Talk on the Wild Side: Why Language Can't Be Tamed by Lane Greene

Author:Lane Greene
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781610398336
Publisher: The Economist
Published: 2018-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

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Buxom, but never nice 113

People who learn Chinese describe two big challenges in doing so.

One is the incredibly difficult script of the written language. Learners

must memorise thousands of characters for basic literacy, and even

this will leave them turning to a dictionary over and over to read an

everyday text like a newspaper article. It is safe to say that this is one of

the most fiendishly complicated writing systems ever devised. It has

its defenders, mostly proud Chinese themselves – but not even they

would call it straightforward and easy.

The other big challenge with Chinese comes not in writing but in

speech: tones. Mandarin, the most common spoken variety, has four

tones – level, rising, dipping and falling pitch – over the course of

pronouncing a vowel. To Chinese-speakers, tone is as important for

meaning as vowel quality is in English; you can no more mix up shí

and shì and expect to be understood than an English-speaker can mix

up “bit” and “beet”. Tones are crucial to the system, and a nightmare for

most Western learners.

But, says the enervated Chinese learner, once you’ve got a grip on

the tones, and once you’ve got a basic vocabulary built up, there comes

a strange and happy surprise. Many people put it starkly: Chinese has

“no grammar”. Unlike, say, French or Italian, which require you to

memorise bucketloads of endings to form a past tense or a subjunctive,

or German, which requires the mastery of a syntax that can leave verbs

at the very end of hugely long clauses, Chinese seems simple. It’s just

word word word word word.

Can it really be that Chinese is so childish, though? How did such

a sophisticated and ancient culture get built with a language that

foreigners describe as being as simple as snapping Legos together?

The answer is that of course it’s not really all that simple, it’s just that

Chinese puts its complexity in different places; namely, it doesn’t have

all those endings that make acquiring Latin and Greek, German and

Russian a long slog of memorisation.

For example, there is no obligatory marking of plurals in Chinese:

, transcribed as qìchē and pronounced like “tchee-cher”, can mean

“car” or “cars”. (This can be shortened to just

, chē, too.) How on earth,

then, do the Chinese know how many cars someone’s got? Simple: they

use context, plus a few simple strategies for clearing up ambiguity

where context isn’t enough: wŏ y΅u chē, said with no other context

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