Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

Cheng Zhong Su wrote: "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."

Umm... that's because they are the same word. In the 20th century,
pro-Westernization intellectuals saw that foreign 'prestige' languages
distinguished gender, so they INVENTED three different ways of writing the
SAME word to reflect the referent's natural gender. That is a really bad
example.

banAnna
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