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Chinese/Japanese characters do seem to be turtles all the way down. To use some examples from another comment in this thread of how those characters decompose l

by vorg 12y ago

Chinese/Japanese characters do seem to be turtles all the way down. To use some examples from another comment in this thread of how those characters decompose like speech does to phonemes and signing does to individual component movements... 他 = 亻+ 也說 = 言 + 兌普 = 丷 + 亚 + 日通 = 之 + ( 龴 + 用 ) 話 = 言 + ( 千 + 口 ) 嗎 = 口 + 馬佢 = 亻+ 巨唔 = 口 + ( 五 + 口 ) 廣 = 广 + 黄東 = 木 + 日

tokenadult 12y ago
The books cited in my earlier reply, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353518 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8353518 by authors who know quite a lot about Japanese, dispute this claim. Most Chinese characters used in Japanese are borrowed written forms used for the loanwords in Sino-Japanese vocabulary.