Considering phonology... Mandarin Chinese has 400 syllabic sounds, each with 5 tonal choices (4 tones plus unstressed). English has 170,000 possible sounds (htt

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_English_language http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Total_number_of_syllables_in_Engli...), 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-words.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/5454273/1000000-wor...). 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.