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That's seen through your own lens. Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English & American English, if not only for the different und
by Juliate 7y ago
That's seen through your own lens.
Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English & American English, if not only for the different understated meanings.
The "funky word order" of German makes sense from a German perspective (and back to ancient Latin & Greek).
Mandarin is not simple, comparatively to English.
Yet, you can be quite assured that, would China, for instance, get the military & cultural influence UK/US had for 2 centuries, by 2200 they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide (as it happened for English; and French and Spanish before them).
- octbash 7y agoBesides vocabulary/characters, in what sense is Mandarin not simple?
- 2a0c40 7y agoTones
- kaesar14 7y agoWhich is a massive sense in which it is not simple! For any non-native speakers, (I'm a native English speaker), tones were nearly impossible to master, and I still have a terrible grasp of them I think. It requires a complete rewiring of the way you speak language, sure, but it also requires a complete rewiring of how you hear it too!
- jhanschoo 7y agoTones are simple (in the sense of being governed by linguistic rules), just foreign.
- henrikschroder 7y ago> they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide For sure, but my point was that the simpler (relatively, comparatively) a lingua franca is, the less pidgin you get, and the more of the actual language you get instead. And that's a merit of the language itself, not the powers that back it.