From: Richard Wordingham (richard.wordingham@ntlworld.com)
Date: Tue Jan 23 2007 - 14:11:25 CST
Michael Maxwell wrote on Tuesday, January 23, 2007 2:03 PM
Subject: RE: Regulating PUA.
> vunzndi@vfemail.net wrote:
>> China has over 200 languages -- if each language uses 5000
>> unique characters total 1 000 000 ( one million!)
> And the other languages of China--Tibeto-Burman, Hmong, etc. used either
> alphabetic scripts or the standard Chinese scripts.
When they are working within the Chinese script, they are perfectly capable
of inventing their own characters to create local extensions of the system.
There are also a *few* systems which appear to be imitations of CJK, but the
living ones are not standardised. For example, the Yi scripts are diverse
and the Yi *syllabary*, which has been encoded, is a phonetic simplification
of the system of one dialect (or language, depending how you count).
That said, 200 times 5000 is an over-estimate.
Richard.
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