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Apr. 21, 2005 Believe it or not, the Chinese language has some good features, but these are far outweighed by the bad features, as probably everybody, even the Chinese, realize. As for the good features, for one thing Chinese pronouns are simplicity itself. 1.) wô--I, me, myself. 2.) nî--you, yourself. 3.) ta--he, she, him, her, himself, herself. 4.) wômen--we, us, ourselves. 5.) nîmen--you, yourselves. 6.) tamen--they, them, themselves. One could spend months and years getting proficient at manipulating pronouns in English, Spanish, German, Greek or Russian, but in Chinese you can get them down pat in five minutes. Another plus is that Chinese has no grammatical number or gender, and no conjugations, declensions or comparisons. Each word is invariable: mâ--horse, horses; qù--go, goes, went; méiyôu--don't have, doesn't have, didn't have; shu--book, books. Of course, number, gender, case, tense, degree and ordinality can be expressed by addition of modifiers: qù le--went; tì èr--second; nî de--your; qi bî mâ--seven horses. The upshot is that Chinese is completely free of the numerous tables of irregularities that encumber European and other languages. Chinese is also very compact. Often one can say with five or six short words what it would take eight or ten longer words in some other language: nî xiê de hàn zì hén hâo--The Chinese characters that you have written are very good. At one time, it was taught that every Chinese word consists of one syllable. Today it is widely recognized that often two, three or four characters, taken together, should be regarded as a single word: qìche--car; túshuguân--library; luòtóu--camel; xíngzuò--constellation. Thus, 'túshuguân' (library) consists of three characters and means 'map (and) book court', but should really be thought of as a compound word instead of three separate words. If you count all the established compounds in existence in the language, the Chinese vocabulary is immense, and allows for the expression of very minute subtleties, but, of course, learning the vocabulary would take several lifetimes. The most obvious, but not most difficult, of the bad features of Chinese is the writing, which, however, is even worse than you may imagine. Today a comprehensive Chinese dictionary has about 7500 characters, and supposedly the average college graduate in China knows at least 6000. But if you know 3000, you can read a newspaper with 98% comprehension, especially if you don't mind looking up an occasional character. The rub is that the Communist regime simplified most Chinese characters, but the simplifications are not observed in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and the US, where traditional characters are still in vogue. The upshot is that if you want to be able to read anything published in Chinese, you must learn both the traditional characters and the simplifications. But it gets even worse. There are also cursive forms of Chinese, messy longhand scripts in varying degrees of divergence from the printed script. I consider them absolutely impossible. Even some of the semi-cursive and ornamental scripts pose a real monkey's puzzle to the outsider. An even more vexing problem is the number of homonyms in Chinese. English has homonyms too, as for example: rood, rude, rued; bight, bite, byte; sight, cite, site. In Chinese, though, a word may have many homonyms. Words like 'xiàng', 'liàng', 'gong', etc., as spoken words, have, on the average, six or seven entirely different meanings denoted by entirely different characters. Thus, 'gong' has these meanings: forearm, respectful, public, male, work, attack, achievement, bow (for arrows), palace. The most notorious is 'yì', which has about 60 meanings. So, whereas the written language is overdetermined, involving much more effort than would be necessary to convey intended meanings, the spoken language is underdetermined, having been reduced to the point where it just barely suffices to convey information, with the result that sentences are often ambiguous, and, for an outsider, just impossible: mèi mèi méi yào yào--My little sister didn't want medicine. Another very annoying complication in Chinese is so-called classifiers. There are a few of these in English too, as in "six head of cattle" and "three pieces of furniture". We can't say "six cattle" or "six furniture". But this occasional oddity in English is universal in Chinese. Thus we have, in translation, "one root of book", "one hand of song", "two sticks of pillar", "three spaces of kitchen", "five seats of mountain", etc. Each noun has its correct classifier, which, then, of course, you must know if you want to express number. Chinese, of course, has no capital letters. Some characters are reserved exclusively for names, but most names are formed of the same characters that are used as common nouns. For example, a typical personal name, like "mâ hóng guò", which we would render as "Ma Hongguo", could also be taken to mean "horse great land", whatever that might mean in context. Sometimes you can waste a lot of time trying to figure out the meaning of a phrase, only to realize eventually that it's a name. In some books published in the past, name characters were marked with lines, under or beside the characters, depending on whether the text was in rows or columns, and this helped immensely. But fewer than 1% of Chinese books have this feature. Chinese can be written in columns, top to bottom, or in rows, either left to right or right to left. In China, left-to-right is the norm. In Singapore, Hong Kong and Taiwan, top-to-bottom is the norm, but headlines read right-to-left. I've even seen left-to-right and right-to-left in the same advertisement or sign. In spite of all this, the Chinese language is a fascinating, if impractical, phenomenon. ------------ About the author Thomas Keyes: I have written two books: A SOJOURN IN ASIA (non-fiction) and A TALE OF UNG (fiction), neither published so far. I have studied languages for years and traveled extensively on five continents. Email: udikeyes@yahoo.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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