Re: Language comparison

Hi!

Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> writes:
>...
> little different from how people actually speak. You tend to drop and
> abbreviate more things when you speak I think, while writing is often a
> more formal medium so more tends to be retained.
I don't think this is true for Mandarin Chinese.  Due to the ambiguity
of spoken syllables, I suspect spoken Mandarin to be longer in
general.  Written syllables quite unambiguously define what you mean,
so you could abbreviate more.

E.g. 'wei3yu2' means 'thuna'.

If you used 'wei3' in spoken language, it would not be easy to
disambiguate that, while the character for this 'wei3' is perfectly
recognisable -- in fact, it even contains the radical 'fish' which is
thus used twice when writing 'wei3yu3'.

Korean and Japanese probably have similar characteristics.  A Korean
told me it would be quite fatal to write law texts phonetically
without totally restructuring them, because only by using Chinese
characters the text is unambiguous.  This would be an argument against
using only Hangul.

Spoken Cantonese OTOH, seems to be so concise that it is quite
unbelievable to me -- when listening to Hongkong movies I cannot
believe how much information is transported by their mumbled,
ultrashort utterances. :-))) But maybe this is just typical for the
genre I was watching...

**Henrik

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