• isyasad@lemmy.world
    3·
    2 days ago

    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.)

  • Quilotoa@lemmy.ca
    4·
    3 days ago

    I always found the idea of singing in a tonal language weird. I guess it works though.

    • ExtremeUnicorn@feddit.org
      3·
      3 days ago

      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.

    • [鳳凰院 凶真 Hououin Kyouma]|[alt: 黃家駒 Wong Ka Kui]@sh.itjust.worksOP
      6·
      3 days ago

      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

      @NorthWestWind@lemmy.world 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.

      • adavis@lemmy.world
        3·
        3 days ago

        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.

      • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world
        2·
        3 days ago

        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.

      • trolololol@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        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.