What are the advantages and disadvantages of Chinese compared with other languages?

◥◣ On the advantages of Chinese characters ◢◤

Competition between Chinese and English!

100 years ago, the whole world thought that Chinese was the language of babies. Later, people found that Chinese is the most advanced language in the world. It turns out that 7,000 years ago, Chinese also had long-winded back sip and words, but later we abandoned all those useless things. For example, a word "le" is used to indicate the completed action. There is no need to be wordy like the present past perfect tense.

Ancient Egyptian cuneiform evolved into Phoenician, ancient Phoenician evolved into Greek, Greek into Latin, Latin into French, and French into English. Latin became the Slavic language family eastward, and the Slavic language family evolved into Russian. At the same time, it is also a history of the spread of religion, a process in which Catholicism is divided into Christianity and Orthodox Christianity. Chinese is the only advanced language in the world that does not use letters.

Chinese is the only language that can be used in the computer age, and it is most suitable for voice control, rather than touching it by hand like English!

This is a question that decides the fate of the people of China. Please publicize as much as possible! An obvious advantage of Chinese is its wide range of thinking. In mathematics, because of monosyllabic pronunciation, the response to numbers is faster, but it is better in logical thinking. However, judging from the development trend of human civilization, Chinese, as an ideographic language, can freely combine new terms, new concepts and even new ideas, and can accommodate the impact of information and knowledge explosion, and will undoubtedly develop into the same language of human beings. It is more convenient and colorful to exchange ideas in this language. Of course, both papers and computer languages use Chinese and Pinyin. The greatness of Chinese lies in its compatibility. You can see that there is a mixture of Chinese Arabic numerals and western pinyin in Chinese academic papers, but there is no Chinese character in English papers. A physicist in China can read through the papers of chemical experts with the basic knowledge of chemistry in middle school, and vice versa. It is casting pearls before swine for experts from different industries in Britain and America to exchange academic achievements. With this advantage, Chinese is qualified to become a world language, and some scholars in our country want to pinyin Chinese. Isn't this a good example for Handan? We in China also have the right to sue those so-called civilized Westerners, who are causing environmental pollution and destroying forests and grasslands, because printing a book with the same content wastes twice as much paper as Chinese, and the number of people who use western languages in the world is five times that of Chinese. Multiplying by simple factor will waste wood 10-20 times and increase industrial wastewater by 20 times. As far as the superiority of language is concerned, westerners are not qualified to make irresponsible remarks about Chinese. Even illiterate people know to find Chinese texts from the five working languages of the United Nations, because Chinese texts are the thinnest.

Human civilization can not be separated from words, and words can not be separated from writing and searching words; Writing (typing) and searching for words are two legs of using words, which are parallel. My point is that in today's information age, human society can't live without computers. What kind of text is the fastest and most accurate to input in the computer, and what kind of text is the best to use and the best to use; Which character is the fastest and most accurate to retrieve words, which character is the best to use, and the best to use.

Our Chinese characters have unique advantages in the speed and accuracy of computer input and text retrieval, which are unmatched by any other characters in the world-it is the unique and best character of human beings.

First, enter the text.

In the past twenty years, Chinese characters have made great progress in computer input, and many "shape codes", "phonetic codes" and "shape and sound codes" have appeared, so that Chinese characters can be freely input in computers like foreign languages of pinyin characters.

In terms of speed and accuracy, Chinese characters are not inferior to, or even surpass, foreign languages of Pinyin, but they do not show absolute advantages and are not satisfactory. This is mainly because many "shape codes", "phonetic codes" and "shape-sound codes" belong to the "one-yuan-one-type" coding method. The reform direction of Chinese character input method is: marching towards "binary binary" coding mode.

Second, word retrieval.

Human civilization can not be separated from words, words can not be separated from writing and word search, and now it can not be separated from computer typing and word search; Writing (typing) and searching for words are two legs of using words, which are parallel.

Chinese characters are "difficult to search", which has been puzzling us since ancient times: our Chinese characters have always lagged behind pinyin foreign languages in the convenience of searching; The reason is that the foreign language of pinyin is an ordered word, while Chinese characters are inherently unordered words. With the appearance and perfection of Chinese character "shape code" coding, the situation of Chinese character "difficulty in choosing words" has changed or will soon change-from "difficulty in choosing words" to: the most convenient word to choose words (it can be put in place in one turn, far behind any foreign language of Pinyin).

China people have such a prejudice in their hearts; I believe that Chinese will be eliminated by English sooner or later. I remember that about once, Hu made his words clear in a simple way during the debate. A few days ago, a scholar Li Rui was invited to the Century Lecture Hall. He also believes that the result of globalization is that English will rule the world. Only Ruan Cishan said in an article "Big Times, Short Stories" that Chinese thinking is faster than English. However, he raised another question; Since the use of' sound' in Chinese makes Chinese think faster than English, is it because there are many sounds in Cantonese that Cantonese thinks faster than Mandarin? My answer is that although Cantonese uses more tones than Mandarin, it has two shortcomings. First, its writing is poorly planned and expressive, with closed syllables. Second, its sound utilization rate is not high. Mandarin has 265,438+0 initials, 35 finals and four tones. The result of continuous multiplication is 2900 tones, but 2500 can be used, and only 1 200 is actually used in Putonghua. Cantonese has nine tones. Even though it has as many initials and finals as Mandarin, it should actually use more than twice as many tones as Mandarin. However, Cantonese actually uses only 1500 tones, which is almost the same as Mandarin, and the usage rate is almost twice that of Mandarin. The low usage rate means that it is difficult to learn. Because every use of the same initial or vowel is actually a process of practice, the initial or vowel with high usage rate is bound to be easy to remember and master. In daily life, we can also see that language elements that are frequently used, including initials, finals, Chinese characters and words, are easier to master. In fact, the quality of a language depends on two aspects. First, can you master it with little memory? Second, can you master more knowledge than others in your lifetime? To put it to a limit, it should be: the best language is the language that you can learn without learning, but you know the most, or the language that you learn less and know more.

English is different from Mandarin. In the International Phonetic Alphabet, English has 20 vowels and 20 consonants, so the number of English sounds will not exceed 20× 20 = 400. On the other hand, any sound that is not within these 400 sounds is not recognized by English, or is considered as an incorrect pronunciation; This is not a syllable. By comparison, we can see that the pronunciation of Chinese is three times that of English, and the ratio between them is much greater than that of Cantonese and Mandarin.

Let's talk about why the more kinds of sounds, the faster the thinking speed. Last year, I discussed this issue in the "Peking University Chinese" forum for a month before I made it clear to you. I want it to be as simple as possible here. Suppose a person can only pronounce two sounds, specifically, he can pronounce two sounds, A and B. According to computer theory, we know that he can still express the whole world with these two symbols. Suppose that there are only 400 things to express in the world, then an Englishman can express one of the 400 things with each pronunciation, while a person who can only pronounce two sounds sometimes expresses one of the 400 things with nine pronunciations, because nine times of two is only greater than 400. For example, the British use' I' to mean' I', and people who only know two sounds may use abbababba to mean the concept of' I'. It takes about a quarter of a second for the average person to make a sound. Comparing the two, we can see that people who only know two kinds of voices not only express slowly, but also work hard. When expressing the concept of' I', the British use a quarter of a second, and people with only two voices use two and a quarter seconds. If two people live in this ratio all their lives, all the information they enjoy in their lives will be its inverse ratio of 9: 1. In the actual situation, the most obvious is the contrast between Japanese and Chinese. As we know, Japanese uses 100 different sounds, while Chinese uses 1200 sounds. Therefore, many Chinese characters, when Japanese want to read, must be expressed in two or three sounds. Let's assume that all words in Japanese are expressed by two sounds. Doesn't that mean that the information that Japanese people can enjoy in their lifetime is only half that of China people? I once wondered whether this had something to do with the fact that there had never been a great thinker in Japanese history. We know that thinking is actually a process of speaking from the heart. If you speak quickly, then the speed of thinking should follow. A concrete example is that Zhao Yuanren once compared the speed of memorizing multiplication formulas in English and Chinese. Chinese took 30 seconds and English took 45 seconds. Therefore, if two people recite in English and Chinese at the same time, by the time of 30 seconds, Chinese users must have thought of 998 1, while English users must not be here. Perhaps, he only thought of seven seven forty-nine. This proves that using languages with more pronunciations is faster than using languages with less pronunciations. This has been confirmed by many scholars at home and abroad. As for whether thinking fast means being smart, this is acknowledged by many scholars.

My evidence is to explain a historical mystery: why are the ancient Greeks smarter than others? Because Greek culture originated from ancient Finich, we know that Finich invented human phonetic symbols, which is a great progress in sound decomposition and a great retrogression in thinking speed. Because the Financians used only 22 consonants to screen the easily distinguishable sound elements, its expression speed was slower than any other language now, while the Greeks used vowels. We know that after the combination of vowels and consonants, the types of sounds have increased several times. In fact, there are vowels in the voice of the Financi people, otherwise they can't be pronounced. The so-called 22 consonants mean that they only recognize these 22 consonants as information carriers, that is, ma, me, mu, mai and muo are no different from an M in their ears, just as the four tones of me are no different from the British. Due to the sudden increase in the types of sounds, the Greeks' thinking advanced by leaps and bounds, resulting in later phenomena. Someone on the forum once asked why Chinese is not as advanced as Britain, because there are still more phonetic types than English. My answer is that when the variety of sounds suddenly increases, new ideas appear. On the contrary, when the types of sounds decrease, the thoughts tend to be conservative. After the Yuan Dynasty, China lost a "Ru" sound in his voice, and China's weakness began at that time. Finally, when discussing Neanderthals, people also found that people who used fewer kinds of sounds would be eliminated by history.

I think the reason why Chinese will definitely beat English is not here. The key is to solve the problem of knowledge explosion that mankind is facing at present. As we know, there are more than one million English words, including all kinds of biological names and new terms of patent inventions. If we consider that there are some elements in English that can be deduced and associated; Such as prefixes, suffixes and compound words, it also needs to remember one million basic words. And these words can be expressed in 4000 Chinese characters. The fundamental reason is that there are not enough kinds of English pronunciation.

For example, the word pork stands for pork in English, which has nothing to do with pigs and meat, but only represents a combination of them. If pork, mutton, beef, beef, lard, lard, sheep fat and butter talons are put together and compared, it is found that all conjunctions in English are new symbols, which have nothing to do with any of them, but constitute the main body of English vocabulary. The fundamental reason is that if pork is changed into the form of pig and meat together, it will sound four times, and pork will only sound twice. Therefore, conjunctions can save pronunciation but increase memory, and participles do not need memory but increase pronunciation times. Imagine that a butcher uses the word' pork' thousands of times a day, and words read twice save two thousand pronunciations than words read four times. Why not? But when it comes to uncommon words, English, like Chinese, uses decomposed words, such as donkey meat. Because of the words that are not commonly used, even if the symbolic form is established, others can't remember them. Chinese can decompose English conjunctions, which is very useful and greatly reduces the vocabulary that needs to be memorized. Not only that, it can also clearly sort out the position of words in people's minds. The birth of Darwinism is based on Linnaeus's binomial method, which makes all kinds of impressions change from the original plane to three-dimensional in the mind. For example, before Linnaeus, people named all living things. In this way, because there are too many kinds, the same creature may have two names, while other creatures may have no names. Linnaeus first classified all creatures, gave them a class name, and then put a word under the class name, which formed the name of binomial method. This is not only clear, but also greatly reduces the symbols that need to be memorized; For example, there used to be 10,000 names, but now they are divided into 100 categories, and each category is 100. What we need to remember is only 100 class names and 100 species names, * * * 200, instead of the original 10000. With the explosion of knowledge becoming more and more serious, it is necessary for human beings to transform other terms in this way, and the only way at present is to transform them according to the structure of Chinese. The reason is still the number of pronunciation types.

This phenomenon was first realized by Leibniz of Germany, who believed that Chinese was the language of group meaning that the western world had been dreaming of since Aristotle. But he didn't see the real characteristics of sound, but because of the quantitative expression of Chinese characters, he defined Chinese characters as the most advanced characters in the world. I think if he sees today's knowledge explosion world, he will definitely ask all countries in the world to abolish pinyin and adopt Chinese characters.

Finally, talk about how many words or symbols a person can remember in his life. The number of Chinese characters used in China is usually 3,000 to 4,000, while Shakespeare has only 30,000 words in English, and he can master them all. However, by Churchill's time, his vocabulary was still 30 thousand, and by that time, there were nearly one million words in English. So I think Shakespeare's proficiency in the use of English vocabulary is beyond the reach of future generations. I once asked many English language institutions in higher education on the Internet how many words they should master in learning English, and their answers were always vague or something else. Later, in some unavoidable articles, I found that linguists' requirements for English words are: an educated English user should master 50,000 to 250,000 words, which is not only a big gap, but also, according to this standard, Shakespeare and Churchill should be illiterate, at least uneducated people. In my opinion, this is the weakness of anyone who admires English, as long as they can avoid being asked this question, so are other aspects. ......