Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Xie xie (thx), Grant

Grant Barrett : “It doesn't matter at all how many sounds your language has. No natural language that I know of, including Chinese, is such that every phoneme equals a single idea and only one idea. Instead, most phonemes do more than one thing and it takes one or more phonemes to make each morpheme, and one or more morphemes to make the larger lexical units, and then sentences, paragraphs, and so on. By the time you have a sufficient number of these strung together, you will find that all living languages can express all ideas, though some can express them more concisely.”

I think a language have more sounds would get more benefit. What I said is ‘sound' neither phoneme nor syllable. A sound may be formed by either a single vowel or a mixture of a consonant and a vowel. A sound lasts roughly 0.25 second. That is to say within this time, everybody can send a clear message to a listener. If we can't use it properly, then we waste time.
An example is from playing card. We know the Chinese speaks a tone language, when a Chinese speaker asks his Chinese mate in English in front of you, “What is this?” as he picking up a playing card. In this case, you thought that gay want to know the card. But in fact the speaker told his friend what the card was already. As a Chinese can use four different tones to pronounce each syllables, he use “What1” telling his friend “This is spade.” “What2” telling his friend “This is heart.” and so on. Now let us check the second syllable in the sentence of “What is this?” It is ‘is'. It could also be pronounced in four different ways. We regard them as 1,2,3,4. Finally, the syllable “this” can be pronounced in four ways too. Then put ‘is' and ‘this' together it should be 1,1=1, 1,2=2, 1,3=3, 1,4=4, 2,1=5, 2,2=6, 2,3=7 and so on. By this way, the speaker tell hie friend the card is spade 9 or club 12 while a English speaker thought the first Chinese ask question to his friend.
From that example you may understand, in everyday speech, an English speaker at least wasted 3/4 information signals.

Grant Barrett : “Conciseness, brevity, and speed of expression that are due to the nature of the language itself and not to the skill of the individual speaker aren't automatically superior to slower, more thorough, or more elliptical expression. If that were true, literature would not exist.”

Structuralism believes that every language is in fact a changing system. So, once we know the trend, we can help a certain language to improve it expression system. As for the aesthetic of literature, it is also follow this rule. For instance, in Shakespeare' time, English had only 30,000 words, but now English has more than one million words, that is to say no one can meet a certain word as frequent as Shakespeare. In other word, no one can use a certain word as sophisticate as Shakespeare.

Grant Barrett : “Such built-in capability of brevity in a language also does not automatically make every speaker of that language somehow better than speakers of languages that take longer to render an idea. No, in all languages the maximum expression is achieved by those who have mastered the given language to its fullest and they, the best writers and the best speakers, are not necessarily those who use the fewest words, even across languages.”

I don't think a reform can be take place overnight, but if you don't want do something, then the problem is still there. Once we know the reason, I believe authors of English would solve the rest issue.

Grant Barrett: “Su, the basic problems with your entire argument are:

1. Failure to define a real problem.

2. Failure to settle on a single definition of “word” or of “English.”

3. Failure to understand the building blocks of language or master linguistics vocabulary in order to fully express your ideas. For example, what you describe a “sound” appears to be a morpheme.

4. Failure to understand how people really learn and remember language.

Addressing each of these points is more than I can possibly accomplish here.”

1. I don't know what you mean of the real problem. Can I ask you a question? Do you know, what is the linguistics study for and why should there is a branch of study that called linguistics?
Anyway, I can answer it.

2. It may be hard to give a definition of English ‘word'. For English world mixed compound word and basic word together. All of them were called word but in fact there are some different. Currently, the English has over one million words (including scientific words), correspondently the Chinese have a vocabulary larger than English. The only different is that every high school student of China can master the Chinese vocabulary. On the other hand, every university student of English can only master less than 30,000 words.

3. What I mean to say a “sound” is not a morpheme. See the difference, you think both ‘ten' and ‘ted' are CVC structure, by with a clearer inspection you may find the difference. ‘ten' is on sound while ‘ted' is two. If you don't believe me, then repeat each of them 20 times continuously. You will find ‘ted' using more time than ‘ten', why?

4. People learn a new word should look for dictionary. What if we list the explanation of dictionary in the book that you are reading? Or we may say we just regard the explanation of dictionary as words and the authors write down the explanation just like he write down any other words? Or we may say, every body understand self explanation words, without any help. The simplest example is once you know what ‘pig' is and what is ‘meat' put them together pig-meat, every body would understand it. But even if you know these two words, some one give you a word as ‘pork', without further training no children will know what is it. In fact, the one million words of English vocabulary is just created like the ‘pork', the reason is that language lacking adequate number of sounds.