On Wed, 27 Mar 2002, Dan Kogai wrote:
> On Wednesday, March 27, 2002, at 03:23 , jarkko.hietaniemi@nokia.com
> wrote:
> > Secondly, as you say, dictating what the plural in various languages
> > should be, borders on arrogance, but is probably just plain old
> > silliness.
>
> Even more arrogantly speaking, the very notion of plural forms may well
> be just plain old silliness. Chinese has none, neither does Japanese
> and I belive neither does Korean. It seems the older (or may I say, the
Korean can form plural nouns by adding U+B4E4. It can sometimes
be added to adverb and verb-root with some other connotations. Of course,
this doesn't mean that Korean has a strict set of rules as to where to use
plural and where not to.
> more mature) the language is, the less sintactic sugar it has. I can
> brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese
Hmm, it depends on how you look at languages.
**To me** Japanese is the most difficult languages among languages
I tried to learn :-). (btw, most of Koreans find it easier to
learn Japanese than English. In my case, exactly the opposite
is the case.) I would say exactly the same thing for Korean if I were
a foreigner trying to learn Korean. Simply, it seems
**to me** agglutinating languages like Japanese and
Korean are too difficult (syntatically complex) to learn after that
'magic-age' of 10-something. (I know there's no clear-cut border among
typological classification of languages...)
> brag all about how syntactically simple Japanese is but it seems Chinese
> have us all beat with respect to that.
Well, English has become 'Chinese-like' (i.e. more
like isolating languages and less like inflecting languages) recently(?)
with less and less inflection. One example is
that there are a number of nouns that act as a verb without any change
in the form.
> I consider the very lack of Academee Ingrais is the bliss rather a
> shortcoming. It is okay to "grok" or name a monkey kwijibo -- so long
Yeah, that is indeed a blessing and, I believe, partly explains why English
has become so widely used. Another part might be what I wrote above:
the relative simplicity of English grammar compared with other inflecting
languages. Of course, there must be other (more important) reasons -
socio-econo-political.
Jungshik Shin
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