On Wed, Mar 27, 2002 at 10:05:51AM +0000, Philip Newton wrote:
The original text appeared in an earlier edition of Encyclopedia
Britannica, and is available here (in big5):
L<http://www.pu.edu.tw/~chinese/Language/A01.htm>.
Is that text in wenyan? Or do people really speak like that?
It is in wenyan, but people do speak like that sometimes.
people have to be able to understand one another, so they develop ways
of disambiguating homophones (such as making up 'words' from two or more
characters which mean similar things), which could also be used in
Pinyin or whatever transliteration scheme one wanted.
This is true. The main problem with Pinyin is that it fixes you to
a certain way of speaking (Mandarin), makes people speaking Ho'lok
or Cantonese (or Japanese!) impossible to understand the text, while
they may be totally comforatble with Kanji characters.
Shi4 Shi4 Shi4 Shi4!
Try to explain this matter!
Would people really understand such a sentence if they heard it spoken
to them and didn't see the characters used to write it?
Without context, then probably not. Chinese (and languages in general) is
all about context, though.
/Autrijus/
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