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If you had to choose a new lingua franca, what language would you pick? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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[โ€“] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

I've been enjoying studying Mandarin. The tones are a bit weird but the grammar seems surprisingly simple, everything can be written pretty universally in pinyin, and Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.

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  • [โ€“] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Hanzi characters are great for condensing information.

    True, I will ask this: Why does it have 2 variants? Traditional? Modern?

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  • [โ€“] 5 points 1 year ago

    Because languages change over time and every once in a while someone comes along who insists they can "fix" the language by making a bunch of changes. They are probably right and the changes, if widely adopted, will probably make the language more sensible. However, since one of the common features of a living language is that it changes over time due to usage, oddities will start creeping back in. And the whole thing will need to start all over again.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Fucked if I know ๐Ÿ˜‚ I'm studying it on my own from textbooks and online resources, not in a classroom setting taught by scholars much much smarter than me. I assume the reduced complexity of simplified characters makes it more accessible though, which is why I understand the PRC makes Pinyin required on road signs as well.

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  • [โ€“] 4 points 1 year ago

    The ultimate goal was to transition Mandarin to Roman letters (which had happened naturally in Vietnam, so there was precedent).ao's party realised that going straight from Chinese characters to Roman letters would be too abrupt, so took a first step of swapping out complex characters for characters that look simpler but are easier to write. This was surprisingly well-received, and became standard in mainland China (but Taiwan did not adopt the new system on the entirely reasonable grounds of fuck the CCP). The CCP intended to do a second round of simplification, but the people balked at this on the grounds that it made the written language to difficult to read, and so they stopped at the current set.

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