Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

For those interested in languages... After studying Chinese (Mandarin), Esperanto has always struck me as being not all that great for a constructed language. Chinese is somewhat remarkable in that if you ignore the logographic writing system and tone-based pronunciation, the grammar is remarkably simple and clear. No grammatical gender, no conjugation, particles instead of prefixes/suffixes for basically everything important - you can pick up the basic rules in a couple days. Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language.

Some Chinese examples for fun (hoping HN supports Unicode)...

To make something plural, you just add 们. I/me is 我, so we/us is 我们. He/him is 他, so they/them is 他们. No need for separate base words - learn the normal nouns/pronouns and one particle and you're done.

Same concept for possessive, you just add 的. Using the above, my is 我的. His is 他的. Their is 他们的. Easy.

Want past tense? Don't mess with the base words; again just add a particle, in this case 了. Go is 去 so went is 去了. Eat is 吃 so ate is 吃了. Easy. Learn the verb once and it never changes.

Forms of "to be" are similarly simple - the base words again don't change, you just add the "to be" word you want and get on with your life. Want to say "I am American"? America = 美国 and person is 人, so American is literally "America person" 美国人. Am for non-adjectives is 是. "I am American" = 我是美国人. "We are American" = 我们是美国人. Easy. Compare this to something like Italian, where "I am American" = Sono americano, but "We are American" = Noi siamo americani. Absurd in comparison.

There's a lot of complexity to Mandarin grammar and syntax under the surface though.

1. A rather common grammatical gotcha in everyday Mandarin is what is the grammatical function of 把 and when do you use it? Native speakers are able to easily tell when it's correctly and incorrectly used, but for learners it's completely inscrutable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C7%8E_construction

2. Syntax is constrained by prosody, which is also extremely unintuitive to Mandarin learners. For instance, you can say 我在走路 ("I am walking [the road]") but 我在走 ("I am walking") sounds syntactically incomplete, even though it has all the semantics of 我在走路 and you have to insert the meaningless 路 for the prosody to sound correct (you would say "我在走路" even if you weren't walking on a road at all!).

3. 了 is not a past tense marker at all, you can also use it in certain non-past tense constructions, e.g. 他要吃了吗 for "Is he going to eat?" and you must omit it in certain past tense constructions, e.g. 我还没去过北京 for "I haven't been to Beijing yet."

4. 们 is not always a pluralizer: sometimes it is e.g. 同学 (classmate) -> 同学们 (classmates) is fine, but 牛 (cow) -> 牛们 (cows) sounds a little weird. 们 is much more similar in function to the Japanese 達 and means something more like "and company", e.g. you could say 李先生们 to mean "Mr. Li and company" and definitely not "Mr. Lis". In fact, most of the time, plurals in Mandarin are actually completely implicit and you have to figure it out from context!

My understanding of Mandarin is not strong, so these questions may sound terribly silly:

Is “我还没去过北京” considered past tense? It’s something that hasn’t been done, so I’m confused as to how that could be in the past.

For things like “我在走路”, is it not just needing a thing to receive the action, even if a filler? Or are there cases where you don’t need a filler?

Also, for “他要吃了吗”, is that not a statement from the past perspective of a (desired) completed action? Kind of like “我卖了这些车以后”?

I would characterize 我还没去过北京 as past perfect tense but in the negative: if "I have been to Beijing" is past perfect in the affirmative, then "I haven't been to Beijing" is past perfect in the negative. Maybe a more straightforward example I should've gone with is "我去过北京" for "I've been to Beijing".

Regarding 我在走路, yes, 路 acts as a filler for prosody purposes. If the prosody is fine, then you don't need it, e.g. 他走的很快 (swapping 我 for 他 here because it sounds kind of weird to say such a sentence about yourself) takes no noun just like the fragment 他在走, but mustn't use the filler noun 路 (他走路的很快 is incorrect).

"我卖了这些车以后" I think is more like "After I sold these cars", where "sold" is definitely past tense here. "他要吃了吗？" expresses "Is he going to eat?", where 吃 hasn't taken place in the past.

1. any example on how this is confusing? 把 is "to do to". like 你吃了饭 you ate rice vs 你把饭吃了you did eat the rice etc

2. Its grammatically correct to say "我在走" but it sounds better when its a "pair" so colloquially it uses a 词, which is a pair of characters which may just say the same thing. you could also say 我在走着 which adds no extra meaning but pads it to be a pair

3. 了 is meant for something in the past, past perfect tense is not the same as past tense, past perfect tense is about ambiguity not time.

4. 们 has the 人 radical, so its mean for humans. Otherwise you're to use counting particles instead, plus 很多 or 几 or some other particle to emphasise it.

1. The interpretation is straightforward but the construction is not: why is 他把饭吃了 grammatical but 他把我帮了 not, despite both being SOV constructions you can make SVO (他饭吃，他帮我）?

2. 走路 I agree colloquially you can say 我在走 even if it feels a bit fragmenty. I do think there’s a lot of difficulty again in the construction:

He’s walking: 他在走（路）

He walks quickly: 他走路很快/他走得很快 but not 他走很快

He walks to my home: 他走到我家 but not 他走路到我家

3. I guess this one depends on your view of past tense and if past perfect you consider a subset of past tense or separate: in any case 了 is not a past tense marker, since you can use it to talk about the future (e.g. 他要来了 for “he is about to arrive”)

4. I just wanted to point out that 们 is not a generic pluralizer and the generic pluralizer is usually implicit: besides, particles lie all the time in Chinese: half the words with the 纟 radical have nothing to do with silk!

Mandarin beginner here. On #2, my pet theory is that it's easier to disambiguate zǒulù than just zǒu in the spoken language. My teacher often says "word's character" (e.g. yī de yīshēng, 醫的醫生, probably bad example and/or just wrong, to distinguish from other characters that sound like 醫). I once calculated that there are only about 600 different sounds in Mandarin -- not many more than toki pona! -- so if you tend to pair sounds into concepts, that's a much richer pool to draw from.

> Syntax is constrained by prosody, which is also extremely unintuitive to Mandarin learners.

Definitely true, but I don't think your analysis holds. Prosody is an important part of determining when you need bisyllabic or monosyllabic words in Chinese which doesn't have an equivalent in English, but you don't fill it in with what are effectively nonsense words.

> you have to insert the meaningless 路 for the prosody to sound correct (you would say "我在走路" even if you weren't walking on a road at all!)

Not really. 路 still has some semantic content. E.g. if you're walking about indoors in your house it sounds weird to say "走路." I do agree that a bisyllabic word sounds better there. Other context and emphasis could also make 我在走 work (I am walking for example), but often times that ties back to prosody as you say.

> 们 is not always a pluralizer

It is generally a pluralizer with the constraint that it must be applied for people. That's why it sounds weird applied to cows. 李先生们 could actually mean "Mr. Lis" (i.e. a group of men all with that surname, or some slang usage of "Mr. Li" in the same way you might say "they're a bunch of Benedict Arnolds"). Indeed that was my first instinct when you wrote that phrase. I don't understand what you mean by "and company." That's not how I would understand 李先生们.

Also historically, 们 used to be an even more general people pluralizer that could be applied to demonstratives. E.g. in Song Dynasty Mandarin 那们 is perfectly acceptable and means "those people." It has become more restricted in modern usage.

> In fact, most of the time, plurals in Mandarin are actually completely implicit and you have to figure it out from context!

This is true.

> Not really. 路 still has some semantic content. E.g. if you're walking about indoors in your house it sounds weird to say "走路." I do agree that a bisyllabic word sounds better there. Other context and emphasis could also make 我在走 work (I am walking for example), but often times that ties back to prosody as you say.

That’s a good point, and I think if you wanted to talk about walking indoors the prosody requirements make it even more difficult (我在我家里走来走去？)

> I don't understand what you mean by "and company." That's not how I would understand 李先生们.

I’ve definitely seen writings like “毛泽东先生们” but perhaps the usage is a little more archaic than I thought! I do think you’re right in that the usage really is just a pluralizer for people rather than my wackier definition.

> 毛泽东先生们

This means something closer to "Mao Zedongists" rather than "Mao and company." For example "毛泽东本人的看法与其他毛泽东们略有不同" works, which doesn't quite work if 毛泽东们 is "Mao and company." It's still a pluralizer, it just so happens that proper names can be modifiers in Chinese.

Composition over inheritance, not only useful in CS but also in linguistics. It makes sense not because both use languages but because both manipulate non-physical abstraction and thus come up with similar paradigms.

Composition is akin to agglutinized languages where there is a base and affixes are added to convey concepts like subject, object, plurality etc, such as Chinese or Thai.

Inheritance is akin to fusional languages, like Latin, where each word is a root and changes (or declines) based on the aforementioned concepts by for example changing the word itself.

I've always thought that English is like the PHP* of natural languages: ubiquitous, borrows from every other language, and wildly inconsistent.

*I cut my teeth on PHP3 and haven't used it in over a decade, and I hear it's gotten a lot better.

modern written chinese was designed and constructed as a lingua franca for hundreds of different cultures and languages within china, so the grammar is as minimal as it could be without being ambiguous. It is, in my opinion, the most ambitious conlang in history.

I believe esperanto to be a similar exercise but english is a far easier and more flexible language

> modern written chinese was designed and constructed as a lingua franca for hundreds of different cultures and languages within china, so the grammar is as minimal as it could be without being ambiguous.

No written Mandarin was not invented in the 20th century. There was some pronunciation and orthographic standardization, but written Mandarin has been the lingua franca of at least the literate class since at least the Song Dynasty, maybe even earlier, and written Mandarin itself extends back to the Tang Dynasty.

Here's for example here's the Southern Song philosopher Zhu Xi complaining about "kids these days" in written Mandarin (these are his original words, not translated into modern Mandarin), with modern Mandarin spelling marked in square brackets.

> 今学者不见有奋发底[的]意思，只是如此悠悠地过；今日见他是如此，明日见他亦是如此。《朱子语类·朱子十八》

And here's the Northern Song Cheng brothers complaining about Buddhism (again in the original)

> 佛学只是以生死恐动人，可怪二千年来无一人觉此，是被他恐动也[this 也 is purely for effect, same as it is occasionally done in modern Mandarin]！《二程遗书·卷一》

> Interlingua is (by design) much closer to this simplicity in a Western-based language.

If you like Interlingua for its design, have you heard about the Interlingue? It's a lot like Interlingua, but will less exceptions. Interlingue is also called Occidental.

Nice to see a comment on Occidental already. That's the one I've used and supported for 10+ years now.

Vietnamese is similar. Aside from the pronunciation it’s a fairly easy language to learn.

My Achilles heel for learning Chinese is typing and reading the characters, and I suspect they are two sides of the same coin - if I had to make the characters I'd be much better at memorizing them. All the learn-Chinese apps appear to gloss over this by letting you drag and drop the letters when writing.

How do you type Simplified Chinese on a phone? On a Linux/Mac desktop? I know it has something to do with an IME but this is one area of i18n that has never been explained to me.

There are a few input methods, but as a native English speaker and complete novice, I found that pinyin input was the easiest for me. Basically you type the pinyin and you get suggestions for characters. Super easy if you know the pronunciation.

Hmm. On one hand I like dodging having to learn to write it - I can memorize wǒ and ren. On the other hand I'm still stuck having to learn the characters, ha. What do native speakers prefer typing with?

I'm never going to be a Chinese author, I just need to navigate chip documentation and message boards.

pinyin because remembering the exact stroke is a pain, plus pinyin is meant for rapid conversation.

Imo Skritter is the best iOS app for this.

Similar to Thai, a lot of particles.

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