are there also pronunciation differences for words that are spelled the same?
Through through tough thought, I can’t think of any.
Even though there are words in both Japanese & Mandarin that are written similarly to one another or exactly the same but keep in mind pronounciation is different, such as 警察 (けいさつ) from Japanese but in Mandarin that’s pronounced as jǐngchá. Dutch and German are still different languages but are there also pronounciation differences including words that are spelled the same?
HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 weeks ago
DokPsy@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not on the same level considering the difference in how the Eastern and Western languages are formed.
I’m generalizing a bit here into Western being Germanic or Latin based languages and Eastern being primarily Chinese.
Western languages typically use symbols that represent the component sounds of a language (phonemes) where Eastern languages use symbols for whole words or concepts (morphemes). So you would have a single symbol for house or tree instead of a series of symbols for the words.
This means that the word spelling would change in Western languages as the spoken language changes more rapidly and show a large difference between two closely related languages in their spelling for the same word.
Conversely, in Eastern languages, the spoken language is not as closely tied to the words used. (To translate into English as best I can: The character for house could be pronounced like house, home, building, cave, lean-to, castle, shed, etc depending on where it’s being said). So, you’d have, after a few generations, the same character pronounced two very different ways with two different meanings