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Can Chinese Characters be used to express English words/sentences? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago by OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml to c/chat@hexbear.net

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My understanding is limited because my knowledge of Mandarin is limited but it seems like a lot of the characters have translingual meanings that can be recognized and interpreted by speakers of other languages that also use Chinese characters. If this is indeed the case, is there any reason English sentences and texts couldn't simply be written in these characters to be read by speakers of English and other languages who read them since English doesn't already have logograms anyway (besides numbers) and there's a void that could be filled? Like the sentence structures might be strange to a Mandarin speaker but possibly still interpretable.

I swear I'm not high [right now].

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[–] buckykat@hexbear.net 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

If you're learning enough Chinese characters to understand English written with them why not just learn Chinese?

[–] OprahsedCreature@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago

I admit, when I made this post I was kind of in a hyper-focused trance 😂

It's just an interesting idea, with logograms you can express so much in a very small space, even given the added complexity they add to a language. It's almost a little frustrating that English doesn't really have them natively, save for numbers.