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Comment by SwiftyBug | Hacker News Reader

It's so amazing how those languages are completely different from western languages. You can see the people in this video inferring multiple, sometimes totally unrelated meanings from the same set of symbols. That is not possible at all in western languages. You either understand a sequence of characters or you don't. One can debate the contextual and abstract meaning of a sentence, but not it's absolute meaning.

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While I agree with your admiration of the versatility and power of CJK languages, I don't think the particular aspect you're commenting on is specific to those. You see this in many western languages too. Here's an example in English. Take the word "pot". It can be a container, it can be a plant, it can be a drug, it can be a dish (pot roast), it can be an electronic component (short for potentiometer). Things can "go to pot". Someone might be told to "shit or get off the pot" when they are indecisive. The meaning depends on context. Some of these meanings are related, some are not. Yet it's all the same word. It has some meanings that are shared across different anglophone cultures, and some that are specific to one or several. There are many other words like that, and you find things like this in almost every language family.

For example, “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” is a valid English sentence.

Syntactically defensible, sure. But what anglophone not seeking to deliberately confuse an interlocutor would call bison from upstate New York "Buffalo buffalo"? What action could such bison perform on other bison that can reasonably be construed as "buffaloing"?

Semantics and pragmatics are part of the language, too.

Can you explain better?

There are a lot of false pairs in Latin based/Romance languages.

As an example if you can read the sequence b-u-r-r-o you get "burro", that means butter in Italian but ass/donkey in Spanish.

In the first segment of the video, the Chinese for "Ramen" is two characters pronounced "Ra" "Mian". They're being used for sound, rather than meaning (although mian is often used as shorthand for "miantiao" = noodle, so it's a nice double entendre).

Some of the Japanese speakers wound up interpreting the characters by meaning rather than sound, leading to hilarious translations.

拉麺 is "pulled noodles", which is meaning, not sound. 麺 on its own already means noodles, but in China it has become ambiguous because it was simplified down to 面, which also means "face". (And that's the sole meaning in Japanese for the character, hence the confusion in the video.)

That's the key difference between ideograms (based on pictures of combination of pictograms) and sound-based writings (alphabet and the like).

Ideograms have a major drawback, however. To represent most of things you need in daily life, you need thousands of them.

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