Re: Language comparison

A friend of mine who watches manga frequently often remarks that a few
words of Japanese often becomes lots and lots of English sentences
subtitled, and many words of Japanese sometimes become just a couple in
English. I guess it's just a case of semantic divisions being different
between languages. :)

>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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