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> Did you know that after the Ottoman Empire conquered Constantinople, Sultan Mehmed viewed himself as the successor of the Roman Empire and declared himself "Caesar of Rome"?

I was previously curious how many countries declared themselves to be the heirs of the Roman empire, and I found there is something of a wikipedia list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Rome

putting the EU in that list is fishy and a reminder that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially for evaluating contemporary information.

I'm sure everyone will be shocked to hear such things of an article that begins with a highlighted "The neutrality of this article is disputed.".

people are literally linking it as source but ok.

https://xkcd.com/978/

Not to forget that the current Chinese government is trying to work hard to erase the diversity of the entirety of China, trying to get everyone to use the same spoken and written language - iirc they already use the same written language, it's just that people will speak the same characters differently depending on region.

The French did something similar in France, changed a rather diversity country into a monoculture, in a period of around 100 years.

That's a component of modernization most Western European countries went through during the 1800s.

The Caesar of Rome title isn't because the sultans actually viewed themselves as a descendant of the Roman empire but rather the inheritors of their legitimacy to rule and is actually part of the prophecies of Islam. Thus for the Sultan to be legitimate, he must conquer Constantinople and Rome (eventually) and thus fulfill the prophecy. (Source: Empires of the Sea)

The comparison between China and Turkey as descendants of the Roman Empire is a bit of a stretch. China at least uses the same language (old Chinese poems written in the Tang dynasty and even Han dynasty can still rhyme correctly and make sense if read in Cantonese), holidays, culture, etc. Turkey doesn't use a romance language or Greek.

>For example: Japan shares many characters with Chinese

Japanese explicitly borrowed Chinese characters, it doesn't "share" them. It's just like modern English and Latin: English uses Latin characters, but it's not at all the same (or even a similar) language. Lots of languages use the Latin character set, and even Japanese is adopting more and more "Romaji". The characters a written language adopts has little to do with its relation with other languages from a linguistic point-of-view. Latin characters can be used for any language.

I mostly agree with you, but I have one, albeit a nebulous one, problem. China, as an idea, has been around for ~6000 years. I agree that China, as a distinct political entity, hasn't existed for that time period. The Egyption civilization went through at least 5 significant changes of a political nature, but most would agree that it was still a contiguous civilization.

My guess is that civilization is too nebulous of a term for good discussion, but thats just my 2p.

honestly this is just not?true.

the Chinese script have evolved, but one can still look at inscriptions from thousands of years ago and understand it.

it might be hard for people to understand different dialects in China but they all use the same writing system, standardized in the Qin dynasty.

Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different

That's no different than saying the English alphabet is just a modified version of the Anglo-Saxon futhorc runic alphabet, and that with a dictionary and a bit of training you could use that too.

'ȝ' becomes 'g', 'Ð' becomes 'D', and we still use 'æ' today, which is also a rune, and they even used 'W'!

Also, the number of characters in Chinese has also drastically changed over time. So while many characters have a 1:1 lineage, far more characters simply did not exist 1 or 2 thousand years ago.

The only commonality is that they are based on pictographs and have a traceable etymology, although that's true for all languages.

the difference is a single runic symbol does not convey any meaning while the Chinese characters does. which is why it's not hard for the average Chinese speaker to figure out what an ancient Chinese inscription is talking about

>Same with the borrowed Chinese characters in Japanese and Korean. A native Chinese speaker would have little problem reading those, although the pronounciations might be a little different

The Japanese pronunciation of Chinese characters is absolutely nothing like the Chinese pronunciation of them, and the meaning is sometimes different too. (The Kanji for "letter" (as in a piece of paper you write a letter on) means "toilet paper" in Chinese.)

https://www.sljfaq.org/afaq/cj-false-friends.html

sure there are edge cases but at least I know it's paper, and i'd be able to figure its actually letter from context in the rest of the sentence

For many, yes, but you were still absolutely wrong about pronunciation. They're not even remotely the same, as the two languages are not in any way similar and don't share any kind of common root.

Are you seriously claiming that you can understand seal script inscriptions?

Are you Indiana Jones?

Yes for me. Of course I don't know every single character by heart but with a little bit practice and the help of a dictionary you can read a lot. You can even download some seal script fonts and make all the Chinese websites shown in seal script.

Some additional thoughts.

With some training, people can read seal script inscriptions because the structure is already fairly close to regular script which is what people use today.

The radicals are written in slightly different styles from today. It actually makes sense. Seal script is a very artistic form of calligraphy, so people use it for their seals hence the name.

An example of the "drum" character: http://www.guoxuedashi.com/zixing/yanbian/11208mb/ The horizontal arrow is the time line, starting from oracle bone script. The 4th one of the first row is seal script and the last regular script.

The idea depicted here is hitting a decorated drum on a rack with a drum stick holding in the hand.

Not sure if you know Chinese or not but seal script will look rather familiar to anyone who knows Chinese:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seal_script

If you look at the picture on the upper right, you can make out "tian xia" and "wang" -- all under heaven (i.e. the world) and king (the character for emperor isn't invented yet)

> the character for emperor isn't invented yet

Hmm it's right there。 The 4th “皇” and 5th “帝”。 And the combined form “皇帝” - a title invented by the First Emperor himself。

Good catch. But that just adds more to my point: modern Chinese can understand seal script to a large extend because seal script is the ancestor of the modern (non-simplified) Chinese. My guess is that neither you nor I are "Indiana Jones".

your language requires Indiana jones, but don't assume that's the case for everyone