mercedo's Journal: Two Signs of World Language

That is "there's no inflection in their words." and "they contain extremely enriched vocaburary." Both Chinese and English show a sign of world language.

English shows, in many aspects, a sign of good language. Probably proto-English used to have lots of paradigm change -inflection as other Indo-European language do. Nowadays we know Latin has more inflected words than English, but still English is an inflectional language.

On the other hands, Chinese is not inflectional. We say it 'analytical', for example, in English we say, ' In the past I went to the park.' or just 'I went to the park.' In Chinese, we say ' In the past we go to the park.' So if it's in present, we just say, 'I go to the park.' There's no inflection in Chinese. Then we noticed if we put the adverbal phrase like 'in the past', we don't have to use the past form 'went' to indicate the action was taken place in the past.

More and more English has been enriched by embracing many words - especially nouns from many other languages, less and less the inflection of English words is. I mean English words have been more rigid -fixed than before, because it is easier for non-native to learn not-inflected words.

Believe me now both world languages show strickingly similar syntax -both Chinese and English.

Intonation

[eglamkowski]

Chinese is a tonal language, which makes it difficult for people who don't speak a tonal language as their native tongue. They've done the studies with brain scans and everything to show that speaking or listening to chinese requires both sides of the brain, while english only requires half the brain. It is literally, physiologically more difficult to speak chinese than english.

Which is why far more chinese speak english than english people speak chinese. English is easier for a chinese person to learn t

Re:Intonation

[mercedo]

Completely correct. I was always amazed to see how Chinese people are very quick to learn to speak English.

Chinese is tonal, that is very unique to Chinese only. The pronounciation of our tongue is very similar to that of Spanish, not tonal at all so basically Chinese was very hard for us to pronounce and adopt. Since China had been very dominant power in all Asia, our national tongue was so affected by Chinese influence -about 80% of vacabulary was from Chinese, though, since there's no tonal distinction i

Re:Intonation

[kesuki]

por favor espanol, does in deed have R and L differences, perhaps you meant the V and W being the same in slovic speaking regions. eg: i've come to vash the vindows.

but yeah there are aqward situations love and rove* are both english words... but for the most part it's something that native speakers can puzzle out, english has several dialects in various regions of the world.... so

* = normally suffixed, 'roved, roving, rover' very few people use 'rove' which still generates confusion with loved, loving, a

Re:Intonation

[mercedo]

por favor espanol, I mean there is a distinction in R&L in spelling, but they don't pronounce them differently. I learned Spanish back in my early twenties, so I am sure.

Re:Intonation

[eglamkowski]

My wife learned french before learning english. She has NO problem with r vs. l in french, but has great difficulty with them in english. It's really weird.

Re:Intonation

[mercedo]

When it comes to pronounciation, English prides itself on abundant of sounds, there's no distinction in th and t in German, Latin people don't pronounce h sound, etc. The more the sounds one language has, the more it can distinguish lots of meanings, so this also indicates the degree of development as a tool of communication.

When English were able to get rid of some phononyms like pool, can, mean, right, light, the time is nigh for English to be true only one world language.

Re:Intonation

[kesuki]

well I guess i'm used to hearing mexican speakers Who DO diferentiate the R and L sounds... i've never been to spain, but my sister has.

Re:Intonation

[eglamkowski]

I've been wondering for a while about other asian languages being tonal - Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.
I've no idea. So apparently Japanese is not tonal...

Re:Intonation

[StalinsNotDead]

Here's an article you may find interesting. [ucsd.edu]

It's somewhat on topic, too. It's about a study wherein a number of sinophonic and anglophonic children who had begun musical training at about the same age and compared the numbers of those who developed perfect pitch. A higher percentage of the Chinese speakers had perfect pitch.

Re:Intonation

[mercedo]

China had been long regarded as a Sleeping Giant. Throughout human history, China played one of the main roles in human development. Because it is Chinese characters - about 5000 ideograms that made China one of the early civilisations, and at the same time it is Chinese characters that deterred the development of modern times China.

As I mentioned, they learn to speak English surprisingly quickly. Bo I Knee

Bo-I I-Love Knee-You, superficial difference is enormous but basically both two languages are very