I want to understand better the split between logographic and phonemic writing systems. As far as i know logographicnlanguages in the modern world are all asian and of a similar character. So id imagine they all have the same roots.

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@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.

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@robryk i expect a lot of cross over fornsure. I suspect there was a si gle root of logographic languages that split and remained intertwined despite the splits.

@freemo

My vague recollection is that there was oneish root of ideograms, but the languages evolved before writing in an unrelated way. I don't know how much adoption of writing affected the languages.

@robryk @freemo Indeed, the Japanese imported their writing system from the Chinese although the languages are not related. Also the phonetic symbols (Hiragana and Katakana) are said to be simplified Kanji. The Koreans used the Chinese symbols as well but also simplified them.

@digastricus @robryk

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.

@freemo @digastricus

Huh? Isn't that the case with all languages that use Latin alphabet but aren't romance?

@robryk

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.

@digastricus

@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.

@freemo @digastricus

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.

@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 @freemo It is interesting to note that the common ground in China is their writing system. There are different dialects and different languages across China, but as long as you can read Chinese you can communicate (sadly, I cannot)

@robryk @freemo As I understand the matter, I would agree. The Phoenician seem to have developed this abstraction of letters representing phonemes instead of things. A lot of writing systems in the world stem from the phoenician alphabet, including greek, hebrew, latin etc.

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