[lit-ideas] Re: Chinese -- ??

And I would know the difference between Mandarin & Cantonese written how??
There are two forms of written Chinese: Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese ("Simplified" is also called "Mainland Chinese".)
Communist Chinese has been modernizing and simplifying the number of strokes in the characters.
Ten years ago, we always did both versions for any translation. But in the last few years, we use mostly (and sometimes only) Simplified Chinese.
There is also Pinyin, which is Chinese that uses Western alphabet. This includes diacritical marks to show the tone.
> I seem to recall that at least one of the far-Eastern languages is > written vertically, rather than horizontally...
Both Japanese and Chinese can be written in any direction: left to right or vertical. Many newspapers use vertical. And I think you also write right-to-left. It doesn't really matter. But computers display only left-to-right, so that is becoming the standard (however, for Arabic, computers can display right-to-left). 

yrs,
andreas
www.andreas.com

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