I was having a look through the search terms that bring people to this site, and I was amazed at the sheer volume of people searching for stuff like “Chinese Japanese Korean difference” and all the possible combinations thereof. I’m optimistically assuming that these people are referring to the languages, so with that in mind, I’ve created this handy guide to identifying that writing on your imported goods:
Many thanks to Omniglot for providing the sentences.
If you found this useful, consider helping me out in return.
You should have added Vietnamese! It looks like this: “Tàu cánh ngầm của tôi đầy lươn.” Basically just random syllables in the Latin alphabet with a million ugly diacritics.
Nice, we can never get too many eels into those hovercraft. Yeah Vietnamese always seems like a surprising choice for the Latin script. It used to be written with hanzi as well, right?
Yeah, the way Vietnamese was written is actually pretty cool compared to Japanese and Korean, because in addition to using standard Chinese characters for Chinese vocabulary or for their phonetic value, they invented their own Chinese-looking characters for native vocabulary. Sadly this system has fallen out of use and I’m not even sure if it’s included in Unicode.
I think Vietnamese wouldn’t actually be too bad in the Latin alphabet if the orthography hadn’t been designed by the French…
[...] person was wondering about these three different languages. If so, then they might find my handy East Asian language identification guide [...]