Boingo wrote:English is currently affecting all the languages, basically. I don't think there is a single one that has been studied that doesn't have a single loanword from English.
And where did all the English words come from? Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Welsh, Latin etc.
The scientific paper is a good example of another medium that English is taking over, by the way. English is the language of science.
And whilst Latin should be long dead, it's now the mother language of Medicine too.
All the languages you mention are descendants of Proto-Indo-European. Does that mean that they are still speaking Proto-Indo-European? No. Words like confident or diarrhoea are very much English today, not Latin or PIE. While Latin is a peculiarity among dead languages, in that it is actively studied and even spoken by some, it is a fact that languages die. Entirely. Surely, the leave behind interesting substrates of loanwords, but otherwise they are gone. There is no doubt that when a Sami language dies – for example – it is dead. It will not be a mother tongue to a field of reindeer hearding or anything else, it will be gone. Neither is it likely people will try to revive it again, since it is hard to keep the ones that still remain alive as it is.
I honestly doubt this. Chinese is hard to spell (and to type into a computer, which good to keep in mind), even harder to speak, and the dialects vary hugely.
Technically,
98% of the Chinese speaking population speaks Mandarin. And the characters stay the same. And did you consider the fact that the average ten year old Chinese Student can write 80 characters a minute on paper, and an adult at 100+, and on a computer using PinYin, over 300+ words a minute? And your opinion will be biased on that which you speak English.
Technically, yes. Then there are the other Chinese languages. And the dialects of those, which make the Chinese use Chinese subtitles on many TV shows. I did take those things into account though, I know very well how Chinese is typed with the help of pinyin for instance. This, however, takes prowess in computers to learn to do (surprisingy few people know how to manipulate their language settings and use IMEs), not to mention learning pinyin, which most people do learn along with the Chinese admittedly. English does not have this problem.
I am also a bit skeptical on their ability to write that much, considering I don't think I can sketch 80 letters in a minute. At least if I'm actually writing, not making a line of A's.
I also did not say that Chinese is harder to speak just because I think it sounds weird or something, I did have a reason for that. The tones are very hard to get your vocal chords to process fluently, add to that the funky things they do when they meet each other. Or when you are not reciting poetry and saying each one in an unusually clear voice. The consonants of Chinese aren't the simplest either, not to mention different registers merge certain ones. On the same vein, English does have an atrocious vowel system, but mispronunciation of the vowels is rarely a barrier for understanding, due to vowel length and stuff like that.
Also, while certain things in the hanzi themselves give an inkling as to what the character means or how it is said, the system is not at all phonemic. Neither is English, notoriously, but at least is has a system. The system's logic has gone since people still spell things like people did centuries ago, but there are still guidelines that will help you pronounce the word correctly 85% or the time.
Chinese is also more context based than English, which might leave things ambiguous for no reason. Obviously Chinese does have benefits over English too, but I don't know much about them. Chinese is more gender neutral, I believe. That is one thing.
Nope. Chinese is definitely gender specific, as well as one of the most context specific languages of all. For example, in English, to state your Mother's Father, you say 'Maternal Grandfather'. In Chinese, you can slip every single descriptive unto a two character word, and the attachments in another two.
Mandarin is also a Mother Language in the East, and has one of the largest and most developed vocabularies of all.
Mandarin 12.44%
Spanish 4.85%
English 4.83%
Arabic 3.25%
Hindi 2.68%
Bengali 2.66%
Portuguese 2.62%
Russian 2.12%
Japanese 1.80%
German 1.33%
Javanese 1.25%
Others 61.17%
Just for reference.
Sorry about the gender stuff, I should have checked it before saying it. Although, looking at Wikipedia, it says: 他/她/它 – tā – he/she/it. This basically means that only the written register has a distinctive gender.
What you mention is not an example of being contextually specific (rather it is an example of Asian culture, since most languages in the area have these complex family term systems – or perhaps it is an interesting piece of derivational morphology, but if that is what you are after English does that too [but is not Inuit]). In Chinese you don't necessarily have to mark a noun for plurality, for instance, right? Is it not possible or even common to omit tense (in favor of aspect, perhaps)? I do know that Chinese is pro drop, with no personal – or other – conjugation, which leaves more room for ambiguity.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by the "mother tongue of the east" or that chart. Please elaborate.
