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Re: The pitfall of Chinese/Mandarin

From:Anton Sherwood <bronto@...>
Date:Friday, December 7, 2001, 10:11
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/

Replies

H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
laokou <laokou@...>
Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...>