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Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

From:Fabian <fabian@...>
Date:Tuesday, December 11, 2001, 22:23
> Answer: Right, most Chinese people don't remember all > the relative terms, but they can use them after first > time you tell them, withou extra rememberance, for all > the one hundred words were combined by about thirty > common characters. > Su Cheng Zhong
So what? Most English speakers don't instinctively know what great uncle means, or third cousin twice removed. I've met both of these in relation to me, but I still couldn't draw you a chart. It is not uncommon for languages to make distinctions that aren't imprtant enough to memorise in daily life. Consider that French does not routinely distinguish between 'this' and 'that', except when both words are used in the same sentence. English now only has 2 levels of deixis, compared to 3 in Japanese. yet Japanese does not distinguish between 'the', 'a', and 'some'. Precision in one area is almost always compensated by ambiguity in another. Any artificial language that tries to mimic the highrst level of precision found in every natural language will inevitability be too complex to learn and use effectively. -- Fabian Teach a man what to think, and he'll think as long as you watch him. Teach a man how to think, and he'll think you're playing mind games.