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UTF-16UTF-16Posted Mar 26, 2010 11:16 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784)In reply to: UTF-16 by atai Parent article: Resetting PHP 6
I can read Chinese writings from the 1st Century; can you use today's English spellings or words to read English writings from the 13th Century? 13th Century English (i.e. what linguists call "Middle English") should be readable-for-meaning by an educated speaker of Modern English with a few marginal glosses. Reading-for-sound is almost as easy (95% of it is covered by "Don't silence the silent-in-Modern-English consonants. Pronounce the vowels like Latin / Italian / Spanish instead of like Modern English"). My understanding is that the Greek of 2000 years ago is similarly readable to fluent Modern Greek users. (The phonological issues are a bit trickier in that case.) In both cases - and, I'm sure, in the case of classical Chinese - it would take more than just knowing the words and grammar to receive the full meaning of the text. Metaphors and cultural assumptions are tricky things.
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