I have a challenge, can you distinguish which character set/s belongs to Japanese & Mandarin?
There are of course differences between Kanji / Hanzi but the “difficult” part is knowing which language is which simply by glancing (unless you know either 日本語 or 中文 that is).
In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?
On these charts, no idea.
In real texts, it’s not that hard because Japanese text usually has kana in it. I can’t read kana, but I can recognize some of them as being kana, even if I don’t know what syllables they represent.
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CN/JP aren’t alphabets.(excepting hiragana and katakana) they’re a logographic language, much like the Egyptian Hieroglyphs.
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JP’s kanji stole something like 95% of its characters from CN. the only real way to tell at a glance if a sentence is JP or CN is by looking for hiragana or katakana in the sentence, as JP usually has a few of them per sentence, while CN does not.
hope this helps your linguistic endeavours! :)
The kana aren’t alphabets either. They’re syllabaries. The closest they get to alphabetic are the characters that represent the single vowel sounds, A, I, O, E, U… aaand N for some reason, but those are very restricted in how and where they’re allowed to be used.
huh, the more you know.
I’ve always called them alphabets because of their phentic similarity to abcde/etc as each character represents one sound.
Alphabets are finer grained. Every alphabetic letter is either a consonant or vowel. Sometimes a letter can be one or the other depending on the specific language and context, but nonetheless, consonant or vowel.
Syllabaries pack two or more of these into a single character. Most of the kana are consonant-vowel pairings, with the exception of the six I mentioned previously, and as a result you can end up with a lot more symbols than a pure alphabet would need.
You can also go the other way into abjads, which generally only write consonants. Vowels take the form of optional marks on those consonants. Hebrew and Arabic are the best known examples of these. And you’d be less inaccurate to call those alphabets to be fair.
But Egyptian Hieroglyphs aren’t a logographic system. They have logographic elements as well as alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic.
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As someone who cannot read either language, I normally go by the rule of thumb that if it has a lot of curves it is probably Japanese, otherwise I assume it is Chinese. If we can throw Korean into the mix then I just need to see one circle and that’s how I determine if it is or not. It’s not a perfect system, but I would surmise that I can guess the language well above half of the time.
Also aren’t the characters for Chinese shared across all spoken versions, if so, why did you specify Mandarin instead of just saying Chinese?
I wanna say 1 is japanese and 2 is chinese, based purely on which seems more complex and swishy.
In contrast, do you know any words that are near identical when written down between two “alphabetical” languages based on their spelling?
Yes.
Idiot (English) Idiot (m) Idiote (f, French) Idiot (m) Idiotin (f, German)
Yes, also a lot of words ending in -tion exist in German, English, and French (though in German they are capitalized because they are nouns). For example “information” or “nation”.
If near identical counts too, it’s even easier because most of these same words exist in Italian with the ending -zione, Spanish with -ción, etc.
