Comments on: Chinese is the New Computer

By: qiuyue

qiuyue — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 04:46:49 +0000

Jason nin hao

wo shi mei guo de, wo shuo yingwen he xue xi zhongwen. Wo tong yi nin, wo men mei guo ren dou ying gai xue xi zhongwen, dan shi mei guo you bu duo lao shi.

Wo xi huan yong zhong guo de wang he zhong guo de you xi xue xi zhongwen, ni ne? Wo you hen duo zhong guo de pengyou, wo jiao ta men yingwen, ta men gao su wo ru guo wo shuo cuo

Wo gao xing ren shi ni. Wo hen xi huan ren shi mei guo ren shui zhi dao zhongwen. Wo xu yao shi jian zhongwen

Fa song gei wo email ba. wo men yi qi neng xue xi. polkadot1977@yahoo.com

Dui bu qi, wo dong pinyin, kan bu dong zhongwen zi.

Translation:

Hi Jason
I am an english speaking American studying Chinese. I agree with you, we should all be learning Chinese, but there are few teachers.

I like to use the Chinese side of the internet and also internet games with chinese farmers for practicing. How do you practice? I have made many chinese friends who learn english from me and tell me when I made mistakes with my chinese.

I’m glad to meet you and really enjoy meeting other americans who study chinese, like me. I need much practice! hehe

Send me an email sometime, maybe we can practice together. polkadot1977@yahoo.com

Sorry, at the moment I understand a fair bit of pinyin but almost no chinese characters, though.

By: Herr Doktor Deth Vegetable

Herr Doktor Deth Vegetable — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 16:50:39 +0000

Actuall, V is right. Someone far cleverer than I once described English as “The end-result of Norman crossbowmen trying to pick up Saxon barmaids.”

A fair assessment of such a muddy mix of germanic and romantic language.

By: Chris Barts

Chris Barts — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 09:52:16 +0000

V: By your logic, English is directly derived from every other language on Earth. Now shut up while the adults are talking.

It's true that the Germanic and the Romantic languages are related to each other by older, less obvious bonds. They are, after all, both part of the western branch of the Indo-European language family. On the other hand, learning a Romance language from a Germanic background can still be an enlightening experience, and vice-versa. For one thing, English has a highly analytic word order (the position of words in a sentence determines their role) whereas Romance languages tend towards inflecting words to show their role. In Latin, for example, you can rearrange the words in the sentence "The farmer saw the wolf." at random and no meaning is lost because each word is modified to show what it does. Therefore, Latin speakers use word order to show emphasis (is the important part that the farmer saw the wolf, or is the important part that the farmer saw the wolf)?

Here is a page showing the Indo-European family tree with a special emphasis on where English comes from. And here is a page describing how we can reconstruct dead languages based on living descendants.

By: V

Thu, 27 Dec 2007 06:30:39 +0000

Thank you, anonymous, I see you’ve read a book recently! However, upon reading it more closely, you will undoubtedly notice that at whereas about half our words and language structure come from a *germanic* root, the other half is Latin or Greek based. Please as to not have your head explode onto your cherished magazine rack, those will also provide you with lots of examples about which I am talking.

By: Chris Barts

Chris Barts — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 05:15:50 +0000

This is just a language geek talking here, but you should make it clear that English is based on (shares the same roots as) German, not Latin. However, the most common second languages in this country (Spanish and French) are based on Latin, so perhaps I merely misunderstood you.