I think you are trifle at sixes and sevens in your interpretation of script meaning it is one language.
Devanagiri is used for many Indian languages, but it does not mean that those languages are same and can be understood by all those who use the Devnagiri script.
Turkey uses the Roman Script and I daresay the Romans and their descendants understand Turkish!
Therefore, it is requires no elaboration that your contention that script means the same language is fallacious! and ingenuous obfuscation to befool.
Please just allow me a brief sidetrack just for this post mods. I'm trying to explain something important, thanks.
TIKI TAM TAM:
PLEASE READ THIS POST BEFORE YOU CONTINUE WITH YOUR CHINESE LANGUAGE THEORY.
Your examples are totally inaccurate in describing the chinese script.
Devanagiri and Roman Script are alphabetical - meaning that the meaning of the words written with them are based on how they are pronounced, therefore the same set of characters can be used to spell out completely different languages, and thus they are mutually incomprehensible.
With chinese characters it's the other way around. The meaning of the words were embedded and described fully by the characters themselves, and pronounced differently in different languages/dialects. The chinese character system is pictoral, this is the writing system first standardised by the first emperor of unified china.
So if say love is pronounced differently in cantonese and mandarin, both people can still understand the written word because meaning is embedded in the word itself. (just like how an indian would read the character '8' and comprehend exactly the same meaning as a chinese reading '8')
Devanagiri script spelling of 8 would be different in different languages because it is dependent on how 8 is pronounced in different languages
Chinese characters are completely independent on how the concepts/words are pronounced. This is why you need thousands of different characters to describe just as many different concepts. Think about egyptian hieroglyphs and why modern day people can still work out their rough meanings without any idea of how ancient egyptian language is pronounced.
Simplified chinese is not a new language system. It is a simplification of traditional chinese characters. Only complex characters are simplified and alot of characters are the same in both sets of characters.
It is an one to one translation between simplified chinese and traditional chinese. If you take traditional chinese and google translate it to simplified chinese, 100% accuracy is assured and no meaning is lost because it simply do a one to one character replacement. (roughly like translating between arabic numerals and roman numerals but even closer)
The fact that simplified chinese were introduced had absolutely nothing to do with assimilation - traditional chinese already performs everything that simplified chinese can. And if assimilation is in mind then why are we allowing tibetan scripts, mongol scripts and urghur scripts (and languages) to continue to be used today?
Is it surprising that people in china speaking different languages can communicate in written chinese? No. Before end of WWII, official documents of Japan were written completely in Kangi, a near strait borrowing of chinese characters, despite the fact the japanese pronounciation were very different. A chinese commander on battlefield can straight off read captured japanese documents.
Hiragana and Katagana are alphabetical, and they were used to describe the pronounciation of Kangi characters which were themselves pictoral.
regards,
I cannot begin to think that, if you are a mod on an indian forum, what sort of perceptions about china and chinese were other people led to by you. Is it any wonder that some indians jump into this forum with some very biased views about china and chinese?
