Considering Korea looked at the nightmare that was chinese and invented their own language to get their people literate… I am not sure it would ever work to be the default languages.
People will always simplify for people to learn and use, wince language is very important for transferring knowledge.
Eh, you don’t need to simplify it down so much.
I mean Simplified Chinese was just slightly altered and it retained most of how it looks and I mean, a population of 1.4 billion? And like nearly all the younger generations are literate.
I’ve talked about this before but a logographic lingua franca has a lot of potential to create text that is legible in any language. 1000 years ago, the Chinese writing system was used all across East Asia and you didn’t even have to know the spoken Chinese language to read it, even though the sentence order could be totally different.
There are definitely a lot of problems with this idea but I think the positives outweigh the negatives. (And of course, everybody should also keep their own language’s writing system. You could write in a logographic lingua franca if you were expecting to communicate with people who don’t speak your language.)
Tonal and Logographic didn’t become Lingua Franca because they’re more difficult to learn and standardization is even more challenging than with Alphabetic languages.
This is like language 101 stuff.
This is well explained in Ancient Writing and the History of the Alphabet by The Great Courses.
This is ignoring the geopolitical reasons that English became the worldwide lingua franca and is reverse-engineering the reason from a single example.
Chinese was the lingua franca of the sinosphere for centuries.
Imagine if it was China who had the power and expanse of the British Empire, it’s not like a non-tonal non-logographic language would suddenly appear and become a lingua franca for no reason other than it being easier to learn. That’s just not how lingua francas come to be.Though you could argue that if Chinese became the worldwide lingua franca, the efforts to romanize/alphabetize it would have more force and the language itself might change. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan all had their own movements to move away from Chinese characters (with VERY different motivations/outcomes in each country).
But I really disagree with your premise that difficulty in learning is what decides a lingua franca.
I’d be inclined to square the blame on economic and cultural imposition.
Which means that in maybe 50 years it will be like you say because of China’s increasing weight on world affairs.
I suspect if China wanted to impose a Lingua Franca on the world, they’d be pragmatic about it and invent something the world could learn and accept.
They seem to be very outcome focused rather than worrying about how they get there.
I always found the idea of singing in a tonal language weird. I guess it works though.
Only if the verse is carefully written.
Yeah. I’m guessing it’s harder to write songs in tonal languages.
The singer of Chthonic, a Taiwanese metal band, explained this briefly in an acoustic live recording. You do have to watch out which tone you choose exactly, otherwise the meaning can change drastically. I also think this is part of the “sound” that you get in these cultures.
Ling-ma nuts!
Instead of gesture typing we’d be carrying beat saber wands, wiggling tones up and down
I know lingua franca, what are the other* two specific things?
what are the pussy two specific things?
My question exactly.
Wow, that’s not the word I wanted right there.
The brain and the heart don’t always want the same things. At least not at the same time.
Indeed, you are as wise as you are seductive. An Scolar among testudinidae.
Rofl 🤣
This is why I don’t use autocorrect
Tonal is like:
詩 史 試 時 市 是
(Poem, History, Try, Time, Market, Yes)
All use the same Jyutping: si
But different tones. From left to right is tones 1 2 3 4 5 6
And the thing is, I’m a native Cantonese speaker and I’m having trouble differentiating between tones 2 and 5 because its so similar… I always thought it was pronounced the same, but apparantly its supposed ti be slightly different, but my parents never corrected me so 🤷♂️
People can understand so that’s all it matters I guess…
Here’s a video example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38H_ySiTd4
@[email protected] can you even tell the difference between tone 2 and tone 5? Cuz its almost the same to me. Like I always heard my parent say 歷史 and 超市 with the same “si”
And Logographic is just Chinese characters and idk any other Logographic ones… Hieroglyphs?
Basically the writing is separate from sounds. You can’t just sound out your word and spell it approximately, I can speak Cantonese and Mandarin, but I can’t “spell out” the characters, because its basically like a picture. I know what a cat looks like, for example, but I can’t draw a cat myself (since I haven’t written with pen and paper for like 15 years).
I can type it tho by the sound, and I can recognize the characters, just not use pen and paper to recall how to write it.
Basically the writing is separate from sounds.
And that’s how people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese can communicate through writing. The word (sound) may be different, but the written character is the same.
The tone 2 and 5 difference is subtle. 5 goes not as high as 2. Most of the time people pronounce them lazily but I can figure it out from the context.
Every language has words that are almost the same sounds but not quite.
English speakers barely pronounce can and can’t differently. If you’re in a noisy place, or are not familiar with the accent of the speaker or got a flu and your ears are blocked or whatever else, you’ll have an extra bad time telling them apart. That’s normal. Just extra annoying that this particular example involves a particular meaning and the opposite of it, so context is not your friend.
HEY MATE, CAN YOU PLEASE COME TO THE PARTY?
I CA’!±:-
OH COOL
I SAID I CA;(++;:-
OH SO YOU CAN’T? YEAH?
YEAH! THAT’S WHAT I SAID.
WELL YOUR LOSS
I SAID I WILL COME, DUDE
OH SHOOT. OK. SEE YOU THERE.
Use Affirmative and Negative like a bunch of soldiers lolz
What?
Sorry, fixed it lol
I believe logograpjic means you write down sylables and not just sounds. And tonal means the tone of you saying aomething changes the meaning. Chinese is tonal afaik.
Tonal, using different tones to differentiate meaning:
The car. The car?
You intonate the “a” differently to denote different meaning.
Logographic - picture-based writing.
What if a Chinese language became the global standard rather than English, for example.
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