On Tue, 7 Jun 2005 11:03:11 +0800, Robert Delfs <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>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).

You and Misha are both wrong because I was referring to those
table LEGS Mika implied.  :-)

Didn't mean to invoke a discourse in history of Chinese dynasties.

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),

As for Japanese table legs of the Mika kind, I have to admit that
I have not seen many, if any;  but since Mika had lived in Japan
several years, I figured he had the short legs in public baths. :-)

>
>>>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!!

No need to argue about simplicity or the LOGIC behind simplicity.
Just write what's below (as it would have been said or written
in Chinese) in the language of your choice, and THEN tell us why
YOUR language is ... better in any way:

I go, you go, he go, she go, we go, they go.  I go yesterday,
Sue and I go today, and Sue go tomorrow.

auf Deutsch (bitte):

en Francais (s'il vous plait):

en espanol (por favor):

any language o yo choice:


>Superiority is a value judgment,

in general.  That's true.  BUt on matters of SIMPLICITY and the lack
of UNNECESSARY burden (such as the gender of a table;  or other
unnecesary conjugation that should be obvious from LOGIC, such as
"I go tomorrow") the specificity of the CRITERION of comparison
make it clear and unequivocal which is superior and which is
grossly inferior.

> and all languages have their own logic
>of one sort or another,

So they say about idiot's babble.  :-)

>though I'm told even linguists find that case
>difficult to make for languages like Hungarian or Basque.

Actually if you had looked at the lexicographic trees studied
by linquists (presented in Classification Society meetings,
such as the International one consisting of such Societies
from 7 different countries which I chaired in 1989), then
you could get a better grasp of the evolution of languages
as Darwin traced the evolution of the species.


>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,

That's what makes them more sharply tuned to the CONTEXT rather
than unnecessary redundundunduncies.  English, French, German,
and most languages do quite well with only ONE question mark,
when the question is in quote.  Spanish requires an upside
down question mark at the beginning, I suppose as a redunduncy
that they may be reading the question upside down hanging
from a tree?  :-)

> whereas in, say, Romance languages the verb
>inflection (conjugation) carries redundant information about the
>subject and other matters which can be useful.

USEFUL?  You mean you have difficulty with the non-redundant I go,
he go, he go tomorrow in the exercise above?


> Languages with high
>levels of redundancy can be both harder to learn and easier to
>understand -

Hah!  Only (unnecessarily) harder to learn!  I am still looking
for the "ab" or "ge" or "zu" that was supposed to go with the
word "fahren" that didn't make sense when it appeared three pages
ago.  (die/la Mika can explain why).

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.

Nah.  Attention Deficit Syndrone is not meant to be cured by
having completely unnecessary clumsiness that would only ADD
to the ADS.

>
>Some other interesting distinctions among languages include:
>
>Agglutinative word formation:  Almost zero for Chinese,

Nicht wahr.  Actually MANY words (characters) in Chinese are
"assembled" from a collection of other characters.  A case in
point is LING (two pieces of WOOD side by side).  If you put
another piece of wood on top of LING, you get "forest" or
"jungle".  You put the character for "female" between two
characters each of which is "male", you get ... remember,
group sex is a RECENT phenomenon <G>, a character meaning
"anger".

>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.

You get any more than two or three you'll be doing hieroglyphics!

>
>Inflected.  Chinese is non-inflected - words do not change phonetically
>at all,

Being a famous cook book author yourself, you should know that there
is a fine line (in Cantonese) between going into a restaurant and
order a dish with "gai see" (shredded chicken) and "gai see"
(chicken shit).  But most Chinese waiters are astute enough to
decipher by context (unless you look really weird) that chicken
shit is NOT what you had in mind.

They also know that you "ma" (mother) is probably not a "ma" (horse)
or some other "ma"s.


> 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.

That's because they didn't have much to do when they were hanging
on trees with their tails while the Chinese were already writing
poetry and literary works 6000 years ago.


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....").

In 'Merkinese, one could say, "If yo don't make me eat no (fruit) ..."

Lo Yu.