From: Christopher John Fynn (cfynn@gmx.net)
Date: Fri Dec 26 2003 - 12:46:11 EST
"Jungshik Shin" <jshin@mailaps.org>
> On Wed, 24 Dec 2003, Christopher John Fynn wrote:
> > BTW are the classical written languages of China & Japan more or less the
> > same thing?? I understand that the Chinese Buddhist canon is also used by
> > the Japanese without translation so I assume that there was (/is?) more
> > or less a common written language - at least for that kind of material.
> You can think of 'classical Chinese' as 'Latin/classical Greek' of
> East Asia. Up until 'recently', learned people in Japan, Korea (and
> presumably Vietnam perhaps until the 19th century) are well-versed at
> _classical_ written _Chinese_ just like learned Europeans were with
> Latin and classical Greek, which doesn't tell you anything about their
> proficiency in modern Greek. BTW, unlike classical Greek and Latin that
> are rather close to most European languages, classical Chinese is heavens
> apart from Japanese and Korean of any age. I guess Vietnamese is a lot
> closer to Chinese than J and K in most metrics.
O.K. This is also similar to literary Tibetan. Nobody speaks or ever spoke
classical Tibetan the way it is written and no literate Tibetan writes the way
they speak. There are a number of mutually exclusive dialects of spoken
Tibetan (Ethhnologue lists them as separate languages) but there is basically
only one written form - understood by literate speakers of all these different
dialects/languages (and traditionally by learned people in Mongolia, Buriyat
etc who speak entirely different languages)
> Buddhist canon may be a little different story. My understanding
> is that some of them are 'transcription' (not translation) of Sanskrit
> (or Tibetan) so that there's no point in translating.
I think most of the Buddhist canon is actually translated into classical
written Chinese - though many of the texts contain transcriptions of esoteric
Sanskrit mantras and dharani which are left un-translated. I've also been told
that some long but frequently repeated phrases in Buddhist scripture are
sometimes translated by a single ideograph in the Chinese (a kind of
shorthand).
The Tibetan Buddhist canon is also translated from Indian languages primarily
Sanskrit (and a few texts from Chinese). But many of these texts contain
transliterated or transcribed Sanskrit mantras & dharani.
===
Unicode deals with scripts used for written languages - so where there is
traditionally a common written language but different spoken languages,
unification probably makes sense - even when there are very different styles of
the same script (e.g. Chinese Hanzi and Japanese Kanji)
And of course we still have separate Hangul, Hiragana, Katakana etc blocks for
things which are beyond the scope of unification.
Latin was the common written language of Western Europe although there have
always been many different spoken languages. When these languages were
eventually written it was naturally in the Latin script people already knew.
(Though the Roman style & Fraktur style of Latin script are probably more
different from each other as some of the separately encoded Indic scripts [e.g.
Kannada / Telugu])
Where different scripts are used primarily to write different languages - it
seems to make sense not to unify, even where the scripts are very closely
related. For example each of the Indic scripts (Devanagri, Bengali, Gurmukhi,
Gujarati, Tamil, Malayalam, Telugu, Kannada) has at least one important
language that is primarily written in that script and generally not written in
any of the others - even though all these scripts share a common ancestor
(Brahmi) and Sanskrit can be written in any of them.
So in the case of the ancient Semitic scripts - even if they are closely
related, is each associated with a particular written language - or were the
different but related scripts being used to write a common language?
- Chris
regards
- Chris
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