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Phoenician writing system was an abjad [0], an alphabet where each symbol stands for consonant, vowels being implied or if symbols exist, they are optional. Whe

Phoenician writing system was an abjad [0], an alphabet where each symbol stands for consonant, vowels being implied or if symbols exist, they are optional. Where alphabet have vowels and consonants. Modern Arab, Hebrew and semitic languages have abjad. Hieroglyph are pictograms/logographic scripts. One word for one logogram to represent one word. They mostly talk about the fact that the Phoenician may have come from illiterate worker in the Canaan mines. Unable to learn hieroglyphs, they may have invented a simplified writing system leading to the Phoenician. The main interest is that the Phoenician abjad is not a construction from savant but by illiterate workers. What do you mean by count? Various writing system exists in parallel, none really prevails on the other. Egyptians did not have an alphabet per se like Mandarin do not really have one either at least not really one that is reflected in the writing system. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

ncmncm 6y ago
Egyptian hieroglyphs are absolutely not pictograms. It was the belief that they were that prevented decrypting them for so long, until the Rosetta Stone was found. Neither are Chinese characters, BTW. Chinese is a syllabary, but with a lot of redundancy -- 1200 syllables, lots more characters -- and arbitrary, historical rules about which variant for a syllable may be used for each word. Amazingly (at least it amazes me), most Mandarin speakers think that other Chinese "dialects" are just different ways to pronounce Mandarin, where in fact they are as different from Mandarin as various European languages are from Latin. Many even think of the characters as pictograms with complicated rules about sharing with homonyms. People who know more than one Sinitic language know better.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Indeed. In general, you don’t need to know how the language sounds in order to read; pictographic scripts make this even easier in a way. I can imagine (not necessarily true) that a text in Chinese could be read as if it was in English.
- knolax 6y ago
  Another crackpot theory by a non-native speaker. Chinese is logographic. You can't simultaneously claim that different dialects are seperate languages and also claim that they were secretly writing phonetically all this time. They wouldn't be mutually intelligible even in writing. Hand-waiving away a logographic system as a "syllabry with redundancy" is exactly the type of dumb semantic game I would expect from HackerNews. I guess you think a car is just a bicycle with more wheels and an engine too.
  - ncmncm 6y ago
    They are, in fact, not mutually intelligible, either phonetically or in writing. That is what is so amazing about monolingual Mandarin speakers believing they should be.
    - banmeifyouwant 6y ago
      Did you really just call somebody replying to you in English a "monolingual mandarin speaker". There have plenty of times where I have accidentally gone on Cantonese wikipedia and didn't notice until halfway through the article. Compare the following from Cantonese Wikipedia: 粵文維基百科係維基百科協作計劃嘅粵文版，由非牟利組織──維基媒體基金會喺2006年3月25號成立。 To "mandarin" Wikipedia 粵文維基百科是維基百科協作計劃的粵文版本，於2006年3月25日成立，由非營利組織──維基媒體基金會負責營運。 1. Save for 係, 嘅, and 喺, the former is perfectly valid Mandarin. Every other difference between the two texts are phrasing differences from then being written seperately by different people. If you did s/係/是/, s/喺/於/, and s/嘅/的/ and copy pasted the Cantonese version into regular Chinese Wikipedia nobody would notice. 2. Despite the fact that not a single word in those two excerpts would be pronounced the same, you can clearly see the same characters being used even if you can't read Chinese. This can not be the case if it were a "syllabary". 3. 係, 喺, and 嘅 are written differently not because they're pronounced different(so is every other character in the above excerpt) or even because they have a different meaning(they pretty much serve the same grammatical purpose as 是, 於, and 的), but because they have different etymologies and are different morphemes. This can only be the case if the writing system is logographic. It wouldn't be the case in either a logographic or ideographic system. Mind you Cantonese Wikipedia is written exclusively by people like you who think Cantonese is a "language", and it's not some dying dialect(It's the second largest dialect and probably spoken by at least 50% of Chinese speakers who actually use Wikipedia and not some other wiki) like Scots so you can't claim that the people writing are just bad Cantonese speakers.
- sparkplug94 6y ago
  I'm not an Egyptologist, but I can read hieroglyphs and can say with surety that Egyptian hieroglyphs are both pictographic AND alphabetic. It's actually an interesting system, where an alphabet (abjad, sort of) exists, but is not usually used in isolation from pictographic writing, nor can most Egyptian words be expressed entirely pictographically. For example, "Nile" is written "i t r w picture-of-water." "Sun" can be written as either a picture of the sun (with a single stroke added, indicating it is a logogram) or as "r ' picture-of-sun." The ' is the common transliteration for the arm hieroglyph, and my understanding is that it's likely pronounced something like the Arabic ayin.

ncmncm 6y ago

Egyptian hieroglyphs are absolutely not pictograms. It was the belief that they were that prevented decrypting them for so long, until the Rosetta Stone was found. Neither are Chinese characters, BTW. Chinese is a syllabary, but with a lot of redundancy -- 1200 syllables, lots more characters -- and arbitrary, historical rules about which variant for a syllable may be used for each word. Amazingly (at least it amazes me), most Mandarin speakers think that other Chinese "dialects" are just different ways to pronounce Mandarin, where in fact they are as different from Mandarin as various European languages are from Latin. Many even think of the characters as pictograms with complicated rules about sharing with homonyms. People who know more than one Sinitic language know better.

Koshkin 6y ago
Indeed. In general, you don’t need to know how the language sounds in order to read; pictographic scripts make this even easier in a way. I can imagine (not necessarily true) that a text in Chinese could be read as if it was in English.
knolax 6y ago
Another crackpot theory by a non-native speaker. Chinese is logographic. You can't simultaneously claim that different dialects are seperate languages and also claim that they were secretly writing phonetically all this time. They wouldn't be mutually intelligible even in writing. Hand-waiving away a logographic system as a "syllabry with redundancy" is exactly the type of dumb semantic game I would expect from HackerNews. I guess you think a car is just a bicycle with more wheels and an engine too.
- ncmncm 6y ago
  They are, in fact, not mutually intelligible, either phonetically or in writing. That is what is so amazing about monolingual Mandarin speakers believing they should be.
  - banmeifyouwant 6y ago
    Did you really just call somebody replying to you in English a "monolingual mandarin speaker". There have plenty of times where I have accidentally gone on Cantonese wikipedia and didn't notice until halfway through the article. Compare the following from Cantonese Wikipedia: 粵文維基百科係維基百科協作計劃嘅粵文版，由非牟利組織──維基媒體基金會喺2006年3月25號成立。 To "mandarin" Wikipedia 粵文維基百科是維基百科協作計劃的粵文版本，於2006年3月25日成立，由非營利組織──維基媒體基金會負責營運。 1. Save for 係, 嘅, and 喺, the former is perfectly valid Mandarin. Every other difference between the two texts are phrasing differences from then being written seperately by different people. If you did s/係/是/, s/喺/於/, and s/嘅/的/ and copy pasted the Cantonese version into regular Chinese Wikipedia nobody would notice. 2. Despite the fact that not a single word in those two excerpts would be pronounced the same, you can clearly see the same characters being used even if you can't read Chinese. This can not be the case if it were a "syllabary". 3. 係, 喺, and 嘅 are written differently not because they're pronounced different(so is every other character in the above excerpt) or even because they have a different meaning(they pretty much serve the same grammatical purpose as 是, 於, and 的), but because they have different etymologies and are different morphemes. This can only be the case if the writing system is logographic. It wouldn't be the case in either a logographic or ideographic system. Mind you Cantonese Wikipedia is written exclusively by people like you who think Cantonese is a "language", and it's not some dying dialect(It's the second largest dialect and probably spoken by at least 50% of Chinese speakers who actually use Wikipedia and not some other wiki) like Scots so you can't claim that the people writing are just bad Cantonese speakers.
sparkplug94 6y ago
I'm not an Egyptologist, but I can read hieroglyphs and can say with surety that Egyptian hieroglyphs are both pictographic AND alphabetic. It's actually an interesting system, where an alphabet (abjad, sort of) exists, but is not usually used in isolation from pictographic writing, nor can most Egyptian words be expressed entirely pictographically. For example, "Nile" is written "i t r w picture-of-water." "Sun" can be written as either a picture of the sun (with a single stroke added, indicating it is a logogram) or as "r ' picture-of-sun." The ' is the common transliteration for the arm hieroglyph, and my understanding is that it's likely pronounced something like the Arabic ayin.