Re:Studying the demise of historic civilisations
by magduf on Tuesday March 05, 2019 @01:07PM
(#19312624)
>For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese
Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.
Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.