On Apr 22, 2005, at 12:49 PM, Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
>
> Considering that in Japanese, afaik, legal texts were, and may
> still be
> written in katakana, apparently to minimize differences of
> interpretation,
> what do the Chinese do to avoid risks of differing interpretation? 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.
>

The problem is more significant in Japanese than Chinese since kanji
are used both for Chinese loan-words and native Japanese words. By
and large, there's only one reasonable parsing of a Chinese
sentence. I'd have to think long and hard to come up with a series
of hanzi which form a plausible sentence of modern written Chinese
but has more than meaning. Chinese, I'd say, is really no worse than
English in that regard.

========
John H. Jenkins
jenkins@...
jhjenkins@...
http://homepage.mac.com/jhjenkins/