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German Reform?
According to a theorie on the formation of the question mark, it originated form the latin word ''quaestio'' written behind an interrogative sentence to denote a question. This got abbriviated to Qo, then to Q above o, from which the final form ''?'' developed.
(Compare with the way the ''selbst''-Kürzel was created in DEK.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragezeichen
This would be quite similar to the formation of the ß from two other letters. So, if you dislike the ß because of that, you also must dislike the question mark!
<<So, if you dislike the ß because of that, you also must dislike the question mark! >>
and the w
and the å
the æ
the œ
the ñ
asf. (--"and so further")
<< <<So, if you dislike the ß because of that, you also must dislike the question mark! >>
and the w
and the å
the æ
the œ
the ñ >>
Yes, but it is unusual to replace w with vv, å with aa, ñ with nn, etc.
In German, you always have the option of replacing ß with an ss. In fact in Switzerland you always write ss instead of ß.
<<Yes, but it is unusual to replace w with vv, å with aa, ñ with nn, etc.>>
You would not replace w with vv, because today, w does mean something different than vv. (In German, there may be compounds with vv at the juntion of the two words.) We don't live in the past anymore.
As far as I once have read, there's some issue about the å with aa thingie out there. About the ñ with nn thingie, there is some issue too, but this is far away for me, so that I never was really interested in it. Maybe someone here on the board can tell us more?
<<In German, you always have the option of replacing ß with an ss. In fact in Switzerland you always write ss instead of ß. >>
Double s, ae, oe, ue are considered as surrogates for ß, ä, ö, ü if the typewriter lacks such letters. Today, most of the people won't use typewriters any more, but computers. Todays computers and text processing systems (and text preparation systems like TeX or LaTex), provide lots of even very rarely used characters form all about the world, even minority languages, you needn't use inconvenient surragates. (LaTeX, e.g. is for free! BTW, TeX and therefor LaTeX, too, also uses a similar method of creating diacritic letters form ordinary letters and diacritics to the method of ''melting'' two characters together.) You must be very old-fashioned and masochistic if you still use a typewriter. (If you ever used a typewriter, you will know what I mean.) Would you want to annoy your reader with unusual word shapes? Your text would probably not get read at all. Would you like to have much effort for being ignored? Would you use unconvenient surrogates if you can have the convenient real thingy?
In life, you always have the option to do what you like. But this can have consequences you probably don't like, alas.
<<In fact in Switzerland you always write ss instead of ß. >>
According to a posting somewhere in www.sprachforschung.org, even in Switzerland pupils were told the usage of ß if they liked. And even swiss book societes published in classical orthography, too.
Double s, ae, oe, ue are considered as surrogates for ß, ä, ö, ü respectively, if the typewriter lacks such letters.
Correction: even from minority languages
<< In life, you always have the option to do what you like. But this can have consequences you probably don't like, alas. >>
When writing German, I often replace ß with ss, and nobody has had any problem with that.
In Switzerland ss instead of ß is even the norm.
You can whine about ß being used less, but most German speakers have no problem with that whatsoever.
@Xie: Nice to see you here.
We have talked about building up new letters form existing ones. Can you tell us about the way chinese characters are build up form others?
Really, by blending old elements. The Hong Kong kids have succeeded in creating quite a few for other Chinese to learn. I think you can find them by a few searches in wikipedia... that's too difficult to tell when u don't know the language.
There had been several attempts by emperors/kings to create new characters to represent their countries, and as the characters were expanding in number, the main driving force had been the need to express new meanings.
As I learned from an article as part of my exam syllabus, it's been said that over 90% of the characters are blended by meaningful components (radicals, or other elements) and sound elements. The Chinese used to recognize only a few metals and no more than a few kinds of chemical elements that are liquids/gases. But then, in the last century, when the Japanese began importing words like Sauerstoff, so that they had something called "sour air" in their language to represent oxygen... the Chinese chemists, too, created hundreds of separate characters to represent each element discovered so far.
So, for gases, they use 气 (air: 氣/气); for metals, they use 釒(金 means gold; gold was as famous as aurum since ancient times, so no new things needed); for liquids, they use 水 (as ever).
That's the general picture.
Thanks, Xie, for that information. It seems to be quite natural to blend or mix characters to create new ones.
Does a chinese character always need a sound element? Is the sound element equal to the radical?
I once saw a film (I don't remember if it was a documentary film or a play), where some kind of chinese stenography was mentioned and shown. I didn' t see that film as a whole, and the sceene mentioned was very short. Have you ever been interested in stenography? Can you tell us something about chinese stenography? What are it's principles?
That article was a summary by a linguist about the development of the characters. He said that, in the contemporary era (last century), the number of characters tended to be stable. I don't have to "refer" to that particular sentence, but it's natural for things to stay stable that way... just like English spelling. And, in particular, he claimed that over 90% of the characters are the kind that have sound elements.
The rest would be highly pictorial ones (日月男女手心, etc), and "instructional" ones (to point to particular directions, like 上下), among others. Many of those are very old and the meanings are almost universal since their birth. So, those would be some of the earliest NCWs, native Chinese "words". But then, as you'd understand, when people had to express more meanings, they couldn't rely on just a few dozens of them, and at first they borrowed some to refer to extended meanings. In older writings, there were more instances that they used nouns as (transitive) verbs, which would sound rather strange now to native readers.
By around the early Han Dynasty, there were a few thousands of characters, and then that figure expanded considerably, ending up to over 40000 in around late 17th century. People often say you only need 3000 characters to read a newspaper now, but it's a scam. 3000 are probably enough to read everything in Japanese, but probably not in another. A huge proportion of this figure IS exactly those blended ones. For metals, you have "gold" ones; for fish, you have "fish" ones, for women, birth, menstruation, girls, you have "female" ones; for animals, you have "cattle" ones... more obscure items are often represented by sounds, and this also applies to some animals discovered very early. 獅子 (lions) were discovered somewhere on the Silk road, so while lions might not be native to "China", people already gave its name by blending the "claw" with "teacher 師" to represent that animal whose name should be something that might have sounded like 師.
Wow, I have no idea. I can't read what waiters write in those dirty chachanting's in the streets near my home (and in Mongkok, too; but very good bargains btw...). They have their own ways of shorthand. They might simply write a "0" (zero; ling4) to represent 檸 (lemon, ling4, or, colloquially, ling2) when I want to have lemon tea. They write poetry on their menus, and particularly in higher-class restaurants, but they never write clearly on the bills.
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