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Can Chinese Characters be used to express English words/sentences? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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My understanding is limited because my knowledge of Mandarin is limited but it seems like a lot of the characters have translingual meanings that can be recognized and interpreted by speakers of other languages that also use Chinese characters. If this is indeed the case, is there any reason English sentences and texts couldn't simply be written in these characters to be read by speakers of English and other languages who read them since English doesn't already have logograms anyway (besides numbers) and there's a void that could be filled? Like the sentence structures might be strange to a Mandarin speaker but possibly still interpretable.

I swear I'm not high [right now].

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This essay demonstrates that the languages that use Chinese characters have a way to form words in common with each other that doesn't work very well when transposed to English. It does this by exploring the very idea of using the Chinese writing system to express English sentences.

It takes the analogy to the point that it breaks, and continues as satire.

http://www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Writing scripts have a tendency to shape the languages that are used by them, this is even true for the spoken language in low literacy societies in past. Even if English could not be written well enough with Chinese script now if it was used for a while it would be influenced by it as more of its rules would diffuse to the language and conventions or new meanings would develop. If anything the fact that there are similar features in languages as different as Chinese and Japanese or Arabic and Persian is all the proof one needs one could see this happen in just a few generations in English and Chinese which are similar in many ways despite the different language families.