Re: English is a crazy language

On Mon, Apr 22, 2002 at 11:50:12PM -0500, Danny Wier wrote:
[snip]
> Now on to your list of sentences: we may have no hope yet for words spelled
> the same but pronounced different. English is not alone in this: Japanese
> has a lot of words that are spelled with different Chinese characters but
> pronounced the same (using Sino-Japanese pronunciations), which is backwards
> from English but still a problem. Using native Japanese readings for
> isolated characters helps with the ambiguities, but that creates a dual
> vocabulary, and more words to memorize....
[snip]

Have you ever heard of the (in)famous Chinese poems that go "Ma, ma, ma,
ma, ma" all with different tones, so that it actually means something?
There are several of these around, unfortunately I'm not familiar enough
with them to give you concrete examples.

But my point is, if you think English/Japanese is bad... just about every
spoken syllable in Mandarin can correspond to about 3-4 differently
written words (and 3-4 is the norm rather than the exception). E.g., "ma1"
can be "mother", "to mop", or could be the interrogative particle.


T

--
Learning to learn is a great learning; learning to unlearn is a greater
learning.

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