>All languagues are equal. They just achieve the same thing in different ways. Trust me, I'm a linguist.This is bullshit. Tonal languages are retarded. English with its multiple meanings of "-ing" and "un-", and its heavy dependence on prosody and punctuation for conveying meaning, is also retarded. Prosody and punctuation are both crutches of a hopelessly mutilated language. Latin and Greek are superior.
>>24744918you're right. this is certified bullshit. there are sound you cannot achieve with certain languages
>>24744918Studying chinese is like studying multiple languages.1) written chinese difficult enough due to iconography and being able to write it is almost learning a whole writing system again!2) spoken and understood chinese is the most tedious repetitive sounds that get completely lost in linger sentencesWritten and spoken chinese are not the same. Chinese characters in Japanese dont make japanese harder to understand. But chinese characters do nothing to help make understanding spoken chinese easier. Its absolutely awful where you basically already need to know what the other person is gonna say so when he says it you recognize it already. You cant throw in a random word and expect it to be understood. Instead the whole sentence is basically like a single word in Indo-European languages. Theres a good reason chinese need subtitles in every medium if tv, movies or music because the “out of context” nature makes their language not understandable if its more than a catch phrase or highly distinct daily phrases. A terrible language with the dumbest spiken grammar. Its like listening to africans speak with their lack of grammar, basically no prepositions few adverbs and always implied words that get omitted.
>>24744918True. Latin and greek texts never have commas or semi colons in them.
>>24744925My point is that changing tone to convey grammatical features is inferior to inflection. I don't care about some special sounds, means nothing to philosophical and other intellectual discourse.
Tonal languages allow for a greater economic of speech. And Chinese, both Mandarin and Cantonese (which is even more tonal), have a very simple grammar. Classically there isn’t even gender or plural and no modification when word is used as a noun or a verb or an adverb. The tones plus the grammar mean that you can say a lot with just a few syllables. Greek by contrast relies on a lot of syllables, the words are very long. This isn’t necessarily better or worse just a character of the languages, the length of Greek is musical with all the vowels but it is also much more difficult to be understated, terse and deadpan, which apparently many Greeks saw as a positive quality in the Spartans As a final point: Ancient Greek *does* use tones and we use tonal notation in rendering it, which you would know if you studied it enough
>>24744962Recent invention. They didn't have it originally. Latin and Greek are not dependent on punctuation to convey meaning unlike the mutilated language English.
>>24744958And my point is a superior language works well for intellectual discourse whether written or spoken, not just for one of them, if it only works for one it's inferior.
>>24744970English didn’t have it originally either
>>24744967> Classically there isn’t even gender or plural and no modification when word is used as a noun or a verb Thats still the fucking same today and no tone shift exists between the verb, noun or adjective of the same fucking word.Take a chinese sentence and have chatgpt or google translate it and it has to guess the Subject personal pronoun and whether plural or singular in everything. Thats retarded.Accents in Greek, stresses in Latin are not for clarity either. It is the melody and spoken manner of the people. Totally arbitrary for a group and not semantics related. Dont compare apples to oranges.
>>24744967>This isn’t necessarily better or worse just a character of the languagesfuck off linguist cuck retard>>24744974Yeah and Old English was much richer than modern English, what's your point dumbass?
Chinese is a language optimized around writing. The writing system was made to unify a bunch of different spoken dialects and even totally different languages, but all using the same recognizable characters which have their own inherent meaning. It allowed an empire with many different regional dialects and languages to communicate internally through writing. Even if they couldn't really understand each other spoken aloud, they could mostly puzzle out meaning through writing because the script was a collection of cognates rather than sounds. Chinese dialects being very loose with their grammar made it that much easier to map it onto these cognate-characters to convey MEANING if not exact translation.
>>24744997Yes. Very impressive and a main reason the empire could grow so vast.But why when I type “shi” do I get 70 suggestions what written character I want? And no picking one if 5 tones doesnt lower the selection enough
>>24744997>>24745017>glorified pidgins are equal to classical languagesDid you have anything relevant to the topic of the thread to say retards?
>Claims English is retarded>Posts in English anywayWhat did he mean by this
Hanzi/Kanji are retarded systems that only did massive damage to people's ability to communicate in writing. Never repping that shit again
low iqs need the most obvious contrast as much as possible to get the difference
>>24744918Are you the same faggot who made that trivium thread? If so, kill yourself.
>>24745129Touched a nerve
>>24745129He's a very stunted boy trying to wear adult clothing.
>>24745412Make an argument related to the topic of this thread or fuck off
>>24745417You yourself didn't "make an argument related to the topic of this thread" until >>2474497223 minutes into the thread. I have some points you might find interesting but you haven't earned them yet on account of your intellectual laziness.
>>24744918What’s your opinion about the Romance languages or even German, or Russian, then?
>>24745076it's his turd world IQ
>>24744918>Tonal languages are retarded. English with its multiple meanings of "-ing" and "un-", and its heavy dependence on prosody and punctuation for conveying meaning, is also retarded. Prosody and punctuation are both crutches of a hopelessly mutilated language. Latin and Greek are superior.>Why?>I-it just is, okay?
>>24744918Also you know ancient Greek was tonal, right? Well, pitch accent, which doesn't work quite the same as Chinese contour tones, but it was still a type of tone system.
>>24744958>Theres a good reason chinese need subtitles in every medium if tv, movies or music because the “out of context” nature makes their language not understandable if its more than a catch phrase or highly distinct daily phrases.So how do they converse?
>>24744970There are absolutely passages where meaning depends on punctuation in Latin and Greek. "Truly I say to you this day you shall be with me in the kingdom of heaven"- the ambiguity between "I say to you this day, you shall be with me" and "I say to you, this day you shall be with me" is present in Greek too.
>>24744972Do you have any evidence for that?>>24744978There are pitch accent minimal pairs in Greek.
>>24745608By being very directly focused on the material situation and things in front of them. Seriously. Chinese looove Wittgensteins Sprachspiel 2 from Philosophical Investigations. They think the entire world functions like them.
>>24744997That's not really true, if you actually write the different "dialects" in characters they're pretty different, even if more mutually intelligible than they would be in speech.>>24745017That's a Mandarin problem. In Cantonese these characters are read variously si, sat, sai, sap, sat, sik, sek,ci... (And that's not factoring in the tones!)
>>24745632So how do they talk over the phone, or listen to the radio, or books on tape? Like, I'm not saying written Chinese doesn't sometimes lean on the script in ways that may be ambiguous out loud, but it is generally possible to disambiguate in the spoken language if you need to.
>>24745681Radio: through speeches being recognizable by repeating often touted and promulgated propaganda phrases and buzzwords.Music: my text book once literally said that songs are not intelligible unless people already know the lyrics But generally, as with phone calls, on the tv, in the radio it is necessary to build a shared context to then give the listener a framework where possible understandings fit while others would be nonsense. Usually this already exists in some form as you said, but in a city a university student will have a hard time talking to a village worker who came into the big city for the day. The number of times I had chinese classmates just nod and grunt in agreement while the villager was trying to speak to them is in the dozens. Just no clue the dude was simply trying to talk about a shrine by the creek they have outside their village by the mountain. They are just too different and the dialects make the problem even worse.
>>24745455>>24745574>>24745576Fuck off female
>>24745734I only made the last of those posts. You're responding to at least two different people. (Also, not an argument.)
>>24745076Not an argument, retard.
