
'They say Chinese is difficult - European languages are more difficult' - soyelmango
http://erhugirl1213.pixnet.net/blog/post/30864466
======
kurtosis
It makes me happy and amused to hear langauge chauvanism from a non-european!
Why am I not-surprised to learn that chinese sounds perfectly logical to a
native speaker!

The examples he gives are quite bogus though - how would someone without the
experience in chinese learn that a "bus" is a "public wagon" instead of a "fat
car" or a "wheeled boat" or a "shared ride"? Is there some rule you can learn?

I've also been trying to learn the german language and there are many many
examples of compounds like this - I have made up many that are completely
logical to me, but get only confused looks from people. e.g. "einziehen" is to
settle-in but "ausziehen" is to remove your clothes.

"chandelier" is actually quite logical if you follow the historical emergence
of the word from the french word for "candlestick"

~~~
baby
Even in the comment you use "langauge", so doubtful I checked if the world
"langauge" existed haha.

When he says it's simple, he means to understand. But sometimes you can still
guess words. Few examples that you could have find if you're familiar with
chinese (because you're learning it for example) :

_出租车 (chuzuche) means taxi (rent - car)

_火车 (huoche) means train (fire - car)

_飞机 (feiji) means airplane (fly - machine)

~~~
hugh3
I'll grant you fly machine. But if a taxi is a rent car, what do I call a
rental car? And if a fire-car is a train, what do I say if my car catches
fire?

------
CWuestefeld
Recently my wife (born and raised in China) was on the phone with her dad. She
was trying to tell him something about ticks (you know, the blood-sucking
insect), but she didn't know the Chinese word.

She looked it up in the English->Chinese dictionary, and that told her what
the _character_ is. But since she was on the phone -- voice only -- she was
still unable to communicate it, since seeing the character doesn't provide any
help in actually saying the word. She tried to describe the strokes in the
character to dad, but just couldn't get it across.

EDIT: to clarify, Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience)
provide pronunciation. That's because Chinese is really several completely
different spoken languages (Mandarin, Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all
mutually unintelligible but sharing the same writing. A given pronunciation
would only address one specific local pronunciation of one specific sub-
language, so it's not so useful.

Also, his complaints about not being able to figure out new words aren't
really valid. Since so much of English consists of building words from roots
stolen from Latin and other languages, if you know those roots, it does get
you a good deal of the way toward understanding new words.

~~~
yuan
> _...since seeing the character doesn't provide any help in actually saying
> the word._

Nonsense. There are about 200 or so[1] chinese radicals, and all chinese
characters are either radicals themselves, or composed of two or more
radicals. For example, the chinese character for ticks, 蜱, is composed of
虫(bug, the meaning part) and 卑(lowly, the sound part), both very common
characters that any chinese literate should know; the character can be
described simply as 虫左卑右 (bug on the left, humble on the right).

> _Chinese dictionaries don't generally (in my experience) provide
> pronunciation._

Your experience is not typical. Any decent Chinese dictionary should provide
pronunciation, either in pinyin or zhuyin. Or you can simply look it up
online[2].

> _Chinese is really several completely different spoken languages (Mandarin,
> Shanghainese, Cantonese, etc.), all mutually unintelligible but sharing the
> same writing._

Another complete nonsense. I only speak Mandarin, and can communicate with
people who only speak Cantonese if we both speak (really) slowly. Normally I
would not know how to say something in Cantonese, but when I hear it, I can
recognize it. I have never tried this with "Shanghainese", but the same goes
for Minnan (spoken in some southern provinces and Taiwan).

It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and
exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a
fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese
nation. But Mandarin is what is taught in schools, used on tv, movies, etc,
and all younger generations speak it. I don't think that's going to change
soon.

[1] <http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Index:Chinese_radical>

[2] [http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-
CN&...](http://www.google.com/dictionary?aq=f&langpair=en|zh-
CN&q=%E8%9C%B1&hl=en)

~~~
bfung
From experience, Mandarin and Cantonese are fairly close to each other, in my
opinion. But Shanghainese (and basically the Wu dialects) is not intelligible
to me. 我們 (wo men = "us" in english) in Mandarin is not so far from 我哋 (ngo
de) in Cantonese, but is pretty far from colloquial Shanghainese, 阿拉 (a la).

 _It seems some people are keen to diminish the role of Mandarin in China and
exaggerate the differences among Chinese dialects, perhaps wishing a
fragmented linguistic landscape would lead to a fragmented and weaken Chinese
nation._

That is nonsense, people are people and will do what makes them happy. If they
don't care about Mandarin, nothing will stop them from not using it.
Personally, I totally enjoy the fact that there are different dialects, each
with it's own flavor in expressing certain concepts(especially profanities!).
For example, everyone's favorite profanity in Cantonese, 仆街 (pok gai/pok kai)
"go to hell" (transliteration is "go lay on the street (and die because you'll
get trampled/ran over)". Over time, this has bled over to English and the
English bled back over to Chinese speakers into PK. And in today's Taiwan
reality shows (I'm sure mainland China uses this term today as well), we have
PK rounds where contestants get eliminated from the shows. In these contexts,
PK has turned into a term about competition!

Sure, having a standard is good so that there can be less ambiguity in
communication between people, but at the same time, diversity is what breeds
new ideas and innovations. Take computers, programming languages, designs as
an example; 1 processor to do computation and graphics? "unifying" everyone to
C# be such a good idea? Is a centralized versioning system the most awesome?

~~~
friendstock
PK = penalty kick

~~~
bfung
PK = 仆街 (pok kai). I find it funny when playing mmo's and people use PK as
Player Kill, hehe.

~~~
friendstock
wow ok... haha, I always thought the term (used widely in Taiwan too) came
from soccer...

Perhaps the coincidence that there is a cantonese term AND it also stands for
Player Kill made "PK" take off?

<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pk>

------
rick888
Every language has its difficulties. Chinese grammar is very easy compared to
English. However, to get to a basic reading level, you need to know at least
2300 characters (in other languages, the alphabet is very small). There are
also tones (mandarin only has 5. Other dialects like Cantonese have 9).

It's also nearly impossible to know the meaning of a character (or how to
pronounce it), unless you have already seen it (you can look at the root, but
that doesn't always work).

~~~
iamwil
This is true. In Chinese, there's no such thing as articles like 'a' 'an' and
'the' to trip you up, much less gender to every noun. And verb conjugation is
pretty much non-existent.

~~~
CWuestefeld
Those things may well trip you up when writing.

But in reading English and other European languages, those things can be clues
to deciphering the stuff you don't know. They help you see how the words of
the sentence relate to each other, so without them you've got a little less
information for puzzling it out.

------
gwern
> Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different characters
> appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters here),
> but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are
> combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if
> you know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For
> simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958
> for 90% and 2377 for 99%.

Good luck reading sentences where the most important and meaningful word is
the one you don't know.

And what's with the interest in characters? Didn't you just get done praising
how most words are formed out of a bunch of characters? So now we need to
memorize a few thousand characters _and_ memorize how multiple characters form
a word/concept. The alphabet looks better all the time...

------
skermes
It looks like the problem the author is struggling with is vocab-as-meaning vs
vocab-as-etymology. She complains that english creates new words for
everything; "bus", "envelope", etc, but we really tend to re-use words for
different but allegorical meanings all the time. I'm sure all the readers here
are familiar with at least one meaning of 'bus' that has nothing to with
wheels. And the noun 'envelope' would be, I think, a pretty easy word to guess
if you saw it in context and were already familiar with the verb 'envelop'.

~~~
CWuestefeld
This is one of the wonderful things about English (and other European
languages that I have knowledge of).

My wife (also referenced in this thread here
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439092> ) struggled with English at
first until an ESL teacher showed her how easy it is to manufacture noun,
verb, adjective, or adverb forms from a single base. She had been working hard
memorizing every word form that was taught her until somebody showed her that
the way English actually works is generally pretty logical. She says her
vocabulary tripled overnight.

------
ambulatorybird
As someone who grew up in a Chinese-speaking household, I've noticed the same
thing. E.g., lobster is "dragon shrimp," computer is "electric brain," etc. I
wonder if the reason European languages have so many apparently 'unique' words
is their inclusion of other older European languages such as Greek and Latin.
Chinese, by comparison, seems to have borrowed mainly from itself.

~~~
joubert
Icelandic has some beautiful examples of creative language (purism), e.g.
instead of using a word derived from the Greek for electricity, it uses
"rafmagn" which literally means "amber power".

Another example is sími, the word for telephone (which comes from the greek
"tele" (far) and "phone" (voice)).

~~~
sethg
Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the man who more or less single-handedly revived the
modern Hebrew language, spent a great deal of effort coming up with Hebrew
words for modern things. “Telephone” was “sakh-rakhok”, from the classical
Hebrew words for “conversation” and “far”. Not all of his suggestions took
root: Israelis just call the telephone a “telefon”.

------
samratjp
Ah, but the complainers are the adults who are pretty lazy (& lousy - in
relative to children of course) at learning a foreign language. The U.S.
especially needs to do a better job of teaching foreign languages. But sadly,
most start a second language in schools around high school and are not very
good at it either.

As about the european languages argument, the comparison is mostly about
vocabulary it seems. That's hardly a justifiable comparison. Sure, words may
indeed be simpler in Chinese, but the sad reality is that languages are a
cultural heirloom that gets guarded but yet is stolen many times. Part of the
gosh-darn specialty of these languages is to strengthen the cultural ties and
keep it _in_. In fact, you might as well compare english with scientific
papers written in english...

------
nwomack
I am a white American, lived in the US for 29 years and now have been in
Taiwan for 3 months with my Taiwanese Fiance. I have been studying Chinese for
about a year, with increasing fever since coming to Taiwan. From what I can
gather so far, Chinese is much harder to get to a basic level than English..
Let's say a 1st grade level. This is primarily due to the tones, and the
characters having no correlation to the words (this is the big one... thank
god for flash cards).

My unqualified claim is that Chinese is "Hard to learn, (relatively) easy to
Master" due to the reasons stated in the article... English would be "Easy to
learn, hard to master", primarily due to the insane vocabulary and tricky
grammar. How many chinese born speakers have you heard say "the, than, 's,
that, which, at, " and the like, not to mention correctly pronounce all the
various english sounds, not to mention American vs British english.

Anyways.. Point is. Chinese is hard. But so are other languages.

Of course, picking up another language that is similar to yours would be much
easier. (English -> German), or (Mandarin Chinese -> Cantonese). It's all
relative.

Something pretty curious about Chinese, though, is how difficult it is to
understand if you don't know it. When being welcomed to a shop, they say 歡迎光臨
(Huānyíng guānglín) which I never noticed until I learned it, after which
point I have heard it constantly. For comparison, in Tokyo, I vividly remember
countless occurances of "irashaimase"

------
soyelmango
(I submitted this link, and I should add that I'm not the author.)

I think the commenters who write about distinguishing learning vocab from
digging deeper into understanding etymology ( eg skermes,
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1439131> ) have hit the nail on the head
(translate that one!). At that point, learning vocab, whatever the language,
becomes more fun for me.

Back to the cooking thing though...

I'm surprised that most comments I see so far are about the language, because
what drew me to the article in the first place is the author's connection
between the Chinese language and Chinese cooking with non-specialised tools,
and how that contrasts with western cooking.

I think both Chinese and 'western' cooking tools have specialized, though
interestingly in opposite directions. The Chinese specialization towards one
wok, one cleaver, one chopping board (prep hygiene, anyone?), chopsticks (and
food cut and cooked to size) and green tea minimizes the toolset.

The 'Western' way specializes in a different way: specialize the tool to
what's being cooked and eaten - a fish pan, a medium sized knife to prep, a
fish knife to eat, and white rather than red wine.

I'm not saying one is better than the other - I'll happily eat both Chinese or
western food (or any other) if you're cooking for me! ... I'm just interested
in studying the differences and similarities.

Disclosure: I'm Chinese.

~~~
nwomack
Also, when eating out in Western culture you are more prone to just ordering
your own meal, whereas in Chinese culture it's typically family style.

It is also, with few exceptions, acceptable to grab food in the 'center' with
your own chopsticks. I guess chopsticks don't get dirty :)

One thing that drives me crazy about chopsticks is when you want to cut
something, you have to do that X trick and sort of cross the chopsticks, or
use the spoon. I'm a wiz with chopsticks, but a knife and fork is the ultimate
combo. It wins at every category except noodle soup and sushi.

~~~
soyelmango
Those chopsticks and communal sauces do get 'dirty', but hey, a few germs keep
your immune system on its toes! There may well be an aspect of group bonding
there in saliva-exchange.

If you have to cut food, that's someone else's failing before it gets to the
table - tough cheap meat, cut too big, or cooked badly. But yes, I've often
had to cut meat with a blunt china spoon too!

Yes, the spoon - glad to hear you're one of the few non-Chinese (I presume,
from your name) who uses it. Always amusing to watch people eating rice 2
grains at a time with chopsticks...

~~~
echaozh
I always have the idea that the westerners are more aggressive because they
use knife on the dinner table. If you cut your own food, and sometimes see
blood dripping out from it, you tends to think making others bleed is more or
less a pleasure, or even a daily need.

As a programmer, I think the cooking process should be well encapsulated, and
the knives should be left in the kitchen. The eaters should care about sending
the food to the mouth, rather than having to postprocess it.

------
jhg
> Chinese like everything simple, doesn't have to be too exact

Oh, don't start. "I don't know what the bug was, but I fixed it." - verbatim
quote. This was a mode of operation of disturbingly large number of Chinese
devs I have worked with. After several bugfixing iterations of this kind it
was easier to throw the code away and redo it from scratch than to understand
how _that_ managed to work. So, yeah, "don't have to be exact" is certainly
there.

~~~
spotter
LOL Anyone who's ever worked with a Chinese PhD's, grad students or serious
developers (such as in finance) knows this is complete horseshit...

But you're right, this thread is the perfect place for some casual racism to
vent your frustrations in working with third-rate developers foisted upon you
by your company's outsource policies.

~~~
jhg
My primary experience stems from working for a Canadian-based company with
200+ developers (located in Canada), 80% of which were Chinese programmers.
The CTO of the company was Chinese and he had an obvious preference for hiring
graduates from his own university and/or country. Top picks, but few with more
than a couple of years of non-Chinese experience.

Just to emphasize - EIGHT PERCENT of my coworkers came from Chinese software
development companies and they quite naturally brought their work ethics with
them. My four years in this company is a basis for my original comment.

If it's not obvious, I am not talking about Chinese nationality, I am talking
about developers with Chinese way of working in a software development
environment. The way that revolves around never saying No to the boss, which
in turn is deeply rooted in their cultural heritage. If the project manager
says that the bug needs to be fixed today, it _will_ be fixed today. Meaning
that it will no longer be reproducible. How it will be fixed and what else is
going to broken along the way is secondary. This will create another bug that
can be taken care of later in the same manner.

And this was the company that developed sophisticated networking software
including their own embedded OS down to the kernel level. Moreover most of
these guys were perfectly capable of NOT cutting corners and doing a splendid
coding job if forced. But god forbid if they would ever do it on their own
accord. Everything was always done in a rush and sketchy-patchy way. I don't
have any other explanation except for it to be a cultural thing.

You can certainly call it a horseshit and a casual racism if you'd like.
However that's how things are in reality.

~~~
spotter
> However that's how things are in reality.

No, that's how things are in _your_ reality, which is not necessarily anyone
else's reality.

You've just perfectly described under-skilled, over-worked, under-paid
H1b-style immigrants who get _deported_ if they're fired. Not talented people
working at the top of their game in finance, biotech, startups, etc.

When you're at the bottom of the pond everything looks like shit. You even
said yourself they're fresh grads with very little experience. Dumbass.

------
mhartl
I think the central claim about Chinese isn't that it's hard to _speak_ ; it's
that it's hard to _read_ and _write_. Although the wonderful article "Why
Chinese is So Damn Hard" (<http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html>)
does mention the lack of cognates and the difficulty of tonal languages, which
are clearly a matter of perspective, there is little doubt that the Chinese
writing system is more difficult than alphabets in absolute terms.

------
toddh
I took Chinese in college and the problem for me was the tones. If you don't
grow up hearing them then they are very hard to pickup as an adult. The
characters you an learn with effort. But the tone shifts just didn't register.

------
aristus
Wait, what? I think the author is just ignorant of Greek and Latin roots (it's
ok, most native speakers are too).

iso-tope is literally "at the same place"

commun-ism is literally "share-ism"

~~~
sabat
You're absolutely right. It's just that, at least in the case of isotope, most
people wouldn't realize that "iso" and "tope" have meanings. They might notice
that "iso" also occurs in "isolate" but probably wouldn't look much beyond
that. The author's point is that the Chinese use simple, everyday words
instead of archaic words from dead versions of languages.

~~~
Nitramp
Be careful. "isolate" comes from Latin "insulare" (or insolare? I don't know).
"isos" is Greek for equal, and "in" is a Latin prefix for not.

------
misterbwong
From OP _Chinese is easy, according to a survey in 2006, 8128 different
characters appeared in newspapers (we're talking about traditional characters
here), but 80% of the 700 million words which appeared in all medias are
combinations of 581 characters, 90% of it use only 934 characters, and if you
know 2314 characters, you can already read 99% of the articles. For
simplified, surprisingly you need slightly more characters, 591 for 80%, 958
for 90% and 2377 for 99%._

Anyone know where I can get my hands on this list? This would help
tremendously while learning chinese.

~~~
ximeng
<http://lingua.mtsu.edu/chinese-computing/>

Try this site for some frequency lists.

------
sh4na
A language where a spoken word has completely different meanings depending on
how hoarse you are that day can be a lot of things, but "simple" is not one of
them, imho.

The author doesn't understand that most european words aren't just made up on
the spot for new things, they are built with the same process as he describes
for chinese: pick an existing term and adapt it for a new use, or pick several
terms and join them up. Of course, you probably have to go back a few hundreds
or thousands of years to get at the root of the thing.

otoh, I could say that the advantage of having a small non-meaningful alphabet
is that you're not stuck with the symbolism of existing characters, so you're
free to actually make words up if you want to.

The advantage of having a (for the most part) neutral tonal system in european
languages combined with a small neutral system of characters, combined with
the rich heritage of the small number of base languages that created all these
languages (latin, greek, etc) and the freedom to synthesize words whenever
appropriate is what is making english the lingua franca that it is, and what
keeps all other (let's not say euro, but western) languages up there on the
importance chart.

I wonder if it would be easy for chinese speakers to understand how western
languages work if we say that each character in the latin alphabet is the
equivalent of a single stroke in chinese...

------
ww520
Every language has its quirks and pluses; otherwise, it won' survive.

For Chinese vs English (or other alphabet-based languages) in term of semantic
representation, the main distinction is semantic GRANULARITY of a base term.
English has 26 alphabets as base term, which have no meaning. The 26 alphabets
are combined to form words, which have meaning. When a new thing comes along,
a brand new word has to be invented.

On the other hand, Chinese has couple thousands (or more) root words as base
term that have meaning, which can be used by themselves alone or they can be
combined as two-word or three-word phrase as new terms for things. The mixing
of root words into new words happen in both Chinese and English. E.g.
Firetruck comes from fire and truck, and provides some semantic description of
what the term is. It's just that in Chinese, the word combination is the 95%
of the language because of large root word set, while only a very small
percentage in English due to the inconvenience of combining long words.

In Chinese is very easy and cheap to build new term (2-word or N-word phrase)
to describe new thing and got accepted by other people since the semantic of
the new term has strong relationship to its composing root words. As in
English, firetruck is probably related to fire and truck. You won't call a
firetruck as waterboat.

------
GiraffeNecktie
After two years studying Mandarin quite intensely I've stopped thinking of the
language as "hard" and recognize that it just takes a long time to get where I
want to go. Driving to the next big city is not hard but it does take longer
than driving to the corner store.

Learning any language involves rewiring the brain and, for a westerner,
learning Chinese involves a lot more of that rewiring because almost nothing
from English is transferable. When I say 'rewiring' I mean coaxing my neurons
to grow into a useful framework that someday will support that magical skill I
posess in English of knowing exactly what people are saying and exactly what I
want to say.

No amount of "hard work" is going to make that happen ... I can't force my
neurons to develop no matter how hard I grit my teeth and study. It just takes
repetition repetition repetition, immersion and lots and lots of time for
those neural pathways to develop.

------
mbenjaminsmith
A language being highly synthetic is actually a liability in the case of non-
delimited written languages (which is the case with Chinese and Thai, the
latter of which I have some fluency).

While Thai is more logical in one sense (subway = electric vehicle under
ground, transliterated: rotfaidaidin) trying to read a sentence with no
separation between those words just adds to the confusion.

When most words in a language are combinations of other, complete words, it
really raises the bar for being able to read something and get the gist of it,
which is critical for moving on to true fluency.

------
est
Classical Chinese is very difficult

here is a list of Chinese words about horses:

<http://www.douban.com/group/topic/8273127/>

马 骎 騤 駉 驵 骜 骥 骀 驽 騑 骖 驷 骃 骅 骆 骊 騧 骐 骠 骝 骢 骓 牿 驺

~~~
hugh3
Here is a list of English words about horses:

horse, mare, stallion, gelding, foal, colt, yearling, filly, pony, equine,
_Equus ferus caballus_ , mustang, brumby, mount, steed,...

and so forth, without getting into different breeds of horses or special-
purpose horses.

~~~
igravious
brumby? now i know fo shizzle that y'all just yankin my chain...

------
mhartl
_Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-property-ism"?_

It's amazing how much this sounds like Newspeak. Evidently you can translate
Newspeak into Chinese.

------
billswift
Read _Asia's Orthographic Dilemma_ by William Hannas. Apparently, not only is
there a ridiculous number of symbols to learn, the dogma that all the spoken
versions share the same written language is _not_ true.

Also, writers commonly make up their own written forms of words on the fly,
especially for technical and academic writing, so even an experienced reader
is left struggling, trying to figure things out.

~~~
olifante
I found Hannas' book boring. I much prefer John DeFrancis' _The Chinese
Language - Fact and Fantasy_
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fant...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language_facts_and_fantasy))
and Sampson's _Writing Systems_.

These are the books that taught me that Chinese writing is more usable and
more adapted to the particular needs of the Chinese language than we in the
West tend to believe. In particular, the phonetic element in Chinese
characters is much more important than I imagined.

Also, while it is true that the road to fluent reading is much longer for the
Chinese than for readers of phonemic scripts, this is partly compensated by
the higher reading efficiency of fluent Chinese readers.

One way to look at Chinese writing is to see it as a highly defective phonemic
writing system with semantic annotations. In other words, Chinese characters
constitute a morphophonemic writing system, much like English (for/four/fore)
but with a much stronger emphasis on the morphemic aspect.

------
chime
I never knew this was the case. It actually makes me want to learn Chinese
(Mandarin/Cantonese etc.) now because it sounds like a very neat system.

------
michaelcampbell
It's all just a matter of abstraction. "In Chinese, a bus is called a "public
wagon"..."

Ok. What's "public"? What's "wagon"? Would it not be easier to use "all people
carrier"? Then, what's "people?

Since it's turtles all the way down, the article is picking an arbitrary (and
comfortable) turtle to stop at and say, "this is the right spot".

------
rit
_I say, you european languages, using 26 or slightly more alphabets, you had a
great chance to make your language simple and easy to learn, why do you make
it so complicated?_

Except, of course, most European languages are intermingled with other
languages so intrinsically that they don't stand on their own.

Look in an English dictionary at how many times you see "from <some other
language, like French>" in the source.

English itself is descended, as I recall from old German. It split off from
Middle English and left Scots (The lowland language, not the Gaelic of the
highlands) still looking and sounding much like Middle English well into
modern times. Hell, American English shares a whole bunch of words from
Scottish English which don't exist in "standard" English (such as Janitor,
Pinkie, and I believe "Proven" is a quirk of "proved" which is specific to
these two offshoots).

Core English itself is heavily influenced by French, which is descended from
Latin. It has, especially for technical things, a huge amount of borrowings
from Greek and Latin in and of itself.

Again, I can't speak for other European languages as apart from American
English I only know some Scots & Irish Gaelic and had a high school education
in Spanish from a Castillan, who taught a form of Spanish completely useless
in America. But part of what made _English_ a lingua franca was the
willingness to take and borrow words from other languages. Why come up with a
"Local" word for something when the other language's word will suffice? (I
can't find examples of the words or remember how to spell them, but Scottish
Gaelic in particular lately has been absorbing "Modern" words like Computer
and Internet and applying a Gaelic-sounding inflection and spelling to them.
Same word, just ... "Gaelicized")

Further, _Why name communism "communism", while you can name it "share-
property-ism"?_ ... I'm taking a wild stab here, but the ability for European
languages to absorb arbitrary new words that people come up with is part of
what has led to such a flexible growth. It's frustrating for new learners to
adapt to the language but the flexibility of the written word to introduce new
concepts is astounding.

Yes, we could have called the Internet "Network-of-connected-computers" but
coining a word for it made it somehow more concrete, and real.

In a "Hacker" context take an article from yesterday which talked about how
Scala is not a better Java.

I'm paraphrasing from memory but the author argued that Java's beauty comes
from it's simple structure, small list of keywords, etc etc.

Scala allows huge flexibility, defining your own keywords, internal DSLs and a
lot of things.

Java has power in it's rigidity and stricture. Scala is incredibly flexible
and adaptable. There are good things about both - but I can make Scala code
read like prose (Oh god, I just had reminders of "Literate Programming")
because I'm free to define new syntax that fits my needs.

_EDIT_: When I say _a high school education in Spanish from a Castillan, who
taught a form of Spanish completely useless in America._ I mean that I at one
point had a fairly good knowledge of Spanish.

When I moved to Miami after high school (I grew up in Philadelphia - wasn't a
lot of exposure to Spanish in the day-to-day at the time), I couldn't
understand a word people were saying or vice versa. The syntax, accents, etc
were so drastically different from what I was taught that I was lost. I've
since more or less let my Spanish knowledge atrophy (I can remember how to
conjugate but damned if I can remember much of the actual words/word roots).

This itself is actually an argument aside from my previous statements. I don't
know much about Chinese but I'm curious as to how locality affects the
language. Is syntax and accent so drastically different from one region to
another so as to make two people practically unable to communicate?

English has cases like that - there are a variety of regional dialects where
two native English speakers from distinct regions might swear neither was
speaking English. I'm to understand that fragmentation is getting greater
since England stopped pushing "Received Pronunciation" (An "official" way to
pronounce words taught in schools up through at least WW2). I'm from Mid-
Atlantic US which to me seems a fairly "neutral" accent (I have a few quirks
of speech specific to my region of birth - I'll often pronounce Water as
"wood-er" [whereas in NY where I now live it's "Watt-er] or Creek as
"crick"]). But some Southern accents can be practically inscrutable. I won't
even begin to go into trying to understand what the hell people from Canada
are saying.

~~~
ww520
That was a false comparison in the borrowing words from other languages. The
European languages are similar and thus make it easy to borrow from each
other. When is the last time you see English borrow from Chinese straight
stroke by stroke? The borrowing is usually at the phonetic level, which happen
quite frequently in Chinese, borrowing foreign terms phonetically.

In your analogy of Java vs Scala, you got it reverse; may be not what you hope
for. Java as small keyword set is English with 26 alphabet. Scala has large
building set and can build DSL, that's Chinese.

~~~
vorg
Considering phonology... Mandarin Chinese has 400 syllabic sounds, each with 5
tonal choices (4 tones plus unstressed). English has 170,000 possible sounds
([http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_Engli...](http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_English_language)),
each either stressed or unstressed. So the phonology of English seems more
like Scala's in allowing symbols, not just alphanumerics, for names.

As for graphology... Chinese has 3000 commonly used characters, >50,000
counting all historic characters, compared to English's 54 (26 uppercase, 26
lowercase, hyphen, and apostrophe), so at first sight looks more varied. But
most Chinese characters are made up of components, e.g. 蜱 being composed of 虫
and 卑 in a left-to-right pattern. Depending on how you count them, there are
about 400 to 600 hundred of these components in all Chinese characters,
including historic ones. It's better to compare 54 English tokens to 600 in
Chinese, more but only 10 times more.

As for lexis... Last year English reached one million words, the most words in
any known language
([http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-wor...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-words.html)).
Not sure how many 'words' Chinese has, but it seems until recently Chinese
never defined the concept of 'word' in their language, only of 'character', so
there's no (intra-word) morphology in Chinese, only (inter-word) syntax. So
perhaps it's best to leave the comparison at the phonological level.

------
Bjoern
As a half-german when I see this I just think literally wth.

> There are German words as long as >
> "Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft".

~~~
slashcom
It's kind of like saying there are english words as long as
antidisestablishmentarianism.

~~~
tbrownaw
My system dictionary has supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,
pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis,
Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, and
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethanes.

------
yosho
it might be simple to say, and it might even be simple to understand, but it's
freakin difficult as hell to read and write.

I think the author needs to expand more on how he defines simple. Being a
native Chinese speaker, I can understand and say most things in Mandarin, but
I still cannot read or write well. Even after years of Chinese School and
years of my parents trying to make me learn, It's just too easy to forget once
you stop using it.

------
julius_geezer
Sounds as if he wants German...

