Language

Turkish is one of the rich and one of the hard one to learn…

I am quite ridiculously enamored with everything having to do with language. I have been reading “The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way” voraciously for the past few days, and I just randomly found it at a library sale I was volunteering at. =/

What is simplified chinese?

How do you think language came about, did a group of people just get together and start it or did it just come around like people recognized certain sounds reffered to certain bjects???  hhhmmm gets you thinking

Chinese characters are categorized as traditional and simplified.

I have no idea. I just thought languages are pretty cool.

Actually, I'm not even trying to think right now... 

The traditional Chinese characters stretch back into antiquity. I've read parts of inscriptions in the National Palace Museum in Taipei (Taiwan, not mainland China) that were three thousand years old. After the mainland Communist takeover in 1949 there was a concerted effort to simplify the writing system, reducing the number of necessary brush/pen strokes for some of the more complicated ones (it takes 19 strokes to write dragon. I know it's not a common word in western conversation; it occurs more in Chinese than you might think). After an enthusiastic start, this programme lost momentum... and in more recent years, I think they noticed problems with using the simplified characters in conjunction with computers. Also, the use of Chinese characters in Japanese (often altered in different ways) and the continued use of traditional Chinese writing outside the People's Republic meant that their revolutionary fervour cooled and gave way to a more pragmatic approach.

Personally, I dislike the simplified versions. They come across like txt msgs.

Well, they had to concoct a new system at the advent of the personal computer, didn’t they?

Until I heard how they really did it (with a phonetic system), I always envisioned Chinese computers as having room-sized keyboards with every single character on it…

I have a vague grasp of that, but my links to Asia dwindled just as personal computers and the internet were taking off.

It is often said that there are 50 000 or so Chinese characters, but you only need a fraction of that for basic literacy; and a lot of those 50 000 are like the extremely obscure English words that you only find in the largest dictionaries. Like hephthemimer, for example.

wow, I didn't know about the whole controversy between traditional and simplified.

I wonder what chinese keyboards look like? (random but the thought jumped into my head when I was reading the conversation)

wow, I would be soo confused, I guess its second nature to them but still. Are all keyboards like that, I mean with regular english letters and then a different countries language underneath the english letters?

The standard design is, I gather, QWERTYUIOP (Read the letters across the top of your keyboard). It would be commercially suicidal to promote anything else.

Your instinct, db, is sure; it is of course second nature to someone not... erm, English-based to think in their own language.

I have limited experience of this - see earlier entries!

There are different ways to type Chinese. Basically there's a standard phonetic system while in Taiwan they use symbols, and English letters for the mainland China. Here's a chart of the symbols and English letters. And by the way, they're not pronounced as the English letters. ;p There are still other ways to type Chinese, and I have no idea how to use them. I only know that one of the systems uses the radicals (traditionally recognized components of Chinese characters).

I'd have thought that you're Asian, Finrod. And for a while I thought you've actually been to Taiwan and the National Palace Museum. Here's the word "dragon," and it's not said to be a hard word for the Chinese. I thought a few common words like "marrow" and "fog" were pretty hard...

No offense, but I detest simplified Chinese. 

I know you're not Asian, and I know what you said was true ;) And about the dragon…well, I guess some people would think it's hard.

Accusing? I have no idea why you would think that. 

I've been to Taipei; that's it!

Accusing? I've just read what you posted.

O wow! I never knew you actually went there...I wouldn't think it's somewhere many people would want to visit.

And I'm really not accusing you anything...I can delete it if you think it offensive.

So give up now whilst you're ahead.

I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to men and German to my Horse – Charles V, king of France.

we must break the language barriers!! >:o

-LockeHeart 

i love my language,,,,,it's the great,,,,,

hahahaha,,,,,,

hidup bhasa melayu,,,,,, 

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