Re: Esperanto and Interlingua

LEE Sau Dan:

"Jens" == Jens S Larsen <jens_s_larsen@xxxxxxxx> writes:

Jens> Can you show me a few Chinese words that are copied
Jens> _directly_ from some other language?

>> Yes. 殺那 -- from Sanskrit. Or 經濟 -- from Japanese.

Jens> How do you know they are copied?

According to various credible sources.

That's rather different from typical loanwords in languages like
English or Russian (or Korean, Japanese and Thai, for that matter).
There, loads of loanwords are easy to recognise from their form.

BTW, I'm not entirely convinced that 經濟 (thank God for cut-and-paste!)
came directly from Japanese. Maybe 經 and 濟 are originally Chinese, and
the Japanese only put them together and re-exported the expression.

Jens> There's a tendency in international conferences where
Jens> English is the only common language, that the native
Jens> English-speakers dominate the discussions.

No. At international conferences, we hear a wide variety of accents
of English: Indian, Italian, French, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, etc.
Some of the speakers speak very fluent *in their own accent*, giving
everyone except their own countrymen a hard time in figuring out what
they mean. So, the native speakers of English aren't really enjoying
a big advantage.

Oh, they are. They can make themselves understood. And if they are not
understood, it's the listeners' fault, not theirs. Authority poker is
played slightly differently with a neutral language than with a non-
neutral one.

Jens S. Larsen

.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A beautiful Gaelic song by Wiliam Ross
    ... The advantage of a phonetic language is of course beyond rubies, ... When speaking English the only rule is that to be understood, ... The Chinese languages, of which there are many, with variations spoken ... Get the tone wrong and you ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: A beautiful Gaelic song by Wiliam Ross
    ... The advantage of a phonetic language is of course beyond rubies, ... When speaking English the only rule is that to be understood, ... The Chinese languages, of which there are many, with variations spoken ... Get the tone wrong and you ...
    (soc.culture.scottish)
  • Re: singapore identity
    ... It is an English language paper which is top heavy with Indians and half-Indians. ... the Indian bias is shining. ... Chinese language, perfectly, at work, at play or at home. ...
    (soc.culture.singapore)
  • Re: The "spinoza" programming language
    ... anything, it shows in natural language a distinct entropy as seen, ... I have heard that when books, particularly science books, are translated ... using long strings of Chinese characters. ... English or another IE language before beginning their studies of CS and ...
    (comp.programming)
  • Re: How NOT to surivive!
    ... While it is beginning to be clear the London police ... a different language then you, ... I don't have a clue what "STOP" is in Chinese, Japanese, ... But before I would go to a country where English was ...
    (misc.survivalism)
Quantcast