> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the pr

> You can't use tones to communicate things like irony, anger or doubt. You have to play on volume. You're losing a lot of expressiveness and subtlety in the process. That's not unusual even in languages without tones. For instance, in Irish, you can't use vocal stress to emphasise particular words like you can in English. Instead, you use a combination of changes in word order and emphatic affixes to convey the same meaning. No expressiveness is lost, it's just that Irish uses as different mechanism to convey the same meaning. My understanding of Mandarin and the other Sinitic languages is similar: they might not use the same mechanisms to convey such information as in English, but they certainly can convey them. > Moreover, combining one character before (or after) another can change the meaning entirely. Adding a third one can again change things. vent con-vent con-vent-tion Mandarin is no different than any other language in this regard. It's just that it's writing system masks what we'd consider words in languages with alphabet-like scripts. Also keep in mind that the Chinese characters make use of punning, so sometimes those weird character combinations are simply very, very old visual or phonological puns. [There's a little bit of cheating in there, because the 'vent' in 'convent' is more like 'ven-t', but the principle still applies, and with some though I could find better examples. However, as mentioned, Chinese characters do rely on punning like this in places, it's not a huge flaw in the example.] > You can't apply a Porter stemming algorithm for example; there's no concept of stem or etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There are a few reasons for that, but the main one is that Mandarin is a largely isolating language. However, to apply some equivalent of Porter stemming, you need to rely on there being a concept similar to a word in the language and its writing system, whereas Chinese characters are more akin to morphemes, so the concept of 'stemming' makes no sense. Pinyin is another matter though. > there's no concept of [...] etymology (no apparently logical one at least). There is, it's just obscured by how divorced the written language is from the spoken language, which isn't the case for languages with alphabets, syllabaries, &c.