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> I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. > or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullsh

> I don’t think this common, glib aphorism has to be true. > or that Chinese has some greater expressive quality than other languages, which is arrogant bullshit and not true. Well, as stated a few moments ago in a previous comment: A picture is worth a thousand words. I'd be (genuinely) curious if you had more precise inputs as to why Chinese language (pictographic) wouldn't be more expressive than Western's (alphabet-based): I think there's reasons to not be so quickly dismissive. > The path that can be walked is not the AllPath. The word that can be said is not the AllWord. Well, aren't you for example losing here the echo to the daiji? With all its "philosophical" significance? > Btw, What does your regular Chinese person think about this book? I know it’s very popular in the west. Is it popular in Chinese speaking regions as well? What do people think about it? A few isolated data points: most Chinese persons I know consider classical Chinese "old unreadable stuff" and don't seem to care much for it. But plenty of Westerners (Europe) don't care much for old Western texts either (e.g. Iliad, Plato, Bible).

keepamovin 2y ago
Thank you for your reply. Let me think about it when I have time and get back to you! :) Are you Chinese, btw? I don't know if that's relevant, I'm just curious
- mbivert 2y ago
  My pleasure; no, I'm not Chinese at all: I'm actually French
  - keepamovin 2y ago
    I thought about it some more and what I have so far to add to my instinct/intuition/feeling about it is: entropy is the same, as measured by entropy of distribution (radicals/glyphs/glyph-bigrams/trigrams/etc (Chinese morphemes) by frequency vs radicals/morphemes/word-clusters by frequency of other languages); stroke count is similar between glyph or glyph-bigram/trigram and a word/word-cluster equivalent in other languages; the glyph is simplistic compared to a "picture" in the sense that the aphorism "picture worth 1000 words" typically applies. Chinese glyphs don't really tell a story, any more than the etymology of words in other languages tell a story; if a language was really "more expressive" it should display results consistent with that, such as, for example: it is significantly harder to learn (then we must consider Finnish or Hungarian as more expressive than Chinese, say); also, speakers of it should be significantly more accomplished and as a group occupy a higher standard of living/intellectualism than speakers of other languages; ethnic groups where those languages dominate should be "genetically superior" to ethnic groups where less expressive languages dominate. Obviously all such tests are problematic haha! :) But I think we can see that by playing such thought experiments there isn't really any difference between all human languages. However, we could compare the "language" of chimps, or other beings who we have ascribed language to, to rank "below" human languages on these scales and see clear and significant trends consistent with the tests, for example, outlined above. I could go on, but I think it's fairly easy to make various cases for the essential expressive equivalence of large majorities of human languages. And I think it's harmful, abusive and bigoted to pretend superiority of one language/culture over others especially without basis.

keepamovin 2y ago

Thank you for your reply. Let me think about it when I have time and get back to you! :) Are you Chinese, btw? I don't know if that's relevant, I'm just curious

mbivert 2y ago
My pleasure; no, I'm not Chinese at all: I'm actually French
- keepamovin 2y ago
  I thought about it some more and what I have so far to add to my instinct/intuition/feeling about it is: entropy is the same, as measured by entropy of distribution (radicals/glyphs/glyph-bigrams/trigrams/etc (Chinese morphemes) by frequency vs radicals/morphemes/word-clusters by frequency of other languages); stroke count is similar between glyph or glyph-bigram/trigram and a word/word-cluster equivalent in other languages; the glyph is simplistic compared to a "picture" in the sense that the aphorism "picture worth 1000 words" typically applies. Chinese glyphs don't really tell a story, any more than the etymology of words in other languages tell a story; if a language was really "more expressive" it should display results consistent with that, such as, for example: it is significantly harder to learn (then we must consider Finnish or Hungarian as more expressive than Chinese, say); also, speakers of it should be significantly more accomplished and as a group occupy a higher standard of living/intellectualism than speakers of other languages; ethnic groups where those languages dominate should be "genetically superior" to ethnic groups where less expressive languages dominate. Obviously all such tests are problematic haha! :) But I think we can see that by playing such thought experiments there isn't really any difference between all human languages. However, we could compare the "language" of chimps, or other beings who we have ascribed language to, to rank "below" human languages on these scales and see clear and significant trends consistent with the tests, for example, outlined above. I could go on, but I think it's fairly easy to make various cases for the essential expressive equivalence of large majorities of human languages. And I think it's harmful, abusive and bigoted to pretend superiority of one language/culture over others especially without basis.