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Grex > Language > #33: Language Self-Study
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2 new of 51 responses total.
brighn
response 50 of 51: Mark Unseen   Dec 20 01:07 UTC 1994
Rane:
#1 -- Serbocroatian is indeed written in two different alphabets.  It takes
about a week of indifferent study to learn the other alphabet.  Hardly an 
onerous enough task to justify distinguishing the languages.   Remember that
English is written in two different scripts -- cursive and printing (so,
technically Serbocroatian is written in four scripts).

#2 -- No writing system is phonetic.  Surely you mean phonemic.

Marcus:
Interesting point, although I doubt that technical journals make very good
spoken English.  Snzzzzzzzzzzzz.........   :)
To put it more explicitly:  There are registers of English which can either
be written or spoken, with little change in acceptability or meaning.  There
are, of course, registers of English which cannot (or should not) be written,
and others which cannot (or should not) be read aloud (e.g., technical 
journals).
In other cultures, agreed, such overlap registers did not exist -- the written
form was not intended to be spoken, and vice versa.  (That is a bit
misleading... the concept of silent reading is, in fact, only about 500 years
old.  In Imperial Rome, written text *was* read aloud, itjust wasn't acceptable
as a  means of speech.)
mdw
response 51 of 51: Mark Unseen   Dec 20 06:42 UTC 1994
Good written chinese is a *very* strange creature; it's most definitely
not at all the same thing as writing down the ideograph *in his
dialect*.  One of the advantages of good written chinese is that it can
be read & understood by people who speak & understand a totally
different spoken form of chinese elsewhere in the country.  Another
advantage is that it has a literary tradition that goes back
considerably further than english.  The disadvantage is that learning to
write chinese is at least as hard as learning a new language, and
chinese typewriters are a truely imposing sight.
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