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This is very untrue--if you look at math or machine learning terminology, the phrases used are actually direct literal translations of the constituent words. I

This is very untrue--if you look at math or machine learning terminology, the phrases used are actually direct literal translations of the constituent words. It is very understandable, even from my perspective as someone only slightly literate in Chinese.

bayesian_horse 8y ago
If you want to use these terms when writing your own texts in Chinese, then you have to know the actual characters, because they are still not chosen from an alphabet. This is compared to English or most Indoeuropean languages were you copy the term unchanged most of the time. Just a minor point. But it makes learning the terminology of a subject rather hard.
- gumby 8y ago
  What's "hard"? Over millennia the sharp corners that make learning and using a language difficult have all been knocked off. Characters that are hard to recognize fade out or are modified. Grammar simplifies. And as an existence proof: more than a billion people speak various Chinese languages, almost all of them learning them as children; probably close to a billion can read and write it to some degree, many with little other schooling. You likely come (as did I) from a background in which such languages are quite unfamiliar but that doesn't make them harder or easier in general. John DeFrancis wrote a funny essay about the "Japanese plan to replace the Roman alphabet within their empire after conquering North America" as a parody of the people who think that the Chinese and Japanese should replace their writing with an alphabetic approach. You may not realize how hard it is for many speakers to learn English spelling where spelling is more conservative (to preserve meaning) than more phonetic writing systems like German, Spanish, Korean etc. The terms are seemingly more obscure. In fact it's to reduce that problem that we violate English "rules" to conserve the declension of the original noun (e.g. felid/felidae) which is uniform when the term is a loan word common across languages.
  - bayesian_horse 8y ago
    It's an objective reality that the Chinese language has a higher information density per syllable and that "transmission" of speech is more easily disrupted. Native Mandarin speakers sometimes even have trouble communicating face to face and "write" characters with a finger on the other's palm. It's also an objective reality that it takes more pieces of information to learn the Chinese representation of an English term than the other way around. It doesn't mean learning English is always easier than Chinese, though it actually is for maybe even most Humans on earth.

bayesian_horse 8y ago

If you want to use these terms when writing your own texts in Chinese, then you have to know the actual characters, because they are still not chosen from an alphabet. This is compared to English or most Indoeuropean languages were you copy the term unchanged most of the time. Just a minor point. But it makes learning the terminology of a subject rather hard.

gumby 8y ago
What's "hard"? Over millennia the sharp corners that make learning and using a language difficult have all been knocked off. Characters that are hard to recognize fade out or are modified. Grammar simplifies. And as an existence proof: more than a billion people speak various Chinese languages, almost all of them learning them as children; probably close to a billion can read and write it to some degree, many with little other schooling. You likely come (as did I) from a background in which such languages are quite unfamiliar but that doesn't make them harder or easier in general. John DeFrancis wrote a funny essay about the "Japanese plan to replace the Roman alphabet within their empire after conquering North America" as a parody of the people who think that the Chinese and Japanese should replace their writing with an alphabetic approach. You may not realize how hard it is for many speakers to learn English spelling where spelling is more conservative (to preserve meaning) than more phonetic writing systems like German, Spanish, Korean etc. The terms are seemingly more obscure. In fact it's to reduce that problem that we violate English "rules" to conserve the declension of the original noun (e.g. felid/felidae) which is uniform when the term is a loan word common across languages.
- bayesian_horse 8y ago
  It's an objective reality that the Chinese language has a higher information density per syllable and that "transmission" of speech is more easily disrupted. Native Mandarin speakers sometimes even have trouble communicating face to face and "write" characters with a finger on the other's palm. It's also an objective reality that it takes more pieces of information to learn the Chinese representation of an English term than the other way around. It doesn't mean learning English is always easier than Chinese, though it actually is for maybe even most Humans on earth.