this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
22 points (89.3% liked)

Asklemmy

54902 readers
440 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
 

For example: 漢字 from both 日本語 (JP) and 中文 (ZH) are derivative from semantic concepts based on what they saw around them (when both languages were first created), kind of like this:

There's more examples of it I can come up with such as the following:

Also, both languages allow this writing orientation (R-L vertical):

I mean, they even have words that are "swapable" (mainly how characters are positioned but retain the same definition) as shown:

The thing is, both languages are logographic which allows for this form of conceptualization regarding vocabulary based on "shape":

That is in contrast with languages that use alphabets (as those are based on sound) while 日本語 (JP) and 中文 (ZH) are "pictorial" if that makes sense, meaning each character conveys a word or concept rather than a single letter that has no inherent definition.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] LeapSecond@lemmy.zip 14 points 2 weeks ago

There's at least one example: | || || |_

If you mean with their current alphabets not really. If you mean making a new writing system why not? You'll still have trouble representing non-physical concepts but Chinese/Japanese can't represent everything accurately either.