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Comment by Jimmy | Hacker News Reader

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Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways.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

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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.

>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.

"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.

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