I went and listened to some Mandarin, and I’m kind of seeing what the OP means. It seems like you can make out the individual syllables more clearly as a non-speaker of Chinese then you could as a non-speaker of, say, Russian. So by “distinct from each other” the OP didn’t mean just “distinct” but “clearly distinct even to a non-speaker of the language.”
And I think your proposed explanation makes a lot of sense. It would cause each syllable to be more clearly set off from other syllables.
Is that a genuine etymology, or is it a supposition/mnemonic?
Anyway, “siu sum” are the characters used on warning roadsigns, quays, ferries etc. all over Hong Kong. “Be careful”, “Beware”, or “Warning” would all be appropriate translations, IMO.
This video speaks of “little known languages like Arabic and Chinese”. In the context of the video “little known” refers to how little the languages are taught in US schools.
I have read, and heard, that US tobacco companies have been flooding rural China with free cigarettes. I hate that. :mad: The cities are already hooked, I guess.
Sorry.
mangeorge
I think a simple answer would be - if you have a language that uses different tones to change the actual meaning of a word (eg. Chinese), rather than the emotion of a word (eg. English), then it’s fair to say that you are going to be able to use a given number of monosyllabic sounds the same number of times as there are tones in the language before you run out and have to go to two syllables. So Chinese can have four or five times the number of single-syllable words that English can.
First of all, no one speaks in such a way that they would pronounce wentothe the same as went to the, not in America, anyway. The British are even more likely to shorten up single words, dropping whole syllables at times, which makes multi-syllabic words much more gliding than single syllable words strung together.
An inflected language is a language that uses different endings to differentiate among meaning, such as adding an “-ed” at the end to make the verb past tense (or past participle), or changing the vowel it ends in to denote the case of the noun. Chinese relies up on tonality and uses helping words to accomplish the same goal. It is not an inflected language.
Um, no offense, but a simple look at an English dictionary would quickly dispell this notion. You will note that the dictionary has many more words that begin with consonants than with vowels.
You’d need to check a Chinese dictionary, too, to dispel the notion. The claim isn’t that there are more English words which start with a vowel than English words which start with a consonant. The claim was that there are more English words which start with a vowel than Chinese words which start with a vowel.
It’s probably quite a bit more than that, but still a small fraction of the 10,000+ characters that exist. For example, in one of my dictionaries, only 4 out of 207 pages are words that begin with A, E, O (no characters begin with “I” or “U”), and the pages are themselves only about half full.
Well, no, the real claim is that such a larger proportion of English words start that way that it makes for a noticeable difference. But, given the relatively large proportion of English words that start with consonants, I doubt it makes a significant difference, which was my point (and this post should prove the point).
IANALinguist so hellifIknow. Broadcast mandarin is almost a seperate language. Spoken extremely precisely, fast and with no context. It’s not normal Chinese speech, if there is such a thing.
As I understand it, it isn’t so much that the sounds are limited by the characters, but that the characters are restricted to possible sounds. All languages have restrictions regarding syllable and word structure; for example, Japanese can’t have syllable-final consonants except N, Spanish can’t have word-initial consonant clusters beginning with S, Georgian permits absolutely jawbreaking consonant strings, etc.
For those languages whose writing system is syllabic (including Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, but also Cree, Inuktitut, and many other writing systems I don’t remember at the moment), the possible characters are restricted to those syllables that are possible in the language, and accordingly tend to end up restricted to languages with relatively simple syllable structure. (English, for example, has a more complicated syllable structure, and by combinatorics, such a large number of possible syllables that writing English with a syllabary would be very difficult – so it’s no surprise it never evolved one.)
So it’s not that the phonetic transliteration of foreign words into Chinese is restricted by the available characters, but that both transliteration and the available characters are restricted by the language’s inherent syllable structure rules, which would exist even if the language had no written form.
Well remember that there isn’t a Chinese Language, as such. In the west Chinese tends to refer to Mandarin or Cantonese, but linguists usually just refer to the Chinese (or Sinitic, sometimes) branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. There’re usually around 40-60 languages within the Chinese branch, depending on who you believe.
Of course, this is the point where China Guy will leap in and tell me how full of gou shi I am now . . .