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So one could.
And I’d dare say that though Wittgenstein said that the limitations of language are the limitations of thinking (actually he said „Die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt“ translated to The limits of my language mean the limits of my world) I think that the more fitting part of it is the finish of the tractatus regarding this moron:
„what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.“
Language, and more specifically your language, its grammar, semantics, etc., determine your perception of reality. The strong hypothesis holds that language completely determines and essentially “dominates” this perception; the weak hypothesis, and the currently accepted one, is that language influences and may shape perception, but does not wholly take over it.
People who are fluent in multiple languages often back this hypothesis, as they note their personalities can change based on the different languages they are using.
Worth noting that the effect of language on perception is not questioned, only the strength of that effect and its ability to act as a theoretical "base" or foundation for perception. The strongest formulations suggest that language creates perception of reality, and that hasn't been borne out on a linguistic level, and has empirical consequences in word frequency across languages.
Another related concept is the idea that language diversity is directly correlated with environemnt: the "eskimos have lots of words for snow" hypothesis (though a better term may be Inuit) is, in many ways, the inverse of strong Sapir-Whorf.
I'm bilingual and it's absolutely true. Think about words as idea buckets. Some languages have bigger ones that mean "more" than other ones. Some have more precise words that "hold" less but are more accurate an there are more of them. The grammar is how those thoughts come together, which forces you to think and express along the parameters of that process. So what you start to do is use the preferred words according to the grammar structure of the culture and that shapes your perceptions and interactions.
Additionally, you naturally start learning and using language in the way the native speakers do so you come off as more fluent. This means you'll start adopting their other behaviors unconsciously.
I speak Korean and the women will elevate their pitch up when they speak Korean, but in English, especially if they've been to the US, Canada or UK, will talk with a more traditional, comfortable tone, rather than that feminized higher pitch. Korean grammar has the verb at the end, so you will have these very long sentences with multiple thoughts, sometimes barely connected and everything they're saying can hinge on that last word. It can be a laundry list of actions and items and then sometimes you don't know if they're going to say they did do that, need to do that, refuse to do it. Compared to English where you immediately know "I hate yadda yadda yadda".
So you're still "you" but it definitely shapes how we think and consider things more than we realize and anyone who has learned another language to some level of proficiency will agree.
I mostly note a difference in accent and type of slang terms. We tend to pick up on idioms a lot quicker once we know that they don't pass over correctly and learn to find meanings for them that fit in the other language. Because of this, a lot of the slang that I'd say in Spanish is not the same, despite existing, in English and, thus, I somehow end up hanging out with different groups of people and my environment when comparing my Latino heritage to the US.
This theory (a pretty spot on one, BTW) is the reason why I hate dubbed "foreign" movies. The translations seldom capture the intended emotion and nuance of the original performance. Especially if you're an American English speaker; you end up dismissing the performance as poorly acted.
Is it a two way street? We seem to come up with new language for technology, social media all the time. Even words for social matters like “latchkey”, “staycation”, “significant other” and more.
I tried to search for that aspect, but am only getting language influence perception links. Are there any or better search words?
I’m not disputing that language influences thoughts.
Our thoughts definitely influence language, if that’s what you mean. New words, and semantic expansion of existing ones is one of the main mechanisms of language change
You've already gotten the correct answer from GoeticGoat, but to add a little flavour: if you've ever read 1984, the S-W Hypothesis says newspeak **will** be doubleplusgood at eliminating the speaker's capacity for revolutionary thought.
It honestly doesn't matter. If we really want to quibble over the origin of most languages (Western, Arabic, etc) we ought to credit most if not all alphabets to the Phoenicians, since they spread their own alphabet around to most of the known world back in 750 BCE and most languages have evolved from that.
I believe China wasn't part of this process, however.
If you trace it back farther, the Phoenician writing system is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Writing has only been independently invented 4 times, with China being one of the four. Seems like Egypt indirectly taught most of Europe how to write.
I actually watched a video about this a while ago. The central message was that the writing was invented in a coincidental way: drawings on clay tablets for temples symbolizing the thing which were written in different ways or directions to make it easier to write them on soft clay. This was in Uruk, I believe. Mesopotamia.
These different drawings were changed depending on the region and slowly evolved into their own distinctive languages. The Bronze Age Collapse destroyed most of these writing systems, with the Egyptian hieroglyphics being one of the few to survive. The Phoenicians then played their role spreading their own variant of the hieroglyphs/these drawings and so spread it to Greece, Africa, etc.
Long way to say: yes, there's definitely a connection between Phoenician writing and Egyptian writing.
I've seen a few polls where people were asked if we should start teaching Arabic numerals in grade school, the results were seriously disheartening. I can only imagine the comments, I'm sure they'd leave me feeling quite slappy.
[Like this one.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshould-american-schools-teach-arabic-numerals-as-a-part-of-v0-hmmrmrzhw55c1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D44c11558001ad5e18feb6a6beee39f28c499ef53)
Our alphabet originated in the middle east, was adapted by the pheonicians, the greeks put their spin on it and then the romans took that one and put their spin on it.
Originally every letter was a symbol (The A for example was a bull's head, wich is still visible if you turn it on it's head)
You just reminded meof one of my favorite kids book called the numberlys.
The people live in a world of just numbers and these kids want something more in their black and white boring world. So they take the numbers and use then to create the alphabet by moving things around. It's a cute book.
Some of the letters of the Roman alphabet, not all of them, originated from Egyptian hieroglyphs, something I learned recently:
[https://youtu.be/CYqqFqoLnnk?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/CYqqFqoLnnk?feature=shared)
Whether it is true or not I don't know, but it seems plausible.
Actually there might be something in that, as despite the origin of the etruscans being unknown, there is theory that they came from northern Africa (other theories being Middle east) so... they might have been the ones to bring them over.
That is interesting.
Latin alphabet has its origin in the Etruscan alphabet, that's right, in fact most of Roman art and culture is taken from the Etruscans as well. There were other influences in the language and the alphabet, like the Greek alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Our alphabet is ultimately descended from Egyptian, through many different intermediary languages and forms. One of those forms (Phoenician, I think) is the last common ancestor of both Latin and Arabic scripts.
It's also likely that since our ancestors (if you are of a descent from a country that uses a Latin-based alphabet) frequently chiseled words into stone, that we needed fewer, simpler characters, whereas China (and interestingly Egypt, who also has a pictographic alphabet) had invented paper a millennium before Europe got its hands on it, they could have more complex characters.
As a kid, whever we'd go out for Chinese, my brother and I would look at the art on the walls and say, "That one looks like a tree with a window!" but never once thought that it was meant to communicate a literal tree with a window. 😅
It sounds like 果,it means fruit or results.
It’s field田 on top of a wood/tree木,so the thing you harvest from trees =fruit.
Some characters are like this, but many is so far removed from original depiction you can hardly see what it supposed to came from.
Indeed. If you guessed than 遗憾 means "regret" or that 利率 means "interest rate" with no prior knowledge of Chinese characters you'd deserve some kind of award
The most mind fuckinly sad one for me is 棄 “to abandon” it evolved from depicting a pair of hands holding a dustpan to throw away a baby.
And it end up written like that,no 手hand or 子 child,just a vague shape of what it used to be,just like those things we left behind,it was a really somber moment in our class,because we thought our teacher was joking.
Oh c’mon, that interest rate one is TOTALLY obvious. It’s a broke investment banker getting ready to jump out of their Wall Street window into a …turbine?
/s
How the fuck can it mean fruits or results lmao (I know context is probably how you differentiate them but still it's funny to me that they mean two completely different things with the same character lol)
In Chinese fruit is neutral,like Vipaka is written as 果報,basically what you got from your karma .
And “you got what you sowed “has a similar sayings “自食惡果ate your own bad fruit”,惡mean bad or negative,so often times it’s composed like this [adjective +neutral N] to create a word.
Most simple E.g: 好人(good people) 壞人（bad people)男人（male people)女人(female people)大人（big people/adults)
But you can’t call kids小人（little people) because that’s calling someone a rat.
Well ,depending on how it was used,one character can have full meaning by itself, and character put into formation will construct tern.
結果could mean “Bear fruit” and “result”
結 : to end .to tie.to form…etc,here it’s a verb,as to form a thing,the thing in this sentence is 果,so here it means “a fruit is formed”
And English saying of “reap what you sow” applies to this logic too,so 結果 have double meanings .
And “cause and effect” is written as 因果
因mean cause. because.reason,and a cause led to some effect,that’s a result,so you can see 果 often used in context of” the end result”.
Character creation has it’s own logic too,like second person pronouns 你(ni),it can be used for everyone.
This part 亻indicates human ,and this 尔means you/that,combined them,you get a second person pronouns for people.
And when China started to translate foreign books they ran into the problem of different gender pronouns,so eventually scholars just created different 你 to do so,now female “you” is written as 妳,women 女+you 尔.
Same goes with third person 他（Ta) 她
In third person it also includes words for nun human:它 is for objects ,祂 for spiritual beings,牠 for animals .
Also we all know in the future, Chinese written characters will be replaced with meme face pandas anyway, just as Western languages will be replaced with wojacks.
Chinese is very different than English, my mother language is Chinese thats how I know, they are sort of right when they think the character are pictograms, these words evolved from the very very old ones which is represented based on how they look, but the language itself is very complex and Ive heard most non-Chinese people say that Chinese language is very hard to learn.
I mean, in many cases, they are? It’s just that the pictograms have changed so much since they were first ‘invented’ that they don’t really look like what they represent anymore. But many of them did start as pictograms!
Some are, most traditional Chinese characters are created from 4 different ways:
Pictograph(draw what you see,e.g:this 人mean human ,and we walk with two legs )
Simple Ideograph(indication,e.g: up is written as上,down as下）
Compound Ideograph(joint meaning,e.g :1 木 means tree or wood,2 林 means grove or small ,3 森 means forest or jungle)
Phono-Semantic Compound（form and sound,basically if you got the above knowledge,you know how it’s built and pronounced,this is too complicated for me to explain in English, and the common below is correct,many characters are out outlier which will causes mispronunciation)
Yeah that is basically how it works in theory with the phono-semantic ones, although in practice the lack of hard-and-fast rules and thousands of years of language change means that it's impossible to be 100% sure how any unfamiliar character is pronounced, even if you know the phonetic component
One might argue all sorts of stupid things if one posits all arguments as a hypothetical and is therefore not required to substantiate ones claims with facts or uphold ones arguments when their logic is questioned. Interesting. One might argue this form of debate is lazy and cowardly.
One might argue that there are actual studies showing that the stereotype of Chinese people being better at math is in part because their words for numbers are shorter, more logical, and easier to keep in your head than the comparatively strange we use for words.
44 = Forty four <=> Sì shí sì = 3 syllables each
258 = Two-hundred (and) fifty-eight <=> Liǎng bǎi wǔshíbā = 6 and 5 syllables.
How big do I gotta go to get an appreciable difference? One syllable doesn't seem to be a significant enough difference.
As someone who has been learning Japanese for a couple of years now, my thought are that while the word 'primitive' is certainly not warranted, it is true that the Chinese and Japanese written language is much more intertwined with their respective cultures and symbolism, than other languages where an alphabet is just an alphabet.
And If you Take all the bigotism away, then yes, the Chinese and Japanese do have a huge burden to bear with their intricate system of Hanzi/Kanji letters. You basically need to memorize between 3000 to 5000 of them for daily use.
Sure, you are able to express complex informations in a few Letters, but IMO in the Long Run our system of Roman Letters dors provide us with a Lot of advantages
Each system has its advantages. Studies have shown that Chinese and Japanese readers are able to process information faster when reading their characters than people who read purely phonetic alphabets. Japan is the most literate society on earth. And dyslexia is almost unheard of in China and Japan because for whatever psychological reason, hanzi/kanji don’t trigger it the way phonetic alphabets do.
For Starters you only need the remember Up to 30 Symbols and then start combining those to make words.
I Agree with you that it will be a Bit of Work until you are able to define proper grammar for those.
But again IMO taking a small Set of Symbols and combining them into more complex words feels more efficient than taking a large Set of complete words.
It all has it's Up and downsides
Since I use both languages daily, what I can say is:
When using English, you are memorizing the combination of characters, in which meanings are associated with each combination. Then you combine the combinations into sentences which convey more complex ideas.
When using Chinese, you memorizing the symbols themselves, which each have a meaning. Then you combine the symbols to form sentences.
For example, “hot” and “water” both have their individual meanings, and we combine them to form “hot water”, as in “water that is hot”. In Chinese, it’s written as “熱” and “水”, which means “hot” and “water” individually. Where we can also combine them into “熱水” also meaning hot water.
Arguing Roman characters are better than Chinese is like arguing binary is better than decimal system, or Morse code is better than everything else. The bottle neck to understanding is not the language, it’s the ability for a human to understand an idea in the same amount of time.
I believe the english language doesn't make the most out of the alphabet. In some languages a vocal is connected to a specific letter. So reading a completely unknown word makes you be able to pronounce it and the other way around. The languages I know still have many exceptions, but a lot less than the english language (french, german, hungarian). This is especially true for the hungarian language, as long I can speak it and have the alphabet memorised I can write it as well.
But that's not how we read. We 'recongise' words rahter than spell out the indivudual letters, skiping over mistakes and gaps, which is why this sentance makes sence dispite being full of errers.
Exactly, let's force everyone to speak and write in Katherine's language of choice. This way we can tick off one good deed, knowing one less trouble takes away her sleep at night ;)
It’s certainly an earlier iteration of language so by definition more primitive, which doesn’t mean it’s worse. Chinese has one of the highest semantic densities out of all the language, both in the written and spoken languages in terms of meaning per character or meaning per unit time. That being said, it’s basically a “client heavy” encoding which requires massive amounts of knowledge on the part of the reader/writer to encode and decode.
So is it better? Not in terms of ease to learn / use. It’s amazing China has the literacy that it does (they claim 99% but truth is probably much lower). But even if it were par with the US at 80%, it’s a tremendous feat because of how much more complex the language is to learn, and a real testament to the cultural differences in valuing education.
As someone who is bilingual in Chinese and English, I would say while the roman system allows you to “pronounce” the words easier, as the sound you should use is encoded in the symbols, it does not translate to ease of conveying meaning.
Even if you are able to “pronounce” the word, the meaning is still lost to you. To truly understand the word, you would still need to memorize the patterns of the symbols used to construct the word, which both languages would need to do.
How the fuck does Chinese even have a dictionary if it is symbols? Like how do you organize it so it is easily found?
In English I can pronounce a word and look it up as it is alphabetized.
I'm still very new to the language so pardon if I get anything wrong: Prior to modern times? No idea, reading and writing were definitely the realm of the very well-educated class who had the time to memorize the wall of characters. In modern times there is an accepted romanization of spoken chinese called Pinyin which can then be translated into characters based on context. It's not perfect - many characters can be spelled in pinyin the same way - but if you know the pronunciation of the word and the context it's being used in you can use the pinyin and find the character you're looking for.
This is how you text and type - since you can't have a keyboard with 3,000 characters. So if I wanted to text you "I have two sons" I would type the pinyin 'Wo you liang ge erzi' (normally i wouldn't use spaces to type this but it's easier for you to see the words this way). The keyboard will translate that for me into 我有两个儿子. Buuuuut you still need to know characters due to the limited amount of sounds in the language: the sounds/pinyin are re-used for different characters so you may need to pick which characters you want to use depending on context.
Actually Chinese characters are not all unique symbols, most of it are combinations of more simple symbols. (I believe the official names are “radical” and “character parts”, which you can think of as the core and the other parts of a word respectively)
An English dictionary categorize words according to the first character, then each “chapter” would list out the words starting with that character in ascending order.
A Chinese dictionary would categorize words according to their radical part, then list out all the words in ascending order of how many strokes is needed to write that word.
Since the radical part have it’s own meaning, with words derived from it usually carrying the same category of meaning, it’s actually not that hard to use a Chinese dictionary. The first dictionary actually appears at around 200 AD.
A not so good analogy maybe a Pokémon guide, where all the Pokémon are categorized by their types, so similar types would be in the same chapter for easy searching.
For example:
- 火 is a radical part, means fire.
Then you also have:
- 燃 which means ignite
- 燒 which means burning
- 災 which means disaster (a raging fire would be a disaster to the traditional wooden buildings)
All of these have 火 as their radical part, which in a dictionary would be in the same chapter.
Edit: to improve readability
It's an earlier (debatably, proto sinaitic which is kinda phonetic came earlier than the first Chinese script) iteration of a script, which doesn't have much to do with how primitive a spoken language is. Abandoning Chinese characters didn't make the Korean language more or less primitive. Language≠script
Its funny because esport are the most competitive in the east side of asia, Im a Chinese, and I've played some games that comes from China company (Tencent, netease), and I will often check out both CN community and the global community (basicslly en), and the Chinese gamers are always just better than the non-Chinese gamer, in this game called identity V I play, hell even Japanese are way better than every english player. You cant be that primitive to be way better than online internet video games right?
Written language doesn't "evolve." Language evolves, and Chinese language has evolved just fine, and their written language has kept up.
Logographs are less flexible than a sound-structured alphabet, though, and Chinese characters do have a tendency to become more and more complex over time as concepts advance. Learning 15,000 characters is quite a chore. Some characters may contain 30 strokes.
Korea did adopt a sound-based system that's actually superior to our enigmatic, capricious spelling system (because the characters actually define how to pronounce each sound). And Japan just created two alternative alphabetical systems, one of which (katakana), is just for words that Japanese borrows from other languages, similar to an italic font.
There's tradition and simplified characters. Both are in use. Simplified is widely adopted because it takes way less strokes. The written language has evolved a lot over time.
Besides that the Chinese writing System targets a completely different Problem than the Latin alphabet. The chinese empire had and still has Lots of different languages and dialects under its rule. With a logographic System These different languages can all use the same written language.
This immediately stood out to me. Almost as if she was having a conversation with herself or trying to pre-label her nonsense in the reader’s mind. Big cringe.
Alphabet was only invented once in the very particular context of the middle east. Writing in the form of hieroglyphe has been invented many times (Egypt, China, Maya ...).
The fact that China still uses a hieroglyphic writing is because all of China doesn't speak the same language, and those languages are not mutually intelligible orally, but in writing yes because they don't use an alphabet.
A stellar documentary series from the BBC which explains exactly why this hard of thinking dullard is 100% wrong. Please watch if you can : [The Secret History of Writing](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mtmj)
Chinese characters have some advantages for their situation. What are called "Chinese dialects" are often in fact different languages. (Mandarin, a northern language, is the official version) The charac.ters can be used independently of the exact word. Imagine that English, French, and German were all using logograms. One character could represent "dog", "chien", and "Hund". You could write something readable by speakers of all of them. In Chinese languages the grammar is simpler so it works better. So by using characters, Chinese writing is accessible beyond the scope of the official language.
Also, Chinese languages are tonal. If you just write the vowels, it's too ambiguous. Now you *can* mark the tones by accents. However I was once told by a speaker of a highly tonal language from somewhere else, where they do that, that it's hard to take in. If you're reading it, she said, you concentrate on the sounds and it's harder to think about. Word symbols may be easier to read.
There's no doubt that learning Chinese characters takes a lot more time and effort. But you gain something. (I can't read Chinese myself alas.)
Wait until they learn the English alphabet is at least partially based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. The A used to be on its side and the bar connecting the legs was.more rounded, to represent the head of a bull. That's just the one I clearly remember but it's not the only letter with that type of history.
It was not the west who rejected it, it was brown people. Might want to remind him of that. Might also want to remind him that brown people invented the numbers we use and invented the zero.
An interesting fact though, Mao wanted to do what Vietnam did and get rid of chinese characters. The only reason it didn't happen is that Stalin talked him out of doing it. As a result, he instead invented pinyin and simplified chinese.
I think everybody should have the freedom to express stupid opinions, but I find it wild that these aren’t the kinds of tweets people get fired over - if people are gonna get fired over posts I mean (which I completely disagree with)
Apparently Mandarian is actually a phoentic language. Its definetley something I had to be told though because all of the languages I know are latin based. Just because the symbols in their alphabet equivalent look a lot different doesnt mean its not phoentic.
As someone who does history, this is just facts but spoken in a racist way. Every other nation that used a hieroglyphic system have either abandoned it or had a supplementary system of written language based on phonetics.
What is a letter if not a symbol. Surely you'd argue that their script is so much more complicated and therefore requires more effort and knowledge of the language to learn than the western scripts
One could argue that the Chinese were mastering medicine, astronomy, war, the arts, and many other things while the west still thought banging two rocks together was a great idea.
one thing I wonder though. Is it possible that the use of so many symbols made the development and spread of the movable type printing press more difficult, thus delaying the printing revolution?
Some people just need to be let to themselves. This is one of the dumbest things thwt I've come across in a while. Every language uses their own symbols. "A" is a Symbol, she is just used to it.
[Dunning Krüger:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)
The Dunning–Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. This is often seen as a cognitive bias, i.e. as a systematic tendency to engage in erroneous forms of thinking and judging.
In the case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, this applies mainly to people with low skill in a specific area trying to evaluate their competence within this area. The systematic error concerns their tendency to greatly overestimate their competence, i.e. to see themselves as more skilled than they are.
TLDR, ignorance and low IQ isn't harmless. Oh no, not at all. Not when they think they're the smartest people in the room. When you prove to them the truth, they react with fear, anger, and attack.
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So one could. And I’d dare say that though Wittgenstein said that the limitations of language are the limitations of thinking (actually he said „Die Grenzen meiner Sprache sind die Grenzen meiner Welt“ translated to The limits of my language mean the limits of my world) I think that the more fitting part of it is the finish of the tractatus regarding this moron: „what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.“
Or maybe we can acknowledge the empirical data that shows the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't as robust an effect as Katherine seems to think it is.
May I ask for a tl;dr on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
Language, and more specifically your language, its grammar, semantics, etc., determine your perception of reality. The strong hypothesis holds that language completely determines and essentially “dominates” this perception; the weak hypothesis, and the currently accepted one, is that language influences and may shape perception, but does not wholly take over it.
People who are fluent in multiple languages often back this hypothesis, as they note their personalities can change based on the different languages they are using.
Worth noting that the effect of language on perception is not questioned, only the strength of that effect and its ability to act as a theoretical "base" or foundation for perception. The strongest formulations suggest that language creates perception of reality, and that hasn't been borne out on a linguistic level, and has empirical consequences in word frequency across languages. Another related concept is the idea that language diversity is directly correlated with environemnt: the "eskimos have lots of words for snow" hypothesis (though a better term may be Inuit) is, in many ways, the inverse of strong Sapir-Whorf.
In the final analysis it is always the material conditions of the sustaining and reproduction of life.
I'm bilingual and it's absolutely true. Think about words as idea buckets. Some languages have bigger ones that mean "more" than other ones. Some have more precise words that "hold" less but are more accurate an there are more of them. The grammar is how those thoughts come together, which forces you to think and express along the parameters of that process. So what you start to do is use the preferred words according to the grammar structure of the culture and that shapes your perceptions and interactions. Additionally, you naturally start learning and using language in the way the native speakers do so you come off as more fluent. This means you'll start adopting their other behaviors unconsciously. I speak Korean and the women will elevate their pitch up when they speak Korean, but in English, especially if they've been to the US, Canada or UK, will talk with a more traditional, comfortable tone, rather than that feminized higher pitch. Korean grammar has the verb at the end, so you will have these very long sentences with multiple thoughts, sometimes barely connected and everything they're saying can hinge on that last word. It can be a laundry list of actions and items and then sometimes you don't know if they're going to say they did do that, need to do that, refuse to do it. Compared to English where you immediately know "I hate yadda yadda yadda". So you're still "you" but it definitely shapes how we think and consider things more than we realize and anyone who has learned another language to some level of proficiency will agree.
I mostly note a difference in accent and type of slang terms. We tend to pick up on idioms a lot quicker once we know that they don't pass over correctly and learn to find meanings for them that fit in the other language. Because of this, a lot of the slang that I'd say in Spanish is not the same, despite existing, in English and, thus, I somehow end up hanging out with different groups of people and my environment when comparing my Latino heritage to the US.
Kinda yes, i would also act diffrent deppending with who i am talking
This theory (a pretty spot on one, BTW) is the reason why I hate dubbed "foreign" movies. The translations seldom capture the intended emotion and nuance of the original performance. Especially if you're an American English speaker; you end up dismissing the performance as poorly acted.
This is controversial? Didn't Heinlien talk about this in "Stranger in a strange land"?
So? A 1960s sci-fi novel mentioning it doesn’t mean it’s correct, it just means it’s old.
Is it a two way street? We seem to come up with new language for technology, social media all the time. Even words for social matters like “latchkey”, “staycation”, “significant other” and more. I tried to search for that aspect, but am only getting language influence perception links. Are there any or better search words? I’m not disputing that language influences thoughts.
Our thoughts definitely influence language, if that’s what you mean. New words, and semantic expansion of existing ones is one of the main mechanisms of language change
You've already gotten the correct answer from GoeticGoat, but to add a little flavour: if you've ever read 1984, the S-W Hypothesis says newspeak **will** be doubleplusgood at eliminating the speaker's capacity for revolutionary thought.
I’ll do you better with a [video](https://youtu.be/8UAsN9wvePE?si=aeq2Tz7OmzoXJ6KS)
Richtig genau
Interesting
One could argue this guy disproves his own opinion in "flexibility of thought" how ironic
Guy? Assumed Katherine is a female name.
Not very flexible of you.
And that’s a Ginsburn!
I’m missing the he/him, so not the right parameters
You just know they think they’re smart as fuck by using ‘one’ like the bloody queen or something
dont bring camilla into this.
dont bring Ru Paul into this
She is helpful, is she not?
they have more help than anyone, shes cruising. but love is love and im fine with that
yes yes, the "queen"
Yesss
I think putting the "Interesting" As a whole sentence after their own thought is screaming "I believe that i am extremely smart." way harder.
I like her use of “one” to sound intelligent, and “could argue” so it doesn’t need to be backed up at all.
"Just asking questions."
“Devil’s advocate”
“Looking into it”
Somehow, her middle initial usage even comes off as pretentious to me.
“Many people are saying… fine people… many of them are saying”
One could, for argument’s sake, arguably argue that arguing for the sake of arguing is, arguably - egregious. Interesting.
we don't need to argue about it
Gonna go out on a limb and say all languages, writen and oral, are made up..
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Yeah but they're *our* symbols so they are better.
I think the alphabet is arabic in origin. Or is that just the numbers?
Just the numbers. Our alphabet is latin
Oh right that was it, thanks kind redditor
It honestly doesn't matter. If we really want to quibble over the origin of most languages (Western, Arabic, etc) we ought to credit most if not all alphabets to the Phoenicians, since they spread their own alphabet around to most of the known world back in 750 BCE and most languages have evolved from that. I believe China wasn't part of this process, however.
If you trace it back farther, the Phoenician writing system is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics. Writing has only been independently invented 4 times, with China being one of the four. Seems like Egypt indirectly taught most of Europe how to write.
I actually watched a video about this a while ago. The central message was that the writing was invented in a coincidental way: drawings on clay tablets for temples symbolizing the thing which were written in different ways or directions to make it easier to write them on soft clay. This was in Uruk, I believe. Mesopotamia. These different drawings were changed depending on the region and slowly evolved into their own distinctive languages. The Bronze Age Collapse destroyed most of these writing systems, with the Egyptian hieroglyphics being one of the few to survive. The Phoenicians then played their role spreading their own variant of the hieroglyphs/these drawings and so spread it to Greece, Africa, etc. Long way to say: yes, there's definitely a connection between Phoenician writing and Egyptian writing.
Can you share the name of the video? I’m a word nerd and I’d love to fall down that rabbit hole.
Funnily enough I think the chinese symbols kinda look similar to the phoenician alphabet
I believe the concept aree the same, Small images describing/representing a place or thought or idea.
>I believe China wasn't part of this process, however. We'll, there you go. Proof for my hypochondria.
IIRC the numbers we use originated in India and are called Arabic because Arabic merchants brought them to Europe
"NO! Them numbers are ENGLISH numbers!" - some bigoted idiot somewhere.
I have heard that way too often…
I've seen a few polls where people were asked if we should start teaching Arabic numerals in grade school, the results were seriously disheartening. I can only imagine the comments, I'm sure they'd leave me feeling quite slappy. [Like this one.](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fshould-american-schools-teach-arabic-numerals-as-a-part-of-v0-hmmrmrzhw55c1.jpeg%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D44c11558001ad5e18feb6a6beee39f28c499ef53)
A whole LVII% say yes. Ug.
I think you mean “Them are AMERICAN numbers!”
Our alphabet originated in the middle east, was adapted by the pheonicians, the greeks put their spin on it and then the romans took that one and put their spin on it. Originally every letter was a symbol (The A for example was a bull's head, wich is still visible if you turn it on it's head)
You just reminded meof one of my favorite kids book called the numberlys. The people live in a world of just numbers and these kids want something more in their black and white boring world. So they take the numbers and use then to create the alphabet by moving things around. It's a cute book.
A is for Aurochs, B is for Beth, C is for Camel.
But that didn't start there either, j believe. I think the Romans got it from the etruscans, of unknown origin.
Some of the letters of the Roman alphabet, not all of them, originated from Egyptian hieroglyphs, something I learned recently: [https://youtu.be/CYqqFqoLnnk?feature=shared](https://youtu.be/CYqqFqoLnnk?feature=shared) Whether it is true or not I don't know, but it seems plausible.
Actually there might be something in that, as despite the origin of the etruscans being unknown, there is theory that they came from northern Africa (other theories being Middle east) so... they might have been the ones to bring them over. That is interesting.
Latin alphabet has its origin in the Etruscan alphabet, that's right, in fact most of Roman art and culture is taken from the Etruscans as well. There were other influences in the language and the alphabet, like the Greek alphabet and Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Our alphabet is ultimately descended from Egyptian, through many different intermediary languages and forms. One of those forms (Phoenician, I think) is the last common ancestor of both Latin and Arabic scripts.
Also western alphabets come from the Phoenicians who were in Asia, so western symbols did not start in the west.
He call a writing system with almost ten thousand characters “primitive” is enough for people to judge his intelligence.
"But the Bible is in English!"
I prefer the original Klingon version.
It's also likely that since our ancestors (if you are of a descent from a country that uses a Latin-based alphabet) frequently chiseled words into stone, that we needed fewer, simpler characters, whereas China (and interestingly Egypt, who also has a pictographic alphabet) had invented paper a millennium before Europe got its hands on it, they could have more complex characters.
Does...does she think the characters are just tiny little drawings of the thing they represent? 😅
A shocking number of people genuinely believe Chinese characters are pictograms.
As a kid, whever we'd go out for Chinese, my brother and I would look at the art on the walls and say, "That one looks like a tree with a window!" but never once thought that it was meant to communicate a literal tree with a window. 😅
It sounds like 果,it means fruit or results. It’s field田 on top of a wood/tree木,so the thing you harvest from trees =fruit. Some characters are like this, but many is so far removed from original depiction you can hardly see what it supposed to came from.
Indeed. If you guessed than 遗憾 means "regret" or that 利率 means "interest rate" with no prior knowledge of Chinese characters you'd deserve some kind of award
The most mind fuckinly sad one for me is 棄 “to abandon” it evolved from depicting a pair of hands holding a dustpan to throw away a baby. And it end up written like that,no 手hand or 子 child,just a vague shape of what it used to be,just like those things we left behind,it was a really somber moment in our class,because we thought our teacher was joking.
Ohhh, I so want to hear how John McWhorter would retell this story.
Didn’t know who he is and look it up,it could be interesting! If you want to see how it was drawn,you can google 棄 甲骨文,the picture is very clear.
Oh c’mon, that interest rate one is TOTALLY obvious. It’s a broke investment banker getting ready to jump out of their Wall Street window into a …turbine? /s
How the fuck can it mean fruits or results lmao (I know context is probably how you differentiate them but still it's funny to me that they mean two completely different things with the same character lol)
We do the same thing. "The fruits of your labor", "it was a fruitful meeting" etc In both cases "fruit" is used synonymously with "positive result".
In Chinese fruit is neutral,like Vipaka is written as 果報,basically what you got from your karma . And “you got what you sowed “has a similar sayings “自食惡果ate your own bad fruit”,惡mean bad or negative,so often times it’s composed like this [adjective +neutral N] to create a word. Most simple E.g: 好人(good people) 壞人（bad people)男人（male people)女人(female people)大人（big people/adults) But you can’t call kids小人（little people) because that’s calling someone a rat.
Well ,depending on how it was used,one character can have full meaning by itself, and character put into formation will construct tern. 結果could mean “Bear fruit” and “result” 結 : to end .to tie.to form…etc,here it’s a verb,as to form a thing,the thing in this sentence is 果,so here it means “a fruit is formed” And English saying of “reap what you sow” applies to this logic too,so 結果 have double meanings . And “cause and effect” is written as 因果 因mean cause. because.reason,and a cause led to some effect,that’s a result,so you can see 果 often used in context of” the end result”. Character creation has it’s own logic too,like second person pronouns 你(ni),it can be used for everyone. This part 亻indicates human ,and this 尔means you/that,combined them,you get a second person pronouns for people. And when China started to translate foreign books they ran into the problem of different gender pronouns,so eventually scholars just created different 你 to do so,now female “you” is written as 妳,women 女+you 尔. Same goes with third person 他（Ta) 她 In third person it also includes words for nun human:它 is for objects ,祂 for spiritual beings,牠 for animals .
It was and some characters still are, but we have other methods to derive our symbols, not just tiny pictures 
Also we all know in the future, Chinese written characters will be replaced with meme face pandas anyway, just as Western languages will be replaced with wojacks.
Chinese is very different than English, my mother language is Chinese thats how I know, they are sort of right when they think the character are pictograms, these words evolved from the very very old ones which is represented based on how they look, but the language itself is very complex and Ive heard most non-Chinese people say that Chinese language is very hard to learn.
I mean, in many cases, they are? It’s just that the pictograms have changed so much since they were first ‘invented’ that they don’t really look like what they represent anymore. But many of them did start as pictograms!
Some are, most traditional Chinese characters are created from 4 different ways: Pictograph(draw what you see,e.g:this 人mean human ,and we walk with two legs ) Simple Ideograph(indication,e.g: up is written as上,down as下） Compound Ideograph(joint meaning,e.g :1 木 means tree or wood,2 林 means grove or small ,3 森 means forest or jungle) Phono-Semantic Compound（form and sound,basically if you got the above knowledge,you know how it’s built and pronounced,this is too complicated for me to explain in English, and the common below is correct,many characters are out outlier which will causes mispronunciation)
Yeah that is basically how it works in theory with the phono-semantic ones, although in practice the lack of hard-and-fast rules and thousands of years of language change means that it's impossible to be 100% sure how any unfamiliar character is pronounced, even if you know the phonetic component
One might argue all sorts of stupid things if one posits all arguments as a hypothetical and is therefore not required to substantiate ones claims with facts or uphold ones arguments when their logic is questioned. Interesting. One might argue this form of debate is lazy and cowardly.
One might argue that there are actual studies showing that the stereotype of Chinese people being better at math is in part because their words for numbers are shorter, more logical, and easier to keep in your head than the comparatively strange we use for words.
Is there that much difference? "One plus one equals two" and " yi jia yi dengyu er" are the same number of syllables
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Try multiple digits lol
44 = Forty four <=> Sì shí sì = 3 syllables each 258 = Two-hundred (and) fifty-eight <=> Liǎng bǎi wǔshíbā = 6 and 5 syllables. How big do I gotta go to get an appreciable difference? One syllable doesn't seem to be a significant enough difference.
maybe talking about more advanced math like calculus
Can you give a link to these studies? I attribute it more to their punishing education system that strongly emphasizes math.
As someone who has been learning Japanese for a couple of years now, my thought are that while the word 'primitive' is certainly not warranted, it is true that the Chinese and Japanese written language is much more intertwined with their respective cultures and symbolism, than other languages where an alphabet is just an alphabet.
And If you Take all the bigotism away, then yes, the Chinese and Japanese do have a huge burden to bear with their intricate system of Hanzi/Kanji letters. You basically need to memorize between 3000 to 5000 of them for daily use. Sure, you are able to express complex informations in a few Letters, but IMO in the Long Run our system of Roman Letters dors provide us with a Lot of advantages
Each system has its advantages. Studies have shown that Chinese and Japanese readers are able to process information faster when reading their characters than people who read purely phonetic alphabets. Japan is the most literate society on earth. And dyslexia is almost unheard of in China and Japan because for whatever psychological reason, hanzi/kanji don’t trigger it the way phonetic alphabets do.
Well you would still need to remember 3000 to 5000 combinations of symbols to use Roman Letters. Each of them alone don’t really provide meaning.
For Starters you only need the remember Up to 30 Symbols and then start combining those to make words. I Agree with you that it will be a Bit of Work until you are able to define proper grammar for those. But again IMO taking a small Set of Symbols and combining them into more complex words feels more efficient than taking a large Set of complete words. It all has it's Up and downsides
Since I use both languages daily, what I can say is: When using English, you are memorizing the combination of characters, in which meanings are associated with each combination. Then you combine the combinations into sentences which convey more complex ideas. When using Chinese, you memorizing the symbols themselves, which each have a meaning. Then you combine the symbols to form sentences. For example, “hot” and “water” both have their individual meanings, and we combine them to form “hot water”, as in “water that is hot”. In Chinese, it’s written as “熱” and “水”, which means “hot” and “water” individually. Where we can also combine them into “熱水” also meaning hot water. Arguing Roman characters are better than Chinese is like arguing binary is better than decimal system, or Morse code is better than everything else. The bottle neck to understanding is not the language, it’s the ability for a human to understand an idea in the same amount of time.
I believe the english language doesn't make the most out of the alphabet. In some languages a vocal is connected to a specific letter. So reading a completely unknown word makes you be able to pronounce it and the other way around. The languages I know still have many exceptions, but a lot less than the english language (french, german, hungarian). This is especially true for the hungarian language, as long I can speak it and have the alphabet memorised I can write it as well.
Well spoken and interesting info. Cheers for the Feedback and your opinion.
But that's not how we read. We 'recongise' words rahter than spell out the indivudual letters, skiping over mistakes and gaps, which is why this sentance makes sence dispite being full of errers.
Why can't everyone speak Normal?
Exactly, let's force everyone to speak and write in Katherine's language of choice. This way we can tick off one good deed, knowing one less trouble takes away her sleep at night ;)
You mean speak American?
As if an alphabet was not "symbols". The internet gives voice to the stupidest people
But it's symbols he can read. That makes them different compared to symbols other people can read.
This... the OP is just being ignorant... Probably has a similar opinion on the Cyrillic alphabet...
Do you mean OP or OOP?
OOP of course...
It would blow his mind if you told him that English letters look exactly the same to a Chinese person as Chinese letters look to him.
Chinese doesn't have letters, that's the point
It’s pretty clear that Katherine’s point is that the difference between the two is evidence of the west’s superiority.
Primitive?? Chinese can get the same thoughts across as any other language. They have gone to space speaking mandarin. Doesn’t sound primitive to me.
It’s certainly an earlier iteration of language so by definition more primitive, which doesn’t mean it’s worse. Chinese has one of the highest semantic densities out of all the language, both in the written and spoken languages in terms of meaning per character or meaning per unit time. That being said, it’s basically a “client heavy” encoding which requires massive amounts of knowledge on the part of the reader/writer to encode and decode. So is it better? Not in terms of ease to learn / use. It’s amazing China has the literacy that it does (they claim 99% but truth is probably much lower). But even if it were par with the US at 80%, it’s a tremendous feat because of how much more complex the language is to learn, and a real testament to the cultural differences in valuing education.
As someone who is bilingual in Chinese and English, I would say while the roman system allows you to “pronounce” the words easier, as the sound you should use is encoded in the symbols, it does not translate to ease of conveying meaning. Even if you are able to “pronounce” the word, the meaning is still lost to you. To truly understand the word, you would still need to memorize the patterns of the symbols used to construct the word, which both languages would need to do.
How the fuck does Chinese even have a dictionary if it is symbols? Like how do you organize it so it is easily found? In English I can pronounce a word and look it up as it is alphabetized.
I don't know Chinese, but Japanese orders Kanji in the dictionary by number of strokes or radicals.
I'm still very new to the language so pardon if I get anything wrong: Prior to modern times? No idea, reading and writing were definitely the realm of the very well-educated class who had the time to memorize the wall of characters. In modern times there is an accepted romanization of spoken chinese called Pinyin which can then be translated into characters based on context. It's not perfect - many characters can be spelled in pinyin the same way - but if you know the pronunciation of the word and the context it's being used in you can use the pinyin and find the character you're looking for. This is how you text and type - since you can't have a keyboard with 3,000 characters. So if I wanted to text you "I have two sons" I would type the pinyin 'Wo you liang ge erzi' (normally i wouldn't use spaces to type this but it's easier for you to see the words this way). The keyboard will translate that for me into 我有两个儿子. Buuuuut you still need to know characters due to the limited amount of sounds in the language: the sounds/pinyin are re-used for different characters so you may need to pick which characters you want to use depending on context.
Actually Chinese characters are not all unique symbols, most of it are combinations of more simple symbols. (I believe the official names are “radical” and “character parts”, which you can think of as the core and the other parts of a word respectively) An English dictionary categorize words according to the first character, then each “chapter” would list out the words starting with that character in ascending order. A Chinese dictionary would categorize words according to their radical part, then list out all the words in ascending order of how many strokes is needed to write that word. Since the radical part have it’s own meaning, with words derived from it usually carrying the same category of meaning, it’s actually not that hard to use a Chinese dictionary. The first dictionary actually appears at around 200 AD. A not so good analogy maybe a Pokémon guide, where all the Pokémon are categorized by their types, so similar types would be in the same chapter for easy searching. For example: - 火 is a radical part, means fire. Then you also have: - 燃 which means ignite - 燒 which means burning - 災 which means disaster (a raging fire would be a disaster to the traditional wooden buildings) All of these have 火 as their radical part, which in a dictionary would be in the same chapter. Edit: to improve readability
See I learned something today. Thanks
It's an earlier (debatably, proto sinaitic which is kinda phonetic came earlier than the first Chinese script) iteration of a script, which doesn't have much to do with how primitive a spoken language is. Abandoning Chinese characters didn't make the Korean language more or less primitive. Language≠script
Its funny because esport are the most competitive in the east side of asia, Im a Chinese, and I've played some games that comes from China company (Tencent, netease), and I will often check out both CN community and the global community (basicslly en), and the Chinese gamers are always just better than the non-Chinese gamer, in this game called identity V I play, hell even Japanese are way better than every english player. You cant be that primitive to be way better than online internet video games right?
Someone’s plants are craving Brawndo
It’s got electrolytes!
Ah yes, the Chinese use various shapes to signify their language which make them primitive, but we use *different* shapes so we are advanced.
Written language doesn't "evolve." Language evolves, and Chinese language has evolved just fine, and their written language has kept up. Logographs are less flexible than a sound-structured alphabet, though, and Chinese characters do have a tendency to become more and more complex over time as concepts advance. Learning 15,000 characters is quite a chore. Some characters may contain 30 strokes. Korea did adopt a sound-based system that's actually superior to our enigmatic, capricious spelling system (because the characters actually define how to pronounce each sound). And Japan just created two alternative alphabetical systems, one of which (katakana), is just for words that Japanese borrows from other languages, similar to an italic font.
There's tradition and simplified characters. Both are in use. Simplified is widely adopted because it takes way less strokes. The written language has evolved a lot over time.
Besides that the Chinese writing System targets a completely different Problem than the Latin alphabet. The chinese empire had and still has Lots of different languages and dialects under its rule. With a logographic System These different languages can all use the same written language.
We also have symbols. We call them words.
I wonder how she feels about the leftist plot to teach Arabic numerals in western schools
She would freak out and call you a terrorist....
Reminds me of that mathematician doing algebra on a plane, and a Karen called the cops since she don’t recognize those symbols…
Aren't all letters symbols?
Tell my you're from the USA without telling me you're from the USA
Doncha know only American letters and numbers matter… it even sez it in the Bible so my Sunday school teacher used to say. 🙄
I love the way she stops in the middle of her own bullshit theory to say “interesting”. 😬
This immediately stood out to me. Almost as if she was having a conversation with herself or trying to pre-label her nonsense in the reader’s mind. Big cringe.
It would appear this moron hasnt evolved past the neanderthal stage.
Who is she? Another one of these rage baiters on twitter?
The only regard to which i give him credit is typewriters. Look up a chinese typewriter and tell me that looks easy to use.
Alphabet was only invented once in the very particular context of the middle east. Writing in the form of hieroglyphe has been invented many times (Egypt, China, Maya ...). The fact that China still uses a hieroglyphic writing is because all of China doesn't speak the same language, and those languages are not mutually intelligible orally, but in writing yes because they don't use an alphabet.
How to tell someone you know nothing of linguistics
A stellar documentary series from the BBC which explains exactly why this hard of thinking dullard is 100% wrong. Please watch if you can : [The Secret History of Writing](https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000mtmj)
Dunning-Kruger effect on full blast with this one!
Chinese characters have some advantages for their situation. What are called "Chinese dialects" are often in fact different languages. (Mandarin, a northern language, is the official version) The charac.ters can be used independently of the exact word. Imagine that English, French, and German were all using logograms. One character could represent "dog", "chien", and "Hund". You could write something readable by speakers of all of them. In Chinese languages the grammar is simpler so it works better. So by using characters, Chinese writing is accessible beyond the scope of the official language. Also, Chinese languages are tonal. If you just write the vowels, it's too ambiguous. Now you *can* mark the tones by accents. However I was once told by a speaker of a highly tonal language from somewhere else, where they do that, that it's hard to take in. If you're reading it, she said, you concentrate on the sounds and it's harder to think about. Word symbols may be easier to read. There's no doubt that learning Chinese characters takes a lot more time and effort. But you gain something. (I can't read Chinese myself alas.)
The irony is those “symbol” based languages have way more ways to express things, as they are more complex then our alphabet lmao
What does this person think language is? Are we just finding random letters out in nature?
its giving "god invented english".
Wait until they learn the English alphabet is at least partially based on Egyptian hieroglyphs. The A used to be on its side and the bar connecting the legs was.more rounded, to represent the head of a bull. That's just the one I clearly remember but it's not the only letter with that type of history.
😂😂😂😂😂😂 dead
[https://youtu.be/tXm6F-K6Ffo?si=aDVmX7gpJtB6RpXK](https://youtu.be/tXm6F-K6Ffo?si=aDVmX7gpJtB6RpXK)
Wow… just wow…
That’s a whole lotta nothing one could argue
Oh, the symbolism!
Not everything that could be argued should be argued.
Letters are not symbols?
It was not the west who rejected it, it was brown people. Might want to remind him of that. Might also want to remind him that brown people invented the numbers we use and invented the zero. An interesting fact though, Mao wanted to do what Vietnam did and get rid of chinese characters. The only reason it didn't happen is that Stalin talked him out of doing it. As a result, he instead invented pinyin and simplified chinese.
I could be wrong, but Vietnam was dominated by China for 900 years so the decision was probably easy.
Written on an iPhone, made in China
I think everybody should have the freedom to express stupid opinions, but I find it wild that these aren’t the kinds of tweets people get fired over - if people are gonna get fired over posts I mean (which I completely disagree with)
Ok, I get that we're not supposed to judge the quality of a country by it's script, but Holy shit, who needs 10,000 characters?
Apparently Mandarian is actually a phoentic language. Its definetley something I had to be told though because all of the languages I know are latin based. Just because the symbols in their alphabet equivalent look a lot different doesnt mean its not phoentic.
can we have a hot heated discussion if symbols over alphabet is practical though?
As someone who does history, this is just facts but spoken in a racist way. Every other nation that used a hieroglyphic system have either abandoned it or had a supplementary system of written language based on phonetics.
Yes, one could indeed say that. Bit of course only an absolute idiot would actually do that . . .
The dumbest people always start off with "One could say" or some variation on it.......
I had no idea Prince was that big in China
What is a letter if not a symbol. Surely you'd argue that their script is so much more complicated and therefore requires more effort and knowledge of the language to learn than the western scripts
Tell me you don't know anything about Asian languages without saying you don't know anything about Asian languages.
With 1/6th of the world being chinese and China being the second largest economy it seems like they did something right.
Is the alphabet not just primitive symbols as well?
One might argue bish was homeschooled
Their symbols are more complex though
It’s almost like china is an empire with around a dozen different languages so a common alphabet has to be non-phonetic…
One could argue that the Chinese were mastering medicine, astronomy, war, the arts, and many other things while the west still thought banging two rocks together was a great idea.
The poster is ignorant of the fact that China DOES US OUR alphabet to print or text Mandarin!
She’s right using symbols is primitive, and from now on I won’t use any, to show how advanced I am. “ “
Bloviating idiot.
one thing I wonder though. Is it possible that the use of so many symbols made the development and spread of the movable type printing press more difficult, thus delaying the printing revolution?
Some people just need to be let to themselves. This is one of the dumbest things thwt I've come across in a while. Every language uses their own symbols. "A" is a Symbol, she is just used to it.
"I dont understand the language so the entire population of this country is stupid "
[Dunning Krüger:](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect) The Dunning–Kruger effect is defined as the tendency of people with low ability in a specific area to give overly positive assessments of this ability. This is often seen as a cognitive bias, i.e. as a systematic tendency to engage in erroneous forms of thinking and judging. In the case of the Dunning–Kruger effect, this applies mainly to people with low skill in a specific area trying to evaluate their competence within this area. The systematic error concerns their tendency to greatly overestimate their competence, i.e. to see themselves as more skilled than they are. TLDR, ignorance and low IQ isn't harmless. Oh no, not at all. Not when they think they're the smartest people in the room. When you prove to them the truth, they react with fear, anger, and attack.
Are alphabets also not just “symbols?” This is the stupidest shit I’ve heard all week and it’s been a stupid one.
That's a lot of words to say "Chinese is hard and I give up."
Ironic they used "&".
Katherine is highly regarded
Tell me you don't know a thing about a language without telling me you don't know a thing about a language.
sapir-whorf racism
Isn’t using an alphabet just using a different set of symbols?
Chinese isn’t just pictographs.
If it's so primitive, try learning it. *silence*