Re: languages vs dialects

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

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


On Thu, 20 Mar 1997, Scott Dean wrote:
> 
> Poster: "Scott Dean" <nacspsd@acs2.acs.ncsu.edu>
> 
> > Poster: "sholt@vt.edu" <sholt@vt.edu>
> >
> > 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. 
> 
This is a garble of a real situation.  A Japanese and a _Chinese_ could
write notes to each other, since both of them use _kanji_ or "ideographs".
The Chinese would be puzzled by the Japanese _kana_ which are used to show
verb and noun endings, Japanese being an inflected language, while the
Japanese would have to track pretty hard to figure out what was really
meant by the bare cores of words, Chinese being an analytic language; but
they _could_ make sense of it, just as, say, a Spaniard, Italian, and
Romanian could understand one another if they spoke slowly and distinctly.

|---------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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