31–40 of 153 posts
> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…
Not even going into the "fun" of the Han unification, there are some weird things in Chinese/Japanese characters. For example, 右 (right) and 左 (left). You'd think the top-left part is the same, but it's not. In the case of 左, you write the horizontal stroke first, but in the case of 右, it's the second stroke. They also have a slightly different shape. Another example from the Jōyō kanjis, 臭 (stinking, odor) and 嗅 (sm…
not sure if you're coming from a purely japanese background, but in chinese 左 and 右 both have the same stroke order for the upper left portion. and to show just how ridiculous han unification is, on my laptop your example makes no sense because the 臭 has a 犬!
The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself a…
Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwa…
Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.
> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…
> Can you spot the difference between 𠮟 and 叱? Me neither. Of course I can, not because I am Chinese, but they really do look different. How can you NOT see the difference? Also they have different meanings. Edit: Here is one that’s really hard to recognize especially in handwritings and often written wrong if not careful. 已 vs 己 This puzzles many Chinese people... Can you spot the difference? 已 has to do with time…
I can't read any of these characters but to me the difference between 已 vs 己 is as clear and obvious as the difference between 𠮟 vs 叱
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically alphabet based phonetic descriptive written languages are a recent invention.
Wait. Can you clarify that? Most of the world outside of East Asia has had that since there was a written language.
Examples of writing systems that used characters primarily to represent sounds did come later, though similarly, it is difficult to argue that any known language is purely phonetic. As a simple example in English, take '&' — though it is not a recognised letter, neither is it punctuation, and it is unarguably a glyph in the English writing system about which one could debate whether it is ideagramatic or logographic. (But I digress.)
There are many types and varieties of phonetically representative writing systems — most of the earliest, like Linear B, are Syllabaries[2]. The earliest known surviving examples date from the mid-15C BCE, written forms of Mycaenian Greek[3].
Fully segmental writing systems (please distinguish 'fully' from 'purely', as elaborated above) are definitely younger than the rest. The earliest examples of these are often abjads and abugidas, which either eschew vowel representations or form consonant-vowel digraphs respectively[4].
The Phoenician alphabet, or more correctly the Proto-Canaanite script that was used by the Phoenicians, is the earliest surviving example of a segmental writing system — it is an abjad of which the earliest surviving examples are from roughly 1000BCE[5].
The earliest preserved writings that aren't just numbers date to about 3100BCE in Sumer[6], so predate preserved phonetic (excluding syllabic) writings by about 2000 years, and are in the order of 5000 and 3000 years old, respectively. So it's a big stretch to call it a 'recent invention', but certainly not as ancient as logographic or mnemonic writing systems.
[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
[2]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_B
[3]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycenaean_Greek
[4]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abjad and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida
The depth and breadth of the diaspora around Chinese characters makes it extremely difficult to get these things right. Even this article presenting highly specific domain knowledge tees off with a questionable example: `The Japanese cross the blade in 刃, the Koreans don’t` Well Japanese have both 刀 for katana, the well known sword, and 刃 for yaiba / "blade". But in fact 刀 is used for many kinds of blade, by itself a…
You've misunderstood. https://i.imgur.com/pTkbX7g.png (for a bigger list see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification#Examples_of_la... )
Even so: in my experience in Japan I've seen e.g. 認 hand-written both ways, and specifically remember becoming curious about this variant. My conclusion after consulting with native speakers and university professors I knew there was that they are essentially and functionally equivalent. That is, against the author's point, Japanese speakers do not note a difference at all.
Chinese gets even more complicated being a language without an alphabet. Even among the traditional and simplified variants, there are different forms for the same character based on popularity. For example, 吃 and 喫 have the same modern meaning "to eat," but one is more commonly used. A character like 鎌 has a variant like 鐮, just as well as 塚 and 冢. People choose characters based on stylistic reasonings (and in Taiwa…
Written Chinese has basically 3 different standards, in Sinosphere:
1. Mainland China: Simplified Chinese. Meanwhile, contrary to most people's understanding, PRC has standardized its own Traditional Chinese writing as well, which is permitted in logo/trademark and research purposes.
2.Hongkong: Hong Kong has its own system, and plus several hundred characters that created specifically for Cantonese.
3.Taiwan: Taiwan's system has some interesting distinction in characters like 骨(bone)，which is different from both Mainland China and Hong Kong's system.
Japan ever since 20 century has simplified and revolutionized its Kanji standard on its own, but unlike China, a lot of Kanjis still follows form from the old Kanxi dictionary(康熙字典). While Korea is an interesting case, where they abandoned Hanja in everyday use, so they don't even bother to simplify it, thus Korean Hanja actually follows the most orthodoxical way of writing of all the systems mentioned above.