Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

> 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.