@freemo Roots of the language and of the writing system are not necessarily the same. There were multiple instances of significant import of "characters" from ~Chinese into Japanese and I had the impression that at least some of them didn't import much past the characters themselves.
Id love to ubderstand how that developed. Importing a writing system but not a language only seems possible at all with logograms which is kinda cool.
No, letters arent a writi g system a writing system would be the meaning of the words, the grammer, everything but the sounds.
In logographic languages the same or similar symbol has entierly different spoken words attached to it but the symbol would mean the same.
In a phonographic language that cant be possible since the letters represent soubds so the spoken language is explicitly linked to the written.
Then Japan didn't really acquire the writing system from China. The grammar is iiuc very different, and at some points in history characters were imported for the pronunciation, ignoring their meaning.
Yea im clueless on the asian side of this equation sadly
@robryk @freemo The grammar is indeed very different, but they imported lots of characters for their meaning but used their own pronunciation. On the other hand, there are different readings and kanji sometimes are used for their original chinese pronunciation. It is said that the Japanese writing system is one of the most complicated ones in existence.
@robryk @digastricus
Also im not sure thisnis even accurate of the script. The latin script evolved from a common rood language (indo european). While it is true the germanic language branched off before the evolution into latin script, and lost the indo european script and was largely oral, it readopted latin which was related to its earlier common script. Id imagine this or similar is true for some of the other language families. However cyrilic never adoped latin and is also from thr indo-european root, it evolved seperately from the common root script.