Re: Half of all Chinese people can't speak Mandarin!

>>>>> "Tak" == Tak To <takto@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Tak> Bob LeChevalier wrote: [Re the sentence fragment "many of the
Tak> 53 percent of China's 1.3 billion people who can speak
Tak> Mandarin are not frequent Mandarin users"]

>> Sorry, but I am a native English speaker, and I also followed
>> the garden path and parsed it at first as: "Many of the 53
>> percent of China's (1.3 billion people who can speak Mandarin)
>> are not frequent Mandarin users. I conflated the "Many of the"
>> with the 53%, essentially ignoring those first three words. I
>> agree that only the parsing that associates the relative clause
>> back to the 53% is plausible looking at the sentence as a
>> whole, it was worded extremely awkwardly (any sentence that
>> says "many of the X of the Y" is certain to cause some
>> confusion).

Tak> But it is not the "many of" that is confusing, is it? It is
Tak> whether the antecedent of "who" is "1.3 billion people" or
Tak> "53%". Replacing "who" with "that" would mark the relative
Tak> clause clearly as "qualifying" and thereby avoiding the
Tak> confusion.

Even better: avoid such a complicated construction. That sentences
can be broken down into simpler sentences, making it much more
intelligible and removing the ambiguity:

China has 1.3 billion people. 53 percent of them can speak
Mandarin. But many of these are not frequent Mandarin users.

Or:

Many people who can speak Mandarin are not frequent users of
the language. They consititute 53 percent of the Chinese
population of 1.3 billion.


The simpler, the better. Less is more.



--
Lee Sau Dan 李守敦 ~{@nJX6X~}

E-mail: danlee@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Home page: http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~danlee
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Idioms.
    ... Tak> homophonous in Mandarin and mean exactly the same things; ... Did this term occur in Classical Chinese at all? ... accepted as the "correct" way to write that Mandarin expression. ... Tak> probably just grey or grey white, ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: chinese question
    ... Tak> receiving a service. ... Both of them are two character phrases. ... Tak> and the phrase is an also used in colloquial Mandarin. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: If you were to design a language, how many vowels and consonants would you use?
    ... Tak> in Mandarin. ... The Pinyin designers were aware of this, ... and then immediately an "i" (whether it represents a glide or a pure ... Listen also to how Mandarin speakers with a modern Taiwanese accent ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: Very difficult Chinese words: can someone translate these words for me???
    ... >>> perhaps a later borrowing from Mandarin. ... character and hence not used in Mandarin writing at all. ... Tak> Cantonese simply means to loose grip. ...
    (sci.lang)