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Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations. For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized
by elgenie 8y ago
Chinese characters are hieroglyphs: they don’t have any relationship to their pronunciations.
For example, 火, the character for fire, is a (slightly) stylized brushstroke picture of a fire.
Mutually unintelligible communications that use the same pictures are distinct languages, but there are political implications to acknowledging this, so they’re “dialects”. As the saying goes, a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
- barry-cotter 8y agoLess than 500, probably less than 200 characters are like that. Most are composed of a sound component and a meaning component, except there has been over a thousand years for sound shifts to render the sound component misleading. If you want to learn more the Wikipedia article is a great place to start. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_characters