191–200 of 312 posts
There was this by Mark Twain, but it never when anywhere https://guidetogrammar.org/grammar/twain.htm As for the article, I believe one of the reasons English and by extension the US ended up "owning" the computer revolution was it was a large language with a simple alphabet. It has less letters than many other large language and was easily coded into the tiny computers of the 40s and 50s.
The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. English? Do you mean the UK? US? My perception was that China said Chinese was one language and that most westerners agreed. Is this not the case?
The difference between a langauge and a dialet is political, not linguistic.
Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
In English, of course, the title of this might be "If English were written like Chinese" Pity the poor subjunctive. Sad and forgotten, its loss leaves our language barer and that bit more denuded.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As far as I know it's not English or any Western entity that has grouped the Chinese languages together as one, but the Chinese government, for political reasons. Western linguists recognize the variants of "Chinese" as different languages.
They're written the same, and have basically the same grammar. The characters have hugely different readings, but people can communicate easily in writing. You can call that different languages, but that's certainly a different kind of different than people would expect when you say different. If there were a version of English where all of the letters designated completely different sounds, but was written exactly t…
China had an imperial bureaucracy for over 2000 years, which sent officials from one end of the country to the next. In fact, a predecessor of Standard Chinese (a.k.a. "Mandarin") was called "the language of officials" (官話).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I speak fluent second-language Spanish and have had next to no difficulty communicating with native Portuguese speakers from Mozambique, Cabo Verde, and Portugal. What variety of Portuguese do you speak? I'll concede that it's possible that I actually have an advantage as a second-language speaker, since my Spanish is probably slower than a native's and when I'm listening I'm already doing more work than a native is…
Brazilian Portuguese has some phonological differences that I think confuse people in both directions more than other varieties of Portuguese, like the /tʃ/ and /dʒ/ for and in various contexts. For example a Spanish speaker would probably have a hard time recognizing that Brazilian Portuguese /dʒi'abu/ is cognate with Spanish . A Brazilian Portuguese speaker who was less familiar with Spanish might similarly have a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"A language is a dialect with an army and navy" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
It's cute, and gets at something real, but it's overstated. The first question is "are these things mutually intelligible", with an answer on a spectrum between "yes, perfectly, obviously" and "no, not at all, obviously". There is a huge gray area that stretches pretty far from the middle in which contingency, identity, community, and nation building projects (both military and literary) move the lines around quite a…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a saying in linguistics that "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy" [0]. Linguists recognize that where you draw boundaries between languages is essentially arbitrary, even more so than boundaries between biological species. It tends to be that a language is a language if and only if some sovereign state declares it to be so, otherwise it's a dialect. This is also how you get Portuguese as a distin…
I like the expression, but the example of Portuguese/Spanish is absurd IMO. As a Portuguese speaker, the amount of effort required to communicate with Spanish speakers is very, very high, to the point where I avoid trying at all costs. Here in Texas, it is almost always more effective for my family to communicate with Spanish speakers using very broken English and hand gestures on both sides than trying to get any Po…
The article does a decent job of explaining of how Chinese characters work, but it falls short of explaining why. The reason why Chinese continues to use a logographic writing system is due to both tradition and practicality. English has grossly grouped together Chinese as one unified language, when in actuality it is not. In fact, many "dialects" are mutually unintelligible--one speaker cannot understand another spe…
I'd love to hear other people's take on this. I heard this many times when I lived in China, however living in Taiwan - people still always use subtitles. In Taiwan there are vanishingly few people that don't speak Mandarin, so it's not inserted for people that are bad at Mandarin. You will see that both in China and Taiwan people that are fluent in Mandarin watching a Mandarin movie will never turn off the subtitles.
Talking to native-speaking friends I've pieced together that it seems Chinese is actively hard to make out (compared to English). Without the subtitles they will miss sections of dialogue in movies/tv-shows. Maybe because it's so tonal and contextual? I've asked people "Okay, but when you talk to people day-to-day, you don't have subtitles - so how are you dealing with it?" and the responses seem to boil down to "often we have to guess what the other person is saying"
I'd love to hear some thoughts from someone who is 100% biligual and able to make the comparison