They're not. Readers native in one version can't read the other, and there are more than handful that got duplicated in multiple forms, so they're just not same, just similar.

You know, obvious presumption underlying Han Unification is that CJK languages must have a continuous dialect continuums, like villagers living in the middle of East China Sea between Shanghai and Nagasaki and Gwangju would speak half-Chinese-Japanese-Korean, and technical distinction only exist because of rivalry or something.

Alas, people don't really erect a house on the surface of an ocean, and CJK languages are each complete isolates with no known shared ancestries, so "it's gotta be all the same" thinking really don't work.

I know it's not very intuitive to think that Chinese and Japanese has ZERO syntactic similarity or mutual intelligibility despite relatively tiny mental shares they occupy, but it's just how things are.

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tadfisher 10 months ago | parent [-]

You're making the same mistake: the languages are different, but the script is the same (or trivially derived from the Han script). The Ideographic Research Group was well aware of this, having consisted of native speakers of the languages in question.

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numpad0 10 months ago | parent [-]

That's not "mistake", that's the reality. They don't exchange, and they're not the same. "Same or trivially derived" is just a completely false statement that solely exist to justify Han Unification, or maybe something that made sense in the 80s, it doesn't make literal sense.

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tadfisher 10 months ago | parent [-]

> "Same or trivially derived" is just a completely false statement

You'd have to ignore a lot of reality to believe this. It's even in the names of the writing systems: Kanji, Hanja, Chữ Hán. Of course they don't exchange, because they don't carry the same meaning, just as the word "chat" means completely different things in French and English. But it is literally the same script, albeit with numerous stylistic differences and simplified forms.

	▲	numpad0 10 months ago \| parent [-]
		CJK native speakers can't read or write other "trivially derived" versions of Hanzi. I don't understand why this has to be reiterated ad infinitum. We can't actually read Simplified Chinese as a native Japanese just like French speakers can't exactly read Cyrillic, only recognize some of it. Therefore those are different alphabet sets. Simple as that. The "trivially derived different styles" justification assumes that to be false, that native users of all 3 major styles of Hanzi can write, at least read, the other two styles without issues. That is not true. Итъс а реал проблем то бе cонстантлй пресентед wитҳ чараcтерс тҳат И жуст cанът реад он тҳе гроунд тҳат тҳейъре "саме". I hope you don't get offended by the line before this, because that's "same" latin, isn't it?