Comment on People around the world are trying to learn English because it's the Lingua Franca, but imagine if the Lingua Franca of the world was a Tonal Language and the writing system was Logographic.

Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• FridaySteve@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  what are the pussy two specific things?

  My question exactly.

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  • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Wow, that’s not the word I wanted right there.

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    • SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The brain and the heart don’t always want the same things. At least not at the same time.

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      • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        Indeed, you are as wise as you are seductive. An Scolar among testudinidae.

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    • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Rofl 🤣

      This is why I don’t use autocorrect

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• DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Tonal is like:

  詩 史 試 時 市 是

  All use the same Jyutping: si

  but from left to right is tones 1 2 3 4 5 6

  And the thing is, I’m a native Cantonese speaker and I’m having trouble differentiating between tones 2 and 5 because its so similar… I always thought it was pronounced the same, but apparantly its supposed ti be slightly different, but my parents never corrected me so 🤷‍♂️

  People can understand so that’s all it matters I guess…

  Here’s a video example: www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38H_ySiTd4

  @NorthWestWind@lemmy.world can you even tell the difference between tone 2 and tone 5? Cuz its almost the same to me. Like I always heard my parent say 歷史 and 超市 with the same “si”

  And Logographic is just Chinese characters and idk any other Logographic ones… Hieroglyphs?

  Basically the writing is separate from sounds. You can’t just sound out your word and spell it approximately, I can speak Cantonese and Mandarin, but I can’t “spell out” the characters, because its basically like a picture. I know what a cat looks like, for example, but I can’t draw a cat myself (since I haven’t written with pen and paper for like 15 years).

  I can type it tho by the sound, and I can recognize the characters, just not use pen and paper to recall how to write it.

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  • adavis@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Basically the writing is separate from sounds.

    And that’s how people who speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Chinese can communicate through writing. The word (sound) may be different, but the written character is the same.

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  • NorthWestWind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The tone 2 and 5 difference is subtle. 5 goes not as high as 2. Most of the time people pronounce them lazily but I can figure it out from the context.

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  • trolololol@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Every language has words that are almost the same sounds but not quite.

    English speakers barely pronounce can and can’t differently. If you’re in a noisy place, or are not familiar with the accent of the speaker or got a flu and your ears are blocked or whatever else, you’ll have an extra bad time telling them apart. That’s normal. Just extra annoying that this particular example involves a particular meaning and the opposite of it, so context is not your friend.

    HEY MATE, CAN YOU PLEASE COME TO THE PARTY?

    I CA’!±:-

    OH COOL

    I SAID I CA;(++;:-

    OH SO YOU CAN’T? YEAH?

    YEAH! THAT’S WHAT I SAID.

    WELL YOUR LOSS

    I SAID I WILL COME, DUDE

    OH SHOOT. OK. SEE YOU THERE.

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    • DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Use Affirmative and Negative like a bunch of soldiers lolz

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• Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  What?

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  • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Sorry, fixed it lol

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    • Wizard_Pope@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I believe logograpjic means you write down sylables and not just sounds. And tonal means the tone of you saying aomething changes the meaning. Chinese is tonal afaik.

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• bitofarambler@crazypeople.online ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Tonal, using different tones to differentiate meaning:

  The car. The car?

  You intonate the a differently to denote different meaning.

  Logographic - picture-based writing.

  OP is asking what if a Chinese language became the global standard rather than English.

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