3/11    Is Italian the closest language to Latin than other Romantic language?
        Isn't it weird that the once great empire has no spoken/written
        language today, but that other old languages from the old empires
        (Greek, Chinese, etc) still survive?
                \- helo you may wish to see ~psb/MOTD/LatinRomeGreece
        \_ Roman empire was a lot more multicultural than those other two...
           The various states spoke their native languages with Latin as
           a government/trade language.  Also, "Chinese" is not one language.
           Note that Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese were all once
           written with Chinese characters!
           \_ why isn't chinese one language?  the spoken form is different
              region to region, by written is essentially the same.
              \_Chinese is one language. It just has many dialects. Also note
                that Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese are essentially dialects
                from Chinese if you express them in Chinese text. In a sense,
                all Romance languages are merely dialects of latin. It's just
                that unlike Chinese there was no unification and the written
                text became fragmented. English itself has various dialects,
                but because of faster travel, radio, and television the dialects
                have tended to remain understandable instead of morphing into
                something very different. However, I have trouble sometimes
                with Punjabees speaking their version of English.
                \_ The Roman alphabet is phonetic.  If written
                   Chinese was phonetic, then there might be more of an
                   argument that the difference Chinese dialects were distinct
                   languages.  Likewise, if the differences in speaking the
                   different Romance languages were not reflected in the
                   written language, it might be easier to argue that they are
                   dialects of Latin rather than distinct lanugages.
                   \_ Modern written Vietnamese is phonetic. There is a
                      way of writing Vietnamese that uses Chinese characters,
                      but this is considered archaic now.
        \_ Italian is closer to latin than Old Greek is to Modern Greek.
        \_ 1.  Latin survives/freezes in some quarters (RCC).  2.  Romanian is
           quite close to Latin.  3.  Living languages evolve: modern chinese
           is quite different from ancient Chinese.  (I speak and write the
           former but have a (very) limited capability for the latter.)  Greeks
           told me similar things about their language.  Hebrew is today like
           what it was many years ago because it had been dead in between.
           4.  By western liguist's definition, different Chinese dialects
           can be considered as different languages (with some slightly
           different but overall similar grammar rules).  Some Chinese consider
           spanish, french, and italian as different dialects of the same
           language used to be known as latin.  5.  There is a distinction
           between the spoken language (the tongue) and its representation
           in terms of writing.  6.  Japanese and Korean are NOT dialects
           of Chinese.  They are probably in a totaly different linguistic
           family although the details are not yet understood.They borrowed
           Chinese character and many chinese words (along with their old
           pronunciation) when they decided they should have a system of
           writing their language - they developed writing much later.
           However, the 2 koreas banned the use of Chinese characters in late
           last century when they go nationalistic.  7.  I don't know whether
           \_ I'm not sure what you mean here.  While true that, in the
              north Chinese characters are more or less banned, and they
              are trying to get away from using Chinese based words, this
              is not at all true in the south.  You can see pleanty of
              Chinese characters in the south, and most people's names
              are written in Chinese.  60% of the vocabulary is chinese
              based.  Chinese has not be "banned."  Now it HAS falled out
              of use, because chinese characters are a terrible way to
              write Korean.  Korean is not a chinese language.  The
              grammar is not chinese, and 40% of the words are pure
              Korean, and can't be reliably WRITTEN in chinese.  Korean
              and Japanese are Altaic languages with a butt-load of
              borrowed chinese vocabulary.
              \_ I have been told by a american professor specialising in the
                 2 koreas that Chinese characters have been banned from use
                 in literature and koreans can no longer read their own classic
                 literature directly (i.e. w/o translation) because they were
                 all written in Chinese (as Principia was written in Latin).
                 I knew (and wrote) that Korean language is completely
                 different from Chinese.  However, that it and Japanese
                 are really from the Altaic group is not firmly extablished
                 (as say Sanskrit and Latin came from the same family).
                 Plus the japanese always claim they have nothing to do with
                 korean, although I never believed that.
           Vietnamese is in the same linguistic family as Chinese but their
           current writing system was developed by the french.  8.  The eastern
           roman empire used greek.  9.  The roman empire was not "more"
           multicultural than the other empires of similar size.