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This article is great fun to read and overall very informative. Yet I had a few gripes about it. * Ridiculous writing system: First, the term "ideogram" is no

• tel 16y ago
  Anecdotally, the "nonexistence" of Chinese grammar is very refreshing. Speaking in Chinese makes you very aware of the grammatical infrastructure of English (especially polite English).
  • wisty 16y ago
    For example: "Give me an example of this" can be a perfectly polite request in Chinese.
    • tokenadult 16y ago
      My sense as a native speaker of English is that "Give me an example of this" can be a perfectly polite request in English as well. In both languages, adding "please" to the sentence would make it more clearly a polite request.
      • fgf 16y ago
        The point that english employs more polite words and phrases than many (most?) other languages is still valid tough.
        • maw 16y ago
          But is it true? You should see some of the crazy fluff used in Spanish in even moderately formal documents or occasions.
          • fgf 16y ago
            I'm not sure about the most part as the "?" implies, but there is more fluff in english than in chinese, scandinavian languages and hebrew. This goes for daily speech of the I need to ask someone for the butter kind.(what's up with the downvote?)
            • tokenadult 16y ago
              what's up with the downvote? I don't know, but I guess my follow-up question to your factual statement would be, "Do you have any examples attested by professional linguists who have carefully compared languages, or is this based on your personal experience?" The reason I would ask that way, which I hope doesn't sound impolite, is that my experience is to the contrary. I find English to be a rather informal language among the dozen or so languages I have studied most closely.
              • fgf 16y ago
                This is hearsay from some linguists studying and some native speakers of the mentioned languages. Looking at the comment again I realize that it's not really up to the rigorous hacker news standards.
      • tel 16y ago
        IANALinguist, but I feel like this feeling of simplification is common experience for English speakers learning Chinese. I'd love to hear a professional opinion, or even just get comparative word counts for several translations. A slight modification to wisty's example would be if you're at a restaurant and the vinegar is at someone else's table. "Give me the vinegar/给我醋(把)" is equally polite to something in English like "Please would you pass the vinegar" which you might be more likely to say to a complete stranger. It's definitely minor, but creates a feeling of convenience which builds over time: terseness as convenience instead of rudeness. Another example might be getting a stranger's attention to ask a question (again, something common to my experience if not the most varied example). In English it's "Hi, would you mind helping me?" "Hi, could you answer a question of mine?" "Hi, I have a question..." In Chinese it's just "please (let me) ask/请问". The "let me" is parenthetical to make it sensible in English, but it's not required to enunciate it (请让我问你）. There is zero conjugation, a noun, the action most closely associated with it, and the verb which generates that noun might all be the exact same word with the meaning derived by context or (if ambiguous) helping words -- especially when speaking. People strive to speak chronologically so that "He took the train to the city" makes sense but "He arrived in the city by train" is strained. The 了 particle is so overloaded as to have many different, non-overlapping contextual meanings. You might say that Chinese is structured more by convention than boilerplate, but that's at best a weak metaphor with a lot of connotations which I don't think carry to human languages well.
• mootothemax 16y ago
  caused by the fact that early printers in England were Dutch This is the first time that I've heard this; could you supply some further reading?
  • m0tive 16y ago
    I remember being told this at school, a quick wiki search turns up some stuff here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#History "[Printing] introduced further inconsistencies, partly because of the use of typesetters trained abroad, particularly in the Low Countries. For example, the h in ghost was influenced by Dutch."
  • Jun8 16y ago
    I recommend three really good books: [1] The Stories of English by David Crystal http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/1585677191/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274490404&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Stories-English-David-Crystal/dp/15856... [2] The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRFM/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274490497&sr=1-1-spell http://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-Bill-Bryson/dp/B001W6RRF... [3] The Story of English by McCrum, Cran, and MacNeil http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002313/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1274490385&sr=8-1 http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002... All of these make a delightful read, I especially like [2]. A number of factors combined to make English orthography as unique as it is. First, there was no central authority of the English language for about three centuries, after the Norman invasion. Then, as French usage receded and English words were becoming more frequent people adopted the spelling of one part of the country and the pronunciation of another, e.g. Western England spellings for "busy" and "bury", but London pronunciation of "bizzy" and Kentish pronunciation of "berry" [2, p, 124] On top of that, the Great Vowel Shift happened. OK, back to the printers. The problem was that English spelling started to become fixated due to printing, around 1650s, just when the language was undergoing a huge change. William Caxton, who may be considered the first English editor, published the oldest English book in Bruges, in 1475. By 1640, it is estimated that there were more than 20,000 titles available in Britain. The final touch came from prescriptive orthographers who fiddled with word spellings to make them "right" according to classical languages, in the seventeenth century. Thus we have the b in "debt", the s in "island", h in "anchor" etc. English is an interesting language indeed.
• chbarts 16y ago
  > Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial, to the point of nonexistent. It seems like that to native English-speakers, because English, unique among Germanic languages, has nearly dropped its case system and has thus ended up with a more-or-less purely analytic grammar, which is similar to Mandarin. I'd like to hear how 'transparent' it is to a native Greek or Lithuanian speaker. > One can argue that languages spread "hardness" in different aspects. All languages need a certain amount of complexity or else nobody would be able to express real concepts in that language. It would be either a toy or an adjunct to some real language. (Compare SQL to Prolog, or pure regular expressions to Perl's extended not-regular-anymore expressions.) To take a concrete example, human languages either have a complex case system (like Latin) or fixed word order (like Mandarin, or (to a lesser extent) English). The same information is conveyed either way: Which words go together, such as which verb or adjective is connected to which noun. > For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor". How is this affected by Simplified Chinese? Is it less effective?
• tokenadult 16y ago
  Chinese major who later worked for years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator replying here. Moser doesn't mention that Chinese grammar is trivial He didn't say that, because Chinese is chock-full of difficult grammar. Take a look at the page count (847 pages) of the book A Grammar of Spoken Chinese by late Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao. His book is thorough, but by no means exhaustive. Li and Thompson's Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar (713 pages) is familiar to many English-speaking students of Chinese. It too is far from exhaustive. Many of the mistakes made in speaking standard Chinese by second-language speakers that impair understanding are GRAMMAR mistakes, and that is true even of native speakers of other Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") who don't know Modern Standard Chinese as a first language. And almost half the population of Chinese, according to a survey by the Chinese government, self-rates as unable to converse in Modern Standard Chinese. http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838.htm http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-03/07/content_5812838... Moreover, despite what that article says, written Chinese characters are frequently a barrier to understanding among Chinese citizens from different regions too. There is first of all the problem of high rates of illiteracy in China, because of the old-fashioned writing system Moser mentions. Many literate Chinese persons tend to write in the regional vocabulary and grammar--there is that again--of their native Sinitic language when they write, and I have seen numerous occasions of Chinese people traveling out of region and not being able to read hand-written signs at markets or even printed official signs posted by the local government.
  • Jd 16y ago
    I'm also a Chinese major who later worked as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator. Compared to German (which I know) / Japanese (which I've studied) / aforementioned exotic languages Chinese grammar is trivial. There may be many inconsistencies (and difficulties when you encounter literary Chinese), but grammar rules are pretty basic.
    • tokenadult 16y ago
      A list of languages I have studied before can be found at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=963415 Suffice it to say that Chinese grammar is NOT "trivial" to anyone who digs into it deeply. No linguist would say so. Chinese grammar, being based in large part on word order and function words, rather than on inflection, is friendly to native speakers of English, and that is one of the reasons I preferred learning Chinese to learning Russian at university while I was taking courses in both. But there is plenty of grammar in Chinese, and plenty of misunderstanding of grammar among Chinese persons that impairs understanding among people who speak differing Sinitic languages.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• est 16y ago
  > For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor". oh no, anchor is 锚, you can tell it's metal, but you can't tell it's something about sea.
  • elblanco 16y ago
    And sometimes the radical can give you hints at pronunciation because often the words will rhyme.
• varjag 16y ago
  I see 'ideogram' used in Chinese (printed in Hong-Kong) tutorials dating from late 1980s. Maybe it's less widespread now, but it is by no means antiquated.
• X-Istence 16y ago
  The compound nature of Chinese characters make it possible for speakers to categorize a word without knowing its meaning! This can be done if they recognize the radical (<100 of them). For example you can tell if a word has something to do with the sea, even if you don't know it means "anchor". That was the part I loved the most about learning Chinese, in school we were required to learn a certain amount of radicals, and once we learned those we learned what they looked like squished next to other characters at that point I knew there was a metal involved if I saw the character for metal, even if I didn't understand the rest of it. Gold being one exception :P