Re: languages vs dialects

[Dick Eney <dickeney@access.digex.net>]

Poster: Dick Eney <dickeney@access.digex.net>


On Thu, 20 Mar 1997 mn13189@WCUVAX1.WCU.EDU wrote:

> Poster: mn13189@WCUVAX1.WCU.EDU
> 
> On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Scott Dean 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.
> > 
> > Are you sure about this?  The Korean script I have seen on signs in 
> > pictures of Korea (and on things like the Korean Presbyterian Church) 
> > is NOTICEABLY different from the kanji I saw when I was in Japan. 
> 
> I think what was being referred to were the various Chinese languages and
> dialcets.  If I remember right, Cantonese and Mandarin use the same
> script, but two speakers would not be able to have a phone conversation
> (although they could write a letter to each other).

This is also true -- and it goes for most of the other dialects spoken in
China, some of which are pretty remote from Official ("Mandarin") Chinese.
Korean, on the other hand, is written with a phonetic alphabet of -- IIRC
-- about forty glyphs.

|---------Master Vuong Manh, C.P., Storvik, Atlantia---------|
|Now, let's stop and think: how would Bugs Bunny handle this?|
|----------------(dickeney@access.digex.net)-----------------|


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