Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>Considering that in Japanese, afaik, legal texts were, and may still be
>written in katakana, apparently to minimize differences of interpretation,
>
>

I am no expert in Japanese legal text rendering, but I can tell you that
writing in katakana is more difficult to interpret them mixed
kanji/kana. And the Japanese language is not meant to be precise by
design and common usage.

My limited reading of the history of the evolution of post-war legal ad
gov't systems in Japan, compared to what the US Occupation intended
always address the issue that legal documents, written with American
style precision, and practical interpretation decades later are 2
different things.

Katakana is generally used to render foreign terms into Japanese.

Nobody in their right mind would want to read a whole document in
katakana - it is maddening. Hiragana only is used by children before
they learn kanji. Once you learn kanji, you won't want to read in kana only.

It may be that digital copies of documents were rendered once in
katakana because there exist 7 bit katakana-only encodings. Of course
that is no longer necessary, but there may be legacy documents. Is that
maybe what you are referring to?

>what do the Chinese do to avoid risks of differing interpretation?
>

Not sure Chinese encourage precise interpretation of legal documents
either ;)

>My
>quite-limited study of hanzi (actually, kanji, via an earlier edition of
>the Nelson dictionary) leads me to think that hanzi at least sometimes are
>more suggestive of specific concepts than absolutely definitive -- they
>(clearly) imply, rather than explicitly define, in perhaps many instances.
>I'm quite willing to be enlightened.
>
>

I think you are touching on a deep and fundamental philosophical
difference that may be visible through writing systems. There is
probably some relationship between the evolution of precision in the
west and writing systems, and vice-versa in the east, but I don't think
you can compare the two pairs by switching them around.

>More generally stated, in any situation when exact definitions are
>required in Chinese, how are they written? (On further thought, that
>question
>really seems to be a matter of linguistics, not writing systems.) (Are
>there subsets of hanzi defined to have quite-specific meanings?)
>
>

Probably most number related terms, especially the counting ones. Maybe
some proper nouns.

>¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
>When lingua franca becomes lingua sinica, will lingua anglia still be in
>use? While doing my best not to be chauvinist, I think that's rather
>likely.
>
>

Well it is an open question (maybe for elsewhere?) as to whether the
degree of precision of "lingua anglia" is the key feature or not, or if
the widespread agreement on a language as an "interoperability standard"
is the key thing. If the latter, the world would continue to function
regardless of the language chosen, although agreed, there is more then
language that comes with such a choice and shapes the result.

Not likely English is going away anytime soon, but no fundamental reason
why that couldn't happen or won't happen eventually that I know of.

Best,

Barry