(03-07-2026, 06:53 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But let me try one last time to clarify what seems to be a major source of your confusion.  

A character like Z or 水 on a piece of paper has physical existence, and its identification as the "Z" character or the "水" character is essentially an objective fact.  Its meaning, in contrast, does not have physical existence: it exists only in the minds of people, and can be different for each person, and change with time, context, etc.  

Thus the claim that "the meaning of a Chinese character is a word" is not just wrong, but nonsensical: because there is no such thing as "the" meaning of the character 水.  

Back in 300 BCE, that character may have meant a word to the "Divine Farmer", in his spoken language.  But, by the time of the "dictation", that language had been lost for more than a thousand years, and no one knew what that word could have been.  Not even people who spoke languages that descended from it.   

And yet 水 continued to have meaningS to this day, not only to speakers of all Sinitic languages but also to speakers of Japanese, and to scholars reading old Korean and Vietnamese books.  Maybe to some of those people the meaning of 水 is a word -- but it will be a different word to different people, and none of those words is "THE" meaning of  水.  But to other people the meaning of 水 is not a word but the concept of water; and it so happens that, for most people who know that character, it indeed means the concept of water -- either directly, or indirectly through a word that means water to them.

So what would 水 have meant to a hypothetical Cantonese-speaking Dictator in 1400?  If to him 水 meant a word, it must have been the Cantonese syllable, that, in spoken Cantonese, evokes the concept of "water"  (Today it would be seoi2, but of course it would be something else by then.)  And water is what, in that scenario, the Author would have thought of when he heard that spoken syllable.  Or years later, when he read the phonetic transcription of that syllable in his notes.

Maybe the Dictator knew also the reading of 水 in Old (1400 CE)  Mandarin, and/or in some conventional "Classical" spoken language.  But, in that case, for him the meaning of 水 would not be one of those words, but the concept of water.  

But it does not matter.  The existence of those other readings, and whether the Dictator knew them or not, would have been entirely irrelevant to the "dictation scenario" or its likelihood.  When the Dictator saw 水 on the book, he would still have said the CANTONESE syllable for water.

(27-06-2026, 03:51 AM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But he meaning of each character is exactly the same for both Mandarin and Cantonese speakers.

(26-06-2026, 04:12 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.But that is not true for the Chinese script -- because it is not phonetic!  In Chinese writing, each symbol (or pair of symbols) represents directly a concept.  Each symbol also represents a sound; but it represents a different sound for the speakers of different languages, while the concept is essentially the same for all Sinitic languages (and even, to some extent, for some non-Sinitic ones). 

(26-06-2026, 04:12 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.In the case of the Chinese script, in contrast, learning the mappings from glyphs to sounds and from glyphs to concepts requires memorizing another table with 50'000 entries or so. That learning normally takes on the order of 10 years at school.  (In theory one would have to learn only one of the two mappings, but in practice details like homophones and synonyms mean that the two tables must be learned together.)  Again, while the mapping from glyphs to sounds is different for each language, the mapping from glyphs to concepts is very much the same for all Sinitic languages.

(26-06-2026, 08:13 PM)Jorge_Stolfi wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Each Sinitic language has settled on a different mapping of hanzi to spoken words (syllables).  But the carving of the "idea space" into lexical chunks associated with the hanzi has become practically the same for all Sinitic languages.  That is what makes written Chinese an effective means of communication between speakers of different Sinitic languages; and this use is what has stabilized that "mental geography" against the natural tendency of languages to diverge over time.