--- "John H. Jenkins" <jenkins@...> wrote:

>
> 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
> loanwords 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.

Try doing a Google search for the English sentence
"time flies like an arrow" for an idea of how much
more ambiguous English is than we assume.

Andrew Dunbar.

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

http://en.wiktionary.org -- http://linguaphile.sf.net/cgi-bin/translator.pl

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