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Comment by Htsthbjig | Hacker News Reader

I see this a lot in China.

The monolingual people in China that only speak different versions of Chinese have serious difficulty with abstract ideas and concepts because of their language.

Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways. It has not evolved, yes you could understand today a 4.000 year old writing but at what cost?

It is a socking experience, because as a European I take evolution in languages for granted.

In some ways, Europeans took the Steve Jobs approach of using new tech, outdating the old, even in language, like Carmack saying f&ck you if you wanted to play his games with only a CPU, and then forcing you to buy newer and newer GPUs.

It is hard to read without training things written even 200-400 years ago, but we have powers that Chinese don't have, like using tones for emotions(we used tones for the language 4.000 years ago), flexibility, abstractions.

But you can only see those if you speak multiple languages.

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Part of your comment may be partially true, but the truth is likely much deeper and subtler. I'd say much of it is a bit Western bias. Abstractions come in different flavors and are tied to worldview. Most people in the West (except learners of Asian traditions) also have problems understanding concepts like Tao, Buddhism's Nirvana, Confucius' filial piety even when they know the words for them. A similar thing may happen in China which compelled the comment of yours.

(My native language is Thai, which is somewhat related to Chinese, and both share many characteristics. I also know a bit of Chinese and Japanese. I think a lot about languages in my job, NLU research)

English might have an advantage representing Western-style abstraction, not because of its inherent linguistic nature, but the culture surrounding its uses. China, Thailand, and many other countries in Asia just started its industrialization recently and one can argue that they have not gone through a European-style Enlightenment. Many of the Western abstract concepts in Chinese and Thai are imported, rather than invented, and thus have shallower roots and limited penetration in societies. Less educated and traditionally educated people might not wholly understand them even if they have heard them mentioned in passing in a documentary or foreign news. Neologisms are invented to represent these concepts, often fairly easily since compound words are in common use in both; but for most people to deeply understand them is a different issue.

So my question is what groups of monolingual population in China do you interact with and draw conclusions from? If they are not the new elites who had much education in Western tradition and worldview, their issues with Western abstract concepts may not really be of linguistic nature, but related to worldview.

Note on representing emotions: Thai and Chinese use tones for meaning, but they have particle words for emotions and social cues. These are more expressive in writing compared to English. Spoken voice usually comes with emotional tones (pitch and loudness vary in these languages too) so people can almost always tell the emotions if the speaker does not hide them. So I disagree with your point about emotional expressiveness.

"Westerners also have problems understanding Eastern concepts like Tao, Buddhism's Nirvana, Confucius' filial piety even when they know the words for them."

Exactly. I'm talking about people that only speak one language, and had not been exposed to different worldviews.

But you talk about Confucious, Tao or Buddhism... How many years those concepts have? Where are Asian Kant, Ortega or Nietzsche.

In China there is another issue and is that the power bureaucracy simply killed their Kants, as they were dangerous for population control, but that is another issue.

My native languages are Spanish,then learned German and French. But French is very similar to Spanish, German very similar to English, and languages become easier the more you speak.

You go to England, you see Churches, not very different from Spanish or French ones.

In Asia there is another core set of values, but there is a world of difference between China and India.

I don't speak Thai, but I had traveled to Thailand and in my view they have very little in common in the way of thinking and expression. In my view Thailand is more similar to India than China.

This is a highly political issue, it is like saying to Catalan nationalist they are Spanish, because even when they are very similar, they don't want to.

You seem surprisingly confident in your knowledge of classic Chinese literature, for someone who doesn't know Chinese.

monolingual people in China

Arguably most people understand at least a local dialect, Mandarin and some Cantonese from pop songs. All young people study English also, and many are from cultural groups with additional languages.

serious difficulty with abstract ideas and concepts...

Where did you get that idea? China is one of the world's foremost centers of mathematics, which is pure abstraction.

...because of their language.

Where did you get that idea? Classical Chinese in particular is widely lauded as a perfect language of poetry and thus abstraction.

As a 15 year China veteran who translates classical Chinese, I can't help but feel you have no idea what you are talking about and have come to a negative perspective on the society around you. There are some difficulties in education in China, but the communist period had far more to do with that than Sapir-Whorf. Maybe you need a holiday.

I am a native English speaker, and only a beginner learner of Mandarin (early primary level plus a set of technical words related to my work).

Are you sure you are not conflating monolingual Chinese speakers with the rural or less educated Chinese demographic? Going purely from my own experience of learning the language and interacting with educated Chinese in the major cities, both the language and the people are perfectly capable of abstract ideas and concepts. It is also uncommon to find an educated yet monolingual Chinese speaker.

In fact, there are studies that the tonal nature of the spoken language as well the complex structure of the written characters improve the ability to learn abstract concepts such as occur in mathematics[0].

Finally, regarding classical versus modern written Chinese, while someone who is fluent in modern Chinese can read the individual characters of classic Chinese, unless they have studied it seperately, they will be unable to make much sense of the sentences. Classical Chinese is extremely concise and relies much more on single character words, rather than the multi-character words used in modern Chinese. A lot of the characters in classical Chinese also take on archaic meanings no longer actively associated with that character.

[0] http://languageboat.com/2013/09/07/scientists-claim-learning...

I am curious about what abstract idea referred here exactly, and your level of fluency of your Chinese to convey such abstract idea to the monolingual Chinese audience.

I heard a lot on the internet about how Chinese as a language hinder the modernization of the country itself, however, every time there is only proposition without evidence to back it up.

>Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways.

This is really interesting. Could you expand on this? Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system? I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words (Japanese handles this by having a system of phonetic spelling that's used alongside traditional Chinese characters).

And before anyone thinks it's absurd that one language could be better at expressing abstract ideas than others, imagine the limit case: a language with only one word. Pretty useless, right? Obviously no natural language is that limited, but that doesn't mean that a range of variation can't exist. It's an empirical matter whether it does.

That hypothetical language wouldn't be more abstract so much as vague and context-dependent which isn't the same thing.

When a language better handles abstraction, that means it's better at expressing common elements across a variety of domains without having to refer to particulars. For example, being able to talk about a relation between some X and Y without having to keep inflecting based on whether X means animals or houses.

One abstraction-helping construction in English is being able to go from "that thing is red" to the concept of redness.

I don't know if English is better or worse at this than other languages except that I remember anecdotes about it being harder to express sentences with unusual referents in Japanese eg "am I wearing the jacket?" vs "are you wearing the jacket.

> That hypothetical language wouldn't be more abstract so much as vague and context-dependent which isn't the same thing.

Well, the hypothetical language has one word, so it wouldn't be able to express much of anything (besides that one thing). I was just giving an example of how it's conceivable that languages could vary in expressive power, regardless of whether they actually do or not.

>I remember anecdotes about it being harder to express sentences with unusual referents in Japanese eg "am I wearing the jacket?" vs "are you wearing the jacket.

I'm not entirely qualified to speak on this, since at this point in my studies my Japanese skills are still relatively poor, but:

There are natural, direct translations of both "am I wearing the jacket?" and "are you wearing the jacket?" in Japanese. Contrary to what some might say, Japanese has all of the pronouns that are available in English (and quite a few more, because of its extensive built-in politeness system). Where Japanese differs from English in this regard is that it allows you to drop pronouns (or rather, the sentence subject altogether) in places where English requires you to specify a subject, and it sounds stilted and unnatural in Japanese to specify a subject when it should be clear from context. So although you can say both "am I wearing the jacket?" and "are you wearing the jacket?", it's much more common to hear "wearing the jacket?" This can introduce ambiguity in some situations, but most of the time people understand each other perfectly well.

Other opportunities for ambiguity: there is a common verb that means both "to finish" and "to do accidentally", depending on the context, and a verb conjugation which means both "to make someone do something" and "to let someone do something", also depending on the context. Such ambiguities are often exploited by writers and comedians, but again, they basically never impede normal communication.

"Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system?"

All the above. In everything. There are no tenses in Mandarin for example. The writing system is hell. Most Chinese have different levels of analphabetism because it has so many words.

"I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words"

They have different transcription methods for that. They standardized in Pinyin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

It is not for loan words, but THEIR OWN ones. They need this in order to know how something sounds!!. Most of them use memory, but you study pinyin if you are educated.

In fact, the same Chinese character sounds different in different Chinese languages, and even in the same language in different parts of the country!.

Chinese does not use formal tenses but they add words to tell time when it's useful to. The same can be said about the lack of grammar for social relationships and politeness levels in English compared to Japanese. Would you say that it is English's weakness?

Languages are rooted in culture and express by default what the culture values. One can claim that an aspect of a culture is more amenable to modernization than another, but to say one language is better than another in an absolute sense does not seem logical.

"The same can be said about the lack of grammar for social relationships and politeness levels in English compared to Japanese. Would you say that it is English's weakness?"

Yes. :-)

My native language is not English. So I don't believe English is perfect by any means, because I know other languages are better for other things.

For example, English way of writing is terrible for expressing sounds. Japanese or the korean ways are much better Or Spanish by the way.

Any country has a propaganda system in order to make people believe their system is the best, and you can't fight against it.

I know there is no way I could convince a Chinese person that the language they speak is outdated, because it is not rational fact but emotional. There are no rational facts against nationalistic dogmas people are feed since they are born.

In fact if it is the only language someone speaks this person is heavily invested in believing their system is the best.

If you go to North Korea all people there feel pity for the rest of the world, mostly because they don't know better.

"but to say one language is better than another in an absolute sense does not seem logical."

I had never said that one language is better than another in absolute sense.

I have said that Chinese is outdated. I have said that it is a better language for reading ancient works, but it has not evolved like other languages.

This is not something I say, this is something Chinese emperors' counselors agreed while having knowledge of other cultures, and their own(there were alphabetic systems inside China Like Mongol's). It was a conscious decision not to evolve the language, because of different reasons.

It is certainly not politically correct in China just the idea that if you force children to learn thousands of symbols in order to properly read, or the order of hundreds of groups in order to properly write, that there are simpler, more evolved ways.

Just comparing a system that requires high levels memory and five years of learning with another that requires one for doing the same is not something I wanted to do.

>For example, English way of writing is terrible for expressing sounds. Japanese or the korean ways are much better Or Spanish by the way.

Just wanted to point out that the style of syllabary that Japanese uses wouldn't be practical for English. Japanese has around 150 possible syllables, English has almost 16,000 [1].

[1] http://semarch.linguistics.fas.nyu.edu/barker/Syllables/inde...

I would say that not requiring politeness grammar is a major strength of English.

Same goes for not requiring articles being a strength of the Japanese language and many other [mostly non European] languages.

I'm less persuaded that tense isn't usually a useful distinction, but the irregularity of tense is a weakness of English (as is its vestigial subjunctive that most speakers barely ever use)

English has politeness grammar, dude; it is just highly nonstandard dialectical.

>> There are no tenses in Mandarin for example

Yes and No. You can explicitly state the time if that is what you need.

>> Most Chinese have different levels of analphabetism because it has so many words

I am sure not every people can remember all the words from the dictionary, which in the age of internet, is constantly evolving every day. In fact, this is one advantage of Chinese, you don't need to remember words one by one. Instead, you learn characters, the basic building blocks of word, many of which have its own semantic meanings.Then you can infer the meaning of a 'word'---a combination of characters on the fly. The core character set is about 3,000, and with that you could read newspaper without too much hassle.

>>"I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words"

Depends. Some words are imported as it is, e.g. 'NBA'/'DNA'/'MapReduce'. Some are being translated, like

'Frontend' -> Front(前)+end(端) -> 前端

'Memory' -> Internal(内) storage(存) -> 内存

'Compiler' -> Put-together(编) translation(译) machine(器) -> 编译器

I would say the direct-import kind of loan words is more popular right now, ever since the era of internet, because there is simply no abundant time to come up with a good translation, and more people are familiar and comfortable with English nowadays.

>Could you expand on this?

Chinese is objectively quite bad in terms of language design. It's elaborated on extensively in this rather lengthy article: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

The title is somewhat misleading. It is the Chinese writing system that's hard (in general). Standard Chinese, the spoken language, is only hard for native speakers of unrelated language, which is hardly surprising.

I have to strenuously disagree with your description of China (a country I have visited, and a country where many of my friends grew up) and of Chinese (a language I have been speaking since 1975). No, no, no, and no, much of what you say is just flat wrong and it makes me wonder how closely you are observing the environment you live in.

First of all, many people in China that only speak different versions of Chinese are not best described as "monolingual," because they know two languages (Modern Standard Chinese and whatever the local Sinitic language, that is "Chinese dialect is) and have to grapple with language differences in their everyday lives. Southern Min and Mandarin (the two Sinitic languages I speak best, with plenty of monololingual native speakers, but with plenty of bilingual speakers of both) are as different from each other as English is from German or as French is from Spanish. They are cognate languages, yes, but they express many of the same ideas differently both as to vocabulary and as to grammar. I also speak some Cantonese, and I can give an example of language differences between Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin). Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

You write, Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways. It has not evolved, yes you could understand today a 4.000 year old writing but at what cost?

You may have heard some Chinese person say to you that Chinese writing has changed so little that today's literate Chinese people can read 4,000-year-old writing, but there are two problems with that statement. First of all, writing in Chinese is only about 3,000 years old. (Writing originated first in the ancient Fertile Crescent and in Egypt, and only later in China, independently.) Nobody can read 4,000-year-old writings in Chinese, because there aren't any to read. Second, anyone who can read ancient writings in Chinese can read them (as I can) because they have specifically studied the differing vocabulary (see above) and differing grammar (see above) of ancient Chinese written in Chinese characters. Yes, Westerners can learn Latin as a language for reading old books and inscriptions on monuments, and very little has changed about the shape of letters of the Roman alphabet (what I'm typing right now) in a long time. But that doesn't mean that languages of the West that use the Roman alphabet don't experience linguistic change. In fact, ALL languages everywhere experience linguistic change, whether the speakers of those languages admit it or not.

we have powers that Chinese don't have, like using tones for emotions

The statement here seems to say that Chinese doesn't use sentence intonation to indicate the speaker's mood or tone. I can assure that it does, and I wonder how well someone can speak Chinese who has never noticed that.

Yeah. I agree in most of what you say.

I have only lived in China for 5 years, and most of what I know from China is deeply limited as is such a big country. In particular I have only lived in big cities, not in deep China.

I travel frequently there and could talk to people and read most of the common symbols, but I am not native.

About the 4000 years old, it is a lapsus thinking on Egipt, and then the voice recognition system repeating it. I wanted to express my opinion fast without thinking much about it so I did not spend too much on HN, and it was a big error as at the end I have to spend a lot of time just clearing some of my sloppy writing.

"The statement here seems to say that Chinese doesn't use sentence intonation to indicate the speaker's mood or tone."

True. I did not intended to say that but my intent was talking about the range of emotion in tone, putting for example Italian as a 10 of expression in tones, Chinese is a 3, because of the necessity of using tones for language itself.

In fact this is one of the big issues for me expressing in Mandaring.

PS: BTW I was born way way after you started learning Chinese.

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