Originally Posted by
chasm54
It's all fascinating stuff, this, and just goes to show what a brilliant idea the first Qin Emperor had when he insisted on standardizing the script. 50-odd languages whose speakers all (if they're educated) share a written language. Amazing, really, and impossible in an alphabetic system.
hard part is surprisingly the pinyin romanization.
(forget for now there are multiple pinyin systems, most discarded)
there are about 90,000 chinese characters. (5000 or so commonly used)
but there are only about 400 pinyin words. (shi, ting, tong, cheng, song, etc....)
so there are hundreds if not thousands of possible characters for each pinyin word.
oh, the hard part? chinese don't use spacing between characters, and many don't
use spacingbetweenthepinyinwordssohowthehelldoyouknowwhenonepiny
inendsandotherbeginsbecasueitsallbasedoncontext...........
i thought thai would be easier! heck, only 44 letters! but 30 of them are consonants
and 20 of them sound like "K". oh, the vowels? yeah, they got 'em, but can be
written before or after the consonant, or above, or below. it's like playing 3D chess with
both sides only having pawns and both sides the same kkkkkokkkkookkkklllloooorlllkkkkk.