The architecture of “not bad”: Decoding the Chinese source code of the void

Post by elcritch » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 5:37 AM UTC

FloorEgg wrote: post #79

shunia_huang wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is somehow real as I'm not so good at English but as a native Chinese speaker it feels a little bit hard to find the word/phrasing to express what I want to, but I guess your target audience should be more clear on what you are trying to express since it's the native thought process that the audience be familier with. To me personally, the same meaning requires a lot of extra work to be expressed in English rath…

It seems what you're pointing out is coming out a lot in this thread. As a solely English speaker (with very little French/Spanish), it's actually a bit of a novel concept for me. I'm curious though: Do you find it particularly hard to differentiate or clarify between you having 0 want or negative want? E.g. "I want x" = 5 want But "I don't want x" = 0 want or -5 want???

Post by popalchemist » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:09 AM UTC

incr_me wrote: post #82

popalchemist wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western culture is predicated on a sort of positivist metaphysics, and our language reflects that. Whereas in the east, the langauges and cultures have both long ago (as in, thousands of years ago) assimilated the precepts of non-dualism, which brings with it a greater degree of subtlety, through its embedded understanding of equanimity, dependent arising, and so on. It's a different ontological root, and therefore a…

Ever read Plato?

Post by popalchemist » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:38 AM UTC

rramadass wrote: post #97

idiotsecant wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things , like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas . I…

> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://www.scienc…

Post by cttet » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 6:44 AM UTC

Post by samus » Fri, Dec 12, 2025, 7:00 AM UTC

decimalenough wrote: post #39

samus wrote: post #33

There are some direct ways to express agreement in Chinese, like 對 or 好. At the same time, the negative statements described are not unique to Chinese at all. It's not that deep, really.

The author states outright that this is not unique to Chinese, it's just much more prevalent than in American English. 不错 is literally "not bad", but it's more positive than the American English equivalent, being basically semantically equal to 很好 (lit. "very good", although in practice just plain old good/OK). You can even say seemingly absurd things like 很不错 "very not bad" (= excellent); or you can tamp it down wit…