On Mon, 6 Jun 2005 14:36:48 -0400, Reef Fish wrote:
>On Mon, 6 Jun 2005 13:59:41 -0400, Michael Doelle wrote:
....
>>Does that explain why Chinese tables have such short legs? Or none?
>
>That shows you haven't seen many Chinese tables. Furthermore, I
>think you might have confused Chinese tablss with Japanese tables.
No, Michael would be right (even though that's not what his joke
meant). Those low Japanese tables Feesh is thinking of are actually a
Heian-era borrowing from Tang China, as are Heian clothing and
decoration - a lot of what we think of as typical or traditional
Japanese style. Chinese style and taste moved onward through the Song
and Ming (1360s-1640s) (and some would say, arguably downward in the
Rococo/Chinese baroque excesses of the Qing (1640s-1911),
>>Languages are never logical, they just ARE. I thought you understood that,
>>speaking more than one. But you somehow insist on arguing ding-dong style
>>about their relative 'merits'. They don't have any. They are the way they
>>are, and that's just fine. The more you know the more you appreciate that
>>fact. Instead of always wondering why THEY don't do it the way WE do.
>
>There's no question whatsoever about the superiority of Chinese over
>the Romance and Germanic language on the SIMPLICITY (lack of
>unnecessary genders and conjugations dem die das and tenses)
>as well as the LOGIC behind the simplicity -- that they ain't
>needed!!
Superiority is a value judgment, and all languages have their own logic
of one sort or another, though I'm told even linguists find that case
difficult to make for languages like Hungarian or Basque. Some of the
main differences between a "simple" language like Chinese involve
levels of redundancy among different parts of a sentence/utterance -
Chinese has almost none, whereas in, say, Romance languages the verb
inflection (conjugation) carries redundant information about the
subject and other matters which can be useful. Languages with high
levels of redundancy can be both harder to learn and easier to
understand - there are more rules to follow, but if you lose the thread
of thought in a sentence or conversation, there are more cues to get
you back on track.
Some other interesting distinctions among languages include:
Agglutinative word formation: Almost zero for Chinese, high for
Romance languages, Agglutinative languages form words through
combining morphemically several significant elements (atmosphere,
deliquescence, ). In Chinese, except for recent neologisms and imports
etc, most words consist of one or at most two morphemic elements.
Inflected. Chinese is non-inflected - words do not change phonetically
at all, whereas Romance languages (also Japanese, Malay, many others)
use prefixes, affixes, suffixes, other modifications such as vowel or
consonant shifts to indicate things like tense, case, gender, person.
(Many inflected languages also have a high degree of redundancy.)
Japanese ranks high on inflectedness, well above English and the
Romance languages. To express the English expression "If I had not
been made to eat [the fruit]..." in Japanese, one could use the past
passive causative conditional negative tense ("[Kudamono o]
tabesaserarenakatara....").
>>Trivia quiz: the latest generations of Japanese are much taller than their
>>ancestors (allegedly). The main reason being? (No, not better food).
>
>The "regression effect" (regression toward the mean) of 'Merkin
>Japenese?
Rulers got smaller? I thought the fact that recent (post-war)
generations of Japanese have much better nutrition esp. in childhood
was pretty well established and accepted as the cause for increase in
average height.
Allegedly or not, the same phenomenon appears to be true for Europe.
One of the most interesting things about the room with medieval armour
in at the the Met Museum in New York is that most suits of armour
appear to have been made for men around 5'5'' or 5'8'', some even
smaller.
Tabula International Ltd.
Email: <[log in to unmask]
Phone: +62 361 282-743
Website: www.tabula-international.com
|
