

This is not exactly true. Most Korean books and papers use the Korean
alphabet which is unique to Korea. An educated Korean might know
how to read Chinese characters and most Japanese know kanje.
Kanje is a writing system that uses Chinese characters but
it is not the same as Mandaren Chinese writing. An educated 
Japanese and an educated Korean could probably comunicate to
each other through a common set of Chinese characters but I
don't know how fluent the communication would be.

	Malcolm MacMalcolm
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