>>> Or are you saying that the set of kanji used in Japanese, hanzi used
>>> in
>>> Chinese, and hanja used in Korean are not interchangeable?
>>
>> They're simply not the same. They share a perhaps sizable core group of
>> characters, but they don't look alike and they don't sound the same.
>>
> From: John Jenkins
>
> Well, sound is irrelevant here, since the Chinese pronunciations can
> vary between dialects about as much as they do from the Sino-korean and
> Sino-japanaese pronunciations. For the vast majority of the entities
> in actual use, the visual appearance is identical, the pronunciations
> are related, and the range of meanings are very similar or identical.
> There are some which are, in actual practice, used only in Japanese, or
> Korean; but, then again, there are an awful lot which are used only for
> Cantonese and never for Mandarin (and rather fewer the other way). The
> use of these characters within China and the various Chinese dialects
> is analogous to their use in Japanese and Korean *except* that in
> Japanese and Korean there are non-Chinese characters which are also
> used as part of the writing system.

Do you know for sure that there are characters that are used in Cantonese
and not in Mandarin? Since there are both spoken dialect of the Chinese
language of mainland China I really find that hard to believe. Unless you
consider Simplified characters to be different then there original complex
forms. Then you could say that Mandarin is spoken in Taiwan where they use
the original character and Cantonese is spoken on the mainland where the
Simplified forms have be standardized, this would make sense. But the way
you stated it above sounds like saying that there are letter in the English
alphabet that are use in the Cockney dialect that are not used in the hills
of Arkansas.
We were talking about the written forms of JKC?????

Scott

--
ki kara saru mo ochiru.
(even monkeys fall from trees)

http://www.awes.com/hp/kuma