Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

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.

I have heard that the distinction in written chinese between <ta> `he'
and <ta> `she' is a recent innovation, perhaps inspired by foreign
languages.

--
Anton Sherwood  --  http://www.ogre.nu/

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