Re: Has it been tried to represent tones with punctuation ...

John Atkinson wrote:
[skip]
It may well be the case that Chinese on average expresses the same amount of information in less syllables of text than English does, but this certainly doesn't follow from the number of possible syllables in each of the languages. The expansion due to tones in Chinese is more than compensated by that due to English having more initials and many many more finals than Chinese.

Allow me to express a point which I till now wonder because I don't
quite understand. Normally 4000 Chinese characters are in my view
very sufficient for normal use (I had seen claim of 1000). But
in English that number of words wouldn't suffice, if I don't err.
Why is that?

Thanks.

M. K. Shen
.

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