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1. Weaf :jv::nv: (weaf@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Aug-2024 13:23:57 JST Weaf :jv::nv:

   • Giar Naga Thar
   Unironically the limitations of Hanzi caused the Chinese to fall behind nations that used proper alphabets
   
   RT: https://poa.st/objects/76f24ac0-c70d-408f-a5ec-df12aef7b798
   • Weaf :jv::nv: (weaf@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Aug-2024 13:54:18 JST Weaf :jv::nv:

     in reply to

     • Giar Naga Thar
     @Dicer It was simply too complex for people to become vastly literate and so information expressed via alphabet languages could be processed much faster.
   • Giar Naga Thar (dicer@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Aug-2024 13:54:19 JST Giar Naga Thar

     in reply to
     @weaf What are they, I don't really know how all the Hanzi and Kanji and all the very intricate symbols used by East-Asian countries came to be and what it meant that they had such a vast and complex system of writing.
   • Giga Vril Breaker (giga_vril_breaker@poa.st)'s status on Tuesday, 06-Aug-2024 22:52:48 JST Giga Vril Breaker

     in reply to

     • Giar Naga Thar
     @Dicer @weaf They started off as hieroglyphs, essentially, hewn into animal shells. They became steadily more abstract and simplified over time, to save time and make things easier. 母 this is mother, for example. Originally, the character was a rough picture of two full breasts :booba_left:. Another example is 大, meaning big- originally a picture of a large man extending the full span of his arms. Some began to be combined, sometimes because of meaning, sometimes because the word associated with a character had a very similar pronunciation to another word.
     Thanks to that, if you know a chinese character, you might not necessarily know how to read it, but you'll probably be able to make a rough guess of its meaning. In alphabet languages, you might be able to pronounce the word (good luck with French tho lol), but unless you've studied latin/greek, you probably won't have a clue what a new word means.
     Weaf :jv::nv: likes this.