@nt

so interesting to learn a non indo-european language I grew up speaking Russian, then learned English and more recently some German. though there are crazy grammar differences and obviously quite different vocabulary, if you're only ever exposed to indo-european languages you can take a bunch of stuff for granted. for example, the idea of words and sentences. we expect concepts to be expressed as words (sequeces of characters). we expect to change the tone of how we speak to signify that something is a question or exclamation. I'm learning Chinese and it's breaking many of these things that I thought were global/universal. for example there's no real concept of words, no clean mapping onto indo-european words. instead, you glue together symbols that have individual meanings (e.g. 女-female + 人-person) to get 女人-woman. Another example: 生-to produce, 气-air = 生气 to get angry (to puff?). It's actually quite logical and even the largest compounds like 兄弟姐妹 (older brother + younger brother + older sister + younger sister = sibling) aren't so hard to pronounce because each symbol has a corresponding 1-syllable pronunciation, and Chinese syllables are even faster to pronounce than e.g. most western. another example is building sentences. in all the languages I've spoken before you make something a sentence by changing word order and adding a rising, inquisitive tone. In Chinese it seems to be quite easy to make questions by adding special particles to the end of the sentence. You also don't have to change verbs to talk about the past or the future, instead you have the verb e.g. 健身 - to work out (健-strong, 身-body) and you can add 在+健身 (在-in/at/during, 健身-work out) to mean "working out". You can use this character also for places to say that you are "at" them. There's also a symbol 了 that signifies that something has been completed (e.g. 健身了- worked out, or 'strong body achieved' lol), and it has a sort of different philosophical flavour to having a past tense in an indo-european language, though it means basically the same thing. super fascinating to pop the linguistic hood of a society though learning the language. it feels like a completely different side of the world that developed its own language from different initial starting conditions, and landed on a very different optimal configuration and essentially different conceptual building blocks. I'm not surprised that this resulted in such a great cultural chasm between e.g. the european and chinese culture. though at the same time, different languages arm different people with the tools needed to express an essentially constant human condition that shares a lot of things regardless of location/culture.

5 replies

1 recast

21 reactions