Mukhrani
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jul 24, 2021
The ultimately Chinese pictoral characters are difficult to learn, but they also had a huge bonus. China is not a linguistic monolith. Many dialects are mutually unintelligible when spoken, and have shifted radically over the years. But anyone who speaks any of these mutually unintelligible languages and is trained in historical characters can read literary Chinese and get the same meaning out of it, because the orthography is divorced from pronunciation, being entirely meaning-based, with each character having multiple pronunciations in many different dialects. Part of why many Asian countries adopted them was the same reason that we preserved Latin in the West: to preserve and crystallize religious texts (primarily Buddhist) through the gradual permutations of language. The way the language is taught and structured, the spoken dialects could continue to evolve and diverge, while everyone could still read and understand the same corpus of civilizationally important works without having to maintain a second dead spoken language like Latin. Meanwhile, in Europe you had phonetic alphabets and the written word followed the evolution of the vernacular, and you ended up with dozens of spoken and written languages and more of a fragmentation once the grip of the Church was broken and Latin gradually fell to the wayside. This did make it way easier for Europe to adopt and develop mechanized print though, a funny accident of history.
