Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

Quoting Anton Sherwood <bronto@...>:

> Cheng Zhong Su wrote:
> > . . . about four characters share one phonetic type.
> > . . . and it always cause mistakes. An
> > extreme example is that all the three words 'he, she,
> > it'in mandarin sound like 'ta' with the same tone,
> > that no one can distinguish them from speech. I
> > believe the best solution is borrow the English word
> > 'he' and 'she' directly. . . .
>
> Many languages use the same word for `he' and `she'.  (Finnish and
> Swahili come to mind.)  It's not a "mistake", merely an extreme
> example of the simple fact that different languages classify the
> universe differently.
Certainly, but why is it even extreme? How is it more extreme
not to include that category than some languages whose deictics
include lots of categories like plant/nonplant, animal/nonanimal,
human/nonhuman, shape, size, and whether it's a force of nature
or not?

=====================================================================
Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
                     "...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics  mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street   and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637     Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers

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