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Re: Language comparison

From:Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...>
Date:Sunday, January 9, 2005, 18:26
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 > > > >