why didn't they ever adopt an alphabet?

>>2708577
to confuse foreigners

>>2708577
They actually have an alphabet called Hiragana and another one that I forget the name of. I'm pretty sure the alphabet is used for computers and shit like that.

>>2708577
as a flip, I'm jealous the chinese still have their own script.

Because the script is actually more useful than an alphabet?

The uniformity of the script allowed different groups of Chinese to write letters to each other and communicate, even though they spoke mutually unintelligible dialects.

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>>2708577
>Be Ancient China.
>Rule over vast Empire filled with different ethnocultural groups speaking different languages.
>A centralized empire to boot.
>You want your imperial decrees understood by your subject niggas.
>Now what is easier: force these groups to speak one language? Or create a system of logographs that everyone agrees will mean a word or a concept.
>Take into consideration a lot of your Non-Han subjects don't even have their own fucking writing systems.

>>2708577
>what is pinyin

>>2708635
Chinese script existed before the unification of China.

>>2708646
And it remained in use till today for the reasons given.

>>2708639
A pronunciation aid.

>Create a system of writing so universal and applicable to so many languages that it becomes the de facto writing system of every ethnicity in the region.

There was no need

>>2708577
Its actually kind of nice to have a non phonemic writing system. I think most alphabet writing systems are phonemic but Chinese is not.

Chinese languages are very diverse and they differ quiet a bit. From region to region and city to city even. Most different "dialects" of Chinese are actually different languages all together.

There is however just one written language system in China and this has been the case for 2000 years. This makes administration, trading and communication much easier.

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>>2708614
>muh script

Spanish speaking zone is twice the size of China

>>2708605
That's Japanese, and it isn't a replacement for kanji.

>>2708605

>Hiragana (&katakana)
>China

Pick one.

>>2708707
>There is however just one written language system in China and this has been the case for 2000 years.

>what is tibetian, manchu, mongolian just off the top of my head
>there are are entire libraries of manchu documents containing things not found in traditional chinese

i love when /his/ talks about shit they dont know aobut, it makes them cute in the same way a retarded puppy looks cute.

>>2708711
Yeah, and that "Spanish speaking zone" was created over the span of 400 years.

China is 5000 years old.

>>2708743
>China is 5000 years old.

Prove it.

>>2708754
Prove that the Spanish speaking zone exists.

>>2708743
You don't need the script to make different groups of people over a large terrority to speak the same language and to use the same writing system.

That is the point of my post .

>>2708771
The point isn't that you need it. The point is that that is how it evolved.

>>2708736
Yes today's border are not a actuate representation of China's past border. The borders also shifts through time.

Still written Chinese was standardized through a large geographical area. The main area of population in the Yellow and Yangtze river basin all had one written language .

>>2708786

whatever nerd

>>2708781
And how is it more useful than alphabet?

A guy from Mexico can have a chat or phone conversation with a guy from Chile without any problem.

>>2708839
Yeah, and if you actually read my posts you would know what the difference is you moron.

Mexicans and Chileans speak the same language.

People from Guangzhou and Beijing do not. But they use the same script.

>>2708843
>But they use the same script.

And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.

And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Again, what is the advantage of script over alphabet?

>>2708897
>And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.
>And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Stop trolling faggot.

>>2708605
If you know you don't know what you are talking about, why take the time to post proof of it?

>>2708771
Now do that in 500 bc

>>2708905

Look, I use the Latin alphabet , not Chink script, to chat with you, and both of us still understand what each other said.

Despite differences in ethnicity, country...etc. That means the Chink script you flattered so hard is just a meme.

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>>2708946

>>2708771
>You don't need the script to make different groups of people over a large terrority to speak the same language and to use the same writing system.

Yeah, you need virulent disease to genocide the majority of the people there, and then export large quantities of your own people to replace the native population.

>>2708897
>And they must learn to know what it means, before they use it.
>And if you want to speak a language, you must learn it first.

Are you dumb enough to imply that people need to learn Mandarin in order to understand the Script?

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Literally ancient emoji.

One does not need to know a specific language to decipher it, although SVO languages may help.

>>2708736
Tibetan/Mongol languages aren't considered Chinese language tbqh. They're Tibetan/Mongol language as they have their own well defined cultural borders.

>>2708982
It's not like Chinese have ever had much problem slaughtering each other.

Probably more people died in the course of Chinese history than the entire colonization of the New World and yet not unified language.
Sad.

>>2708987
>implying you don't learn Hanzi to know what those logograms mean

>>2708987
Are you dumb enough to imply you can understand Chinese script simply by looking at it and that you don't need to learn it's quarter million characters or whatever the obscene number is, to know what they mean?

>>2708946
Wew this has to be bait

>>2709014
Maybe that had something to do with China having the most people in the world for 4000+ years.

An anon being absolutely ignorant about the subject he posts about?
Sad.

>>2709014
>Probably more people died in the course of Chinese history than the entire colonization of the New World

Is this bait?

>>2709053
He probably just forgot to drop some of the zeros off.

>>2709034
>Person A speaks language C, but learns Chinese script
>Person B speaks D language, but learns the same Chinese script

How the fuck is this so hard to understand you mongoloid?

>>2709018
>You need to learn the characters to understand what those characters mean

Do you know what you are talking about?

>>2708743
>China is 5000 years old
I like this meme.

>>2709062
>Person A speaks language C, but learns language E
>Person B speaks D language, but learns the same language E


Try harder, Bao

>>2709072
>He doesn't even know the difference between spoken language and written

I mean, only on /his/ could someone be this fucking stupid.

>>2709053
It's not that unfeasible because China is apparently the oldest and most populated civilization in the world, that more people would die in it's conflicts over thousands of years than a colonization exercise that lasted a few hundred.

>>2709076
So this is not the written? ,

> " hello, you dumb fuck" .

This is the language E

>>2709083
>china is oldest civilisation
what is this shit meme

>>2709084
I know you're trolling, but seriously educate yourself.

You're just making a fool out of yourself.

>>2709076
>He's clinging to pedantry out of autistic pride

Only someone who has never spent time learning hanzi would claim that learning it is a simple solution to mass communication across cultures.

>>2709072
Holy fuck anon

Written Chinese and Spoken Chinese are not the same language.

>Roman Empire uses Latin, written phonetically
>it all just collapses into the various Romance languages and unity of culture is lost
>Chinese Empire uses a shitload of mutually unintelligible languages mostly descended from Old Chinese and Middle Chinese
>they can all be written with the same script that allows them to understand each other despite being mutually unintelligible verbally, unity of culture is preserved throughout the periods of division

>>2709092
I never said it was a "simple solution to mass communication across cultures".

I said it was *a* solution.

If X character means the same in Guangzhou as it means in Beijing, but it is pronounced differently in speech, you don't need to speak the same language to communicate.

>>2709092
I am Singaporean Chinese and I can read all the traditional (and most simplified) Chinese posted here but I wouldn't understand a thing spoken in Beijing.

Please don't talk about what you clearly don't know

Hanzi is not required

>>2709089
>muh troll

>muh Y-you must learn X to know X

That applied to any language, logogram or phonogram.

>>2709113
>I am Singaporean Chinese and I can read all the traditional (and most simplified) Chinese posted here but I wouldn't understand a thing spoken in Beijing.
Don't you guys learn Mandarin down there or are you one of those old people who only speaks Hokkien or Cantonese?

>>2709083
>that more people would die in it's conflicts over thousands of years than a colonization exercise that lasted a few hundred.

The bait part was the fact this low IQ mouth breather somehow thinks that gross deaths matters more than the rate of death as percentage of your total population when it comes supplanting an entire culture and people with your own.

>>2709118
Only some learn Mandarin

Many speak Cantonese languages though in the home.

Likewise, many Cantonese in Guangzhou don't know any Mandarin. We perfectly understand what is on Weibo or a government report though. There are some exceptions of course, especially among the elderly.

>>2709117
Yes you're a baitlord.

>>2709092
>Only someone who has never spent time learning hanzi
>Pea brain couldn't handle learning characters because his tiny brain couldn't handle it.

You can literally read the script in English you fool.

>>2708577
I think it's important to understand that all of the thousands of larger complex characters are made from a much smaller set of simple ones.

Example: 木 is considered an individual character, but so is 林 and 森. Even though it's just reusing one single character in an increasing amount.

So it's similar to taking letters and building words, just instead of writing them all next to each other sequentially, they're assembled in an aesthetically pleasing manner.

That being said, it is not phonetic, but that wasn't what was important, as others pointed out. They wanted to be understood by multiple readers across languages.

>>2709094
What we are using now is the written form of a language.

>>2709140
And?

You don't pronounce "language" when you read it like the French do, even though it's a French word.

OK, here's an example.

If I wanted to tell the time, and I only speak Hokkien.

The time is 9:25.

In Hokkien you would say "kau diam gor lei ji"

In Mandarin it is "jiu dian wu ge zi"

Spoken, we can't understand each other. But in writing form, both are written as 「九點五個字」。 We can communicate.

>>2709158
/thread

>>2709140
Okay.

Let me make this clear for you since you don't seem capable of reading wikipedia or watching a youtube video about Chinese.

Written Chinese looks like this 葉

It represents a single idea.

"Spoken Chinese" is a Western-invented term to describe the 57+ Chinese spoken languages.

They are roughly similar to the difference between English and Upper German.

In England and Germany, people use the Latin Alphabet. The Germans used to have a runic alphabet though.

In China they don't use an alphabet. They use what is essentially a separate written language formed by these characters 雑. The pronunciation of each character depends on your spoken language, but the idea represented by each character is the same.

Therefore a Cantonese Chinese like me can understand the character and tell my blind father about it via pronouncing it in Cantonese, but he will only know the actual written character's shape if I take care to express the full idea it represents.

It's not like using the Latin Alphabet between Germans and English. It's like using a solely written language to communicate, and translating it into our own spoken language.

>>2709158
ohhhhh

>>2709127
Oh, I thought it was your government policy for all races to have to learn their race's mother tongue in school, meaning Mandarin for the Chinese. Guess I heard wrong. paiseh paiseh

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They should just use Zhuyin DESU

>>2709183
Of course the system isn't perfect since each "dialect" has its own peculiarities of grammar, vocabulary, and so on, they aren't exact ciphers of each other. But they are still close enough to be intelligible via the writing system, especially when using Classical Chinese aka Literary Chinese which has an extremely stripped down grammar structure and laconic form.

>>2709127
>Cantonese languages
But hokkien is the largest dialect group in Singapore.

>>2709113
That's nice, and entirely irrelevant to my point that the supposed advantage of cross-cultural communication it affords is outweighed by it's significant disadvantages.

>>2709183
And yet we use the Latin alphabet to write these comments, not your Chinese script, and still pretty much understand. Kinda ironic, huh?

Remembering hiragana only words is harder than words with kanji. Using only bopomofo or pinyin only would be even more painful.

>>2709243
The advantage is that the system is more resistant to languages diverging and becoming unintelligible, which is important when you are working across such a massive geographical territory. Look at what happened to Vulgar Latin.

>>2709135
>missing the point
Written Chinese is a fascinating language for autists but it is simply obsolete in comparison to the more efficient Latin alphabet system.

>>2709249
Because the world as it is today is conducive to everyone learning and maintaining English as a lingua franca. Conditions were different in ancient China when people don't travel around or communicate very much beyond their immediate surroundings.

>>2709264
Oh yes more efficient which is why the Roman Empire collapsed and fell to pieces, and everyone started speaking different languages which evolved from Vulgar Latin and identifying as different people; whereas in China the empire could fragment and reunite as much as they liked and they all still maintained a unity of culture through written language.

Learning Mandarin alongside English wasn't all that hard. There's only around 214 radicals that form the rest of the characters. You can infer meaning and pronunciation from the characters most of the time. It's not so inefficient that it's worth getting rid of. It would be akin to getting everyone to switch from English to Esperanto because it's "more logical".

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>>2709300

>>2709300

i don't know what the meaning of most radicals mean, i just learned the intuitive combination of radicals and their equivalent english meanings.

>>2709365
Native learners don't memorise radical meanings, but from context and knowing other characters that use the same radical you can guess.

>>2709399
>Native learners don't memorise radical meanings

that's bullshit. i've been to an elementary school class and saw a teacher teach radicals.

>>2709264
>simply obsolete in comparison to the more efficient Latin alphabet system.

Once again your tinyness of your mind is staggering. You do realize that the way we process words in a Latin alphabet system is the same as a logographic system? That we simply collate letters into a general shape, and then tether than shape into an idea? It's why we misread things, and insert words where there are none. From a brain power standpoint there is 0 difference.

>>2709465
You're the only one bringing brainpower into this chum.
:3

>>2709506
I might come from a place of bias but it really seems logical to me that an alphabet of 26 characters that is (more or less) phonetic is far less complex, and therefore easier to master, than the chinese script with its several hundred radicals

>>2709465

There is a point to Chinese characters being harder to learn. Both Japan and Korea adopted Hanzi for their written system due to Han/Tang influence, however, both languages reformed by adding a phonetic system, which later superceded hanja/kanji as the primary writing system.

China itself has done the same thing with Pinyin, and I don't think it's implausiable that Hanzi itself becomes depreciated in the far (>100 yr) future.

>>2709465
Not him, but this is wrong.

MRI studies of dyslexic kids from alphabetic or logographic regions show that the two have no relation (a person dyslexic in English may not be dyslexic in Chinese, and vice versa), and reading in the two languages occupies different parts of the brain.

In alphabetic languages one decodes shapes into sounds; in logographic, shapes into ideas.

>>2709549
I wouldn't say kana are primary writing systems.

>>2709549
Pinyin is not a writing system. It's a phonetic aid.

>>2709653

Are they not? My exposure to Japanese documents and literature gives the impression that they are mostly kana based, and the more recent and less official the document, the more kana it has and less kanji. I can read older japanese documents easier due to greater prevalence of kanji from knowing Chinese.

>>2708605
Japan adopted kanji because too many homophones in their language.

Context in incredibly important with spoken and hiragana written japanese. Otherwise you get confused.

the world for bridge and chop stick is written the same way, and even sounds similar. depending on where you stress the word, changes the meaning. though half of japan flips the meanings. so you can say the word identically in two parts of japan and the people in those parts will think of different items.

>>2709657
Well the point is that pinyin is a phonetic aid now, but I can see pinyin becoming more and more important, to the point of potentially supplanting hanzi. This is accelerated by keyboard input of text, which is predominantly pinyin. Modern urbanized Chinese input far more text by keyboard than handwriting, to the point that the handwriting skill atrophies rapidly for college graduates now that they don't have to take paper tests anymore.

>>2709682
I grew up in HK. I'm not going to lie, although I can still passively understand it when spoken, my command of written Cantonese is pretty lousy, but I cannot imagine reading a substantial text written in pinyin. As an aid for reading the hanzi, sure, but on its own, no chance. Sounds like it would be completely illegible.

>>2708577
Because Chinese language stayed around along with Chinese characters.

Almost all proto/original writing script starts logographic and stayed ideogram. e.g.: hieroglyph, oracle bone, sumerians cuneiforms.
i.e. all original character comes with associated sound, meaning, and graphic.

The languages that came along with all these script is fucking dead except chinese language.

The reason europe and elsewhere using phonetic script is because you're all using stupidified knockoff writing script.

Consider the following degrees of adopting writing system:
1) Take in the foreign characters along with the accompanying language as a whole. Example: coastal niggers in pre modern era around China (JapKorViet) all wrote and record history exclusively in classical chinese, a foreign language to them. Consider a fictional England where the plebs speaks english but couldn't bother to learn to write a shit, and the patricians would rather write documents in Latin/French than in Aenglisc.

2) Use the foreign characters along with the associated meanings and sounds, treat them as sort of loanword or root word and incorporate them into local language. Example: Kanji in modern Jap.

3) Use the foreign characters to purely denote sounds. Example: Phoenician and shits.

>>2708614

And this is a strength of the somewhat arbitrary English spelling system as well. At this point any attempt to make it more phonetically exact is a waste of time due to the wide variety of dialects.

God damn, English really is the perfect lingua franca, the love child of Germanic and Latin Europe. Frenchies, eat your heart out.

>>2708654
It is much more than that.

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>>2709673
>Japan adopted kanji because too many homophones in their language.
I'm pretty sure they adopted kanji because they are located next to China.

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>>2708646
So? Same shit.

Some of the Pre-Unification Chink kingdoms unified more than one Ethnolinguistic groups. Qin with their Steppenigger subjects and the Chu with their Brownigger Southern Barbarian subjects.

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>>2709062
>mongoloid

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>>2708771
>>2708711
>Force people your own language.
>THEY STILL REVOLT AND OVERTHROW YOUR ASS.
>Spain stands to lose Catalonia even.
>Meanwhile China just grew and grew.

Yeap, served Spain a lot, forcing their lingo on the natives.

>>2711136
Every language has lots of dialects, yet many manage to have much more uniform spelling than English.

Rather than allowing people to communicate with each other, English spelling variability just introduces confusion and miscommunication, even among native speakers

>>2711376

>confusion and miscommunication

If you're retarded, maybe. Just memorize the words, it isn't that difficult.

Look at German dialects, for example, many of which have a different orthographic standard (Plattdeutsch, Swiss German, many others). Isn't that annoying? Just speak your dialect and spell your words with the quasi-logographic English alphabet that you managed to learn because you weren't a drooling imbecile.

>>2708793
>Calling anyone a nerd on this Indonesia Fruit Emporium

>>2708577
They prefer pictographs.

>>2711324
well yes, that is why the adopt it instead of fixing their language. but my point still stands.

>>2711376
24 characters as opposed to three gazillion characters as done by autistic chinks, and even they don't memorize half that by the time they reach their 20's.

>>2712535

Chinese vocabulary is hard, but Chinese grammar is incredibly simple.

But if I had to pick one language to be the "standard" it would be korean. Korea is constructed rather than evolved, which meant it's grammar rules were designed to be as regular as possible.

>roll out butchers paper and have a cock fight with their feet dipped in ink
>claim as language
>waddle around saying nigger a lot
>asian menace

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>>2709050
I'm not certain it's true China has always had more people, but it's always been large, and unified for more of history than other major Old World civilizations (Europe, India, Middle East).

>>2712544
but it looks ugly as heck
top aesthetic languages from most to least.

english>romance languages>ayrabic>jappo>chinese>corean

t b h

>>2708754
Isn't that like saying Russia is 4000 years old by virtue of being ruled by various shifting dynasties like China was?

>>2712598
China's 5000 years of history meme includes mythical kings and dynasties.

>>2712598
Chink history is divided into Ancient, Imperial, and Modern.

Ancient China isn't really China. Ignoring the meme mythical dynasties (which were probably just retconned tribal chiefs really), you have the Shang Theocracy, and then the Zhou Feudal Empire.

China as we know it began with the Empire. So if anything, it's just 2000. Though its previous history did make it what it was considering the concept of Zhongguo did emerge from the Zhou period.

>>2709653
while kana also are a phonetic aid, they're certainly integral parts of the writing system in general, kana and kanji all have their own uses with katakana being mainly for foreign words, hiragana for grammar and native words with no or obscure kanji(or if you just feel like it) and kanji for nouns, to distinguish between words that are homophones, etc.
>>2709673
>>2711324
technically you're both right, they adopted kanji wholesale initially as their writing system, but retained it after the introduction or kana because of the many homophones.

>This is western intelligence at its finest.

So happy that the white cancer will kill themselves in the next century.

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>>2713012

>>2709671
If anything Japanese people these days use kanji more than ever before because inputting them is so easy with digital interfaces.

>>2708577
My guess, they created a system that works, so they saw no need to change it. Today, it is tradition, to change it would be a blow to their national identity and culture. Plus it looks gorgeous, let's not kid ourselves.

>>2708577
Because It's aesthetically better

>>2709107
eh, the latin languages all preserve more or less the roman spellings of words even when they don't make sense like in french and portuguese

Basically French, Portuguese and English, even though alphabets, function kind of like Chinese script, the spelling is not phonetic, but based on traditional Greek and Roman spelling

Italian and Spanish are phonetic though

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Do you look forward to put Chinese Oracle Bone Script into Unicode?

Pro: ancient Egyptian scripts are codified. Many less circulated scripts are codified. It helps circulating Chinese text.

Con: there is no concensus on shapes and identities of characters

>>2708605
In addition the other replies, I just wanted to add that hiragana and katakana aren't an alphabets. They are syllabaries, or more accurately moraic scripts.

>>2708577

Too many homophones

A good book that touches on this is Empire of the Word by Nicholas Ostler.

I think the direct answer to this is probably pride. But also, since their language lacks inflection and all that, there is less need to adopt an alphabet. I couldn't imagine a language like Irish using this type of system.

Something to note is that this style of writing is a lot less transferable to different cultures without forcing change. To use it as a non-native, your essentially have to adopt a lot of their words and sounds in order to make it work. This happened in southeast Asia concerning the Chinese system and with akkadians when they used Sumerian cuniform. Alphabet based systems are a lot more transferrable and flexible, and that's evident when considering there is no requirement to adopt the other languages sounds and words. Any loanwords the Greeks took from the Phoenicians were for other reasons. Alphabets are a lot more customizable to a language.

Now that Chinese languages are unified I expect the written language to become an alphabet rapidly

>>2713060
They were once phonetic. This is only a symptom of language shifts over time. France is too stubborn to change their spelling and choose to remain historical, and English is too decentralized to have a central language control. Alphabets really need updating in order to properly remain phonetic.

>>2714435
basically this. Reading something in pinyin isn't impossible by any means, but it is kind of a pain in the ass

>>2708577
So people can speak multiple unintelligible dialects of "a language" (really multiple different languages at this point) and still understand each other through script.

>>2708605
I really don't get why the Japanese have 3 writing systems. It seems really excessive tbqh

>>2714541
>update alphabet
>make all old texts unreadable
Great idea

>>2714538

technically there is pinyin

but that will remain merely a tool for pronunciation/computer input, and never replace characters.

at best you can hope for further simplified system of radicals. in like 20 years. or by then we'll all have robot brains and you can download chinese language patch matrix-style.

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>>2708577
if you think chinese characters are incomprehensible, wait until you see tangut characters, pic related

>>2715981
Look at the shifts in old English and middle English. It was definitely needed.

>>2713060
>portuguese is not phonetic
wtf, have you ever heard any brazilian or portuguese linguist claim that? Written portuguese is very related to spoken one, except for regional accents, the only real problem is pronunciation of imperfect times, where am is pronounced as ao

>>2708577
Too many homophones.

>no consistent way to use a dictionary
>can't type on a computer effectively

Character based languages will be dead in 100 years

>>2718092
>no consistent way to use a dictionary
Except that dictionaries are arranged by radical and stroke order.

>can't type on a computer effectively
They're doing just fine with both zhuyin and pinyin last I checked.

>>2709158
What i was always wondering, that only works for chinese language thought, right? Like you probably have signs for grammatical words or something like that, how is it possible to translate those from dialect to dialect/language to language?

>>2709420
It's like a school in the middle east lol

>>2715981
Bruh, just because you change the spelling of some words doesn't mean you forget how to read

>>2718181
The system isn't perfect of course.

For example "Where" in Standard Mandarin is "na li"/"哪裡" (or "nar"/哪兒 if you're from Northern China, they love those 兒化); in Cantonese it's "bin dou"/"邊度"; in Shanghainese it's "hhar li"/"阿裡", In Taiwanese Hokkien it's "to ui"/"佗位", in Singaporean Hokkien (descended from the Quanzhou variant of Minnan) it's "to loh"/"佗落"
That would be because at the end of the day they are all different languages that about as related as French and Portuguese and German and English, all shoehorning a common system of writing into their own languages.

But the beauty of Classical Chinese, which is the system that was primarily used in writing and formal setting (as opposed to vernacular Chinese which is the form that was used in everyday conversation) is how compact and simple it is, and how it can generally be read using any of the "dialects" and still be more or less intelligible thanks to common meaning of the characters used in all dialects.

Note that Classical Chinese is not its own language or dialect, but more of a universal written grammatical system. Classical Chinese is acceptable formal writing in any dialect and can be pronounced using any dialect, including archaic pronunciations, Mandarin, Cantonese, or any other dialect of your choosing. This is why modern Mandarin speakers and Cantonese speakers and so on can read Tang dynasty poetry and Ming dynasty banknotes and still understand what they are saying even though the way they pronounce them has very little relation to how the ancients would have spoken.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Chinese_grammar

>>2718261
As an example 我 is "wo" in Mandarin, "ngo" in Cantonese", "goa" in Taiwanese Hokkien, "wa" in Penang Hokkien, and even "ware" in Japanese, and so on, but they all have the meaning of "me".

To continue the earlier example the formal "where" as used in Classical Chinese is 何處. This is read variously in Mandarin as "he chu", in Cantonese as "ho chyu", and in Hokkien as "ho chhu", and in Japanese as "doko", but invariably it conveys the same meaning.

>>2716792
Are you kidding me? Pronunciation of Portuguese is all over the place

Spanish vs Portuguese from Wikipedia:

>Al buen entendedor pocas palabras bastan (Spanish: [al ˈβwen entendeˈðor ˈpokas paˈlaβɾaz ˈβastan])
Spanish, written as spoken

>Ao bom entendedor poucas palavras bastam (European Portuguese: [ɐw ˈβõ ẽtẽdɨˈðoɾ ˈpo(w)kɐʃ pɐˈlavɾɐʒ ˈβaʃtɐ̃w], Brazilian Portuguese: [aw ˈbõw ĩtẽdeˈdoʁ ˈpo(w)kas paˈlavɾaz ˈbastɐ̃w])
Portuguese, as you can see, like French, letters have various pronunciations, and don't sound anything like what is written

I

>>2718092
>>can't type on a computer effectively
Good thing that technology progressed so fast we don't even worry about if our characters work with 3D printing anymore

The way I see it, Classical Chinese is really a wonderful thing

The problem is that your language has to accomodate it first before it works like magic.

People might say that different Chinese languages and Japanese and Vietnamese and Korean and probably many minority languages in china work with Classical Chinese. The problem is they have spent centuries to accommodate with it.

Those who got their own nation state: Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese, have records about how originally their spoken languages didn't work with Classical Chinese.

I would say that Classical Chinese is after all based on one particular Chinese language. It may work with other languages but further away from that particular language the harder the it is for that language to work with Classical Chinese.

>>2718261
If Chinese conquered France or Germany could they impose Classical Chinese writing system on German and French speakers? Will these two languages become dialects of Chinese then?

>>2719094
> Will these two languages become dialects of Chinese then?
They're not even in the Sinitic language family. Korean and Japanese were never dialects of Chinese.

>>2708577
Alphabets take a long time to develop. Most early writing systems are logographic or syllableries, and because Chinese has such little inflection there was never a need to develop syllabary or alphabet systems to show grammatical particles.

>>2721040
>and because Chinese has such little inflection
Can you elaborate?

>>2708635
I agree with this concept entirely but even the simplified characters are complex and difficult to learn.

>>2708989
Clover book target poop?

>>2709158
>Two chinese people from difference provinces meet and have to get their phones out and start texting each other despite being sat together
heh

>>2718261
I dont get why people cant understand this.

It even works for English speakers, i know about 300 chinese character meanings and if i read them all in english i can still understand the text.

我是一个英国人
I am an england country person (british)

>>2722232
Not him, but chinese is famous for being one of the most analytical languages

Im not an expert so i don't know how much inflection it has, but i've heard it's minimal, meaning the words don't change depending on context, like instead of "dog" vs "dogs", they would say "dog" vs "many dog" or "man" vs "men", it would be "man" vs "many man"

>>2722259
That's what makes written Chinese so interesting It's a language independent of spoken word.

>>2722259
More like:
>I am one brave country person