How many languages / What languages do you speak?

My Chinese friends always assumed that mow is just the Kuangdong pronunciation of the mei in mei you, "not have." The word stands on its own in compounds with the meaning "don't have," as in mei chian de, "lack money (-ing)," i.e., "poor."

I remember the poem our Chinese teacher (who was from Fujian and an outsider to the rivalry) taught us:

Tian bu pa,
Di bu pa.
Zuei pa Tong ren
Shuo guan hua.

"I fear nothing in heaven or on earth
so much as the sound of a Cantonese speaking Mandarin."

On this side the compound also has only one meaning: "to impregnate," but it's considered vulgar.

From one round of the Washington Post's weekly word contest a few years back. Rules: to rewrite a well-known set of instructions in the style of a famous poet.

The warning on a liquor bottle, by Eminem:

"If you a knocked-up ho,
Don't drink no mo."

(I can't resist reposting my absolute favorite from that week.)

How to Do the Hokey Pokey
by William Shakespeare

O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe,
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heaven's yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst thou go, girl.
The Hoke, the Poke—banish thou now thy doubt:
Verily, be this what 'tis all about.

 

Are you saying that Mandarin mei and Cantonese mou have two different symbols?

Yes, that stands out. I don't know if they write hai with the symbol for shi or if it's just a different word with a similar meaning. There's no way they could be the same word with phonetic shifts. Cantonese also don't use the Mandarin word chi for "eat," but they say set, which is Mandarin shi, one of many words for "food."

You must have learned the Yale transliteration system like I did. I thought it was superior for actually studying the pronunciation. In Pinyin, "be" is shi and it's shih in Wade-Giles.

I don't really know any Cantonese. My Mandarin vocabulary is so small that I don't have two readings for every syllable. (And maybe not even one for all of them.) The only one I can think of is man fourth tone (I think), "slow down."

 

Long before I studied Chinese, I was told a story that I haven't verified. A regional administrator rose to power during wartime and was not well educated. He surrounded himself with scholars to help him finish his education. One made a reference to the tonality of Chinese and the ruler said, "What? I have never heard of such a thing. Give me an example demonstrating this tonality if you expect me to believe you." The scholar crafted a four-word sentence using the same syllable in all four tones, meaning something like, "Whatever Your Grace requires of me."

I think the example betrays its apocryphal nature. If I'm not mistaken, ancient Han had six tones, as are preserved in some regional dialects of Mandarin like Sichuan hua.

I always wanted to study a non-Indo-European language. Books on Hebrew were easy enough to find in the 1950s, but in a cowboy town I couldn't find any live speakers. Eventually I moved to L.A. and after finishing college and getting a job that had nothing to do with any language except Cobol, I discovered that the nearby community college offered classes in Mandarin. A year later I found myself with a Chinese girlfriend and I prevailed upon her to speak Mandarin at home even though for her it was like living with a three-year-old. (Turns out it was a good match emotionally but that's another story.)

I think I made it to about four and a half eventually, which is not bad. What little I know, I am completely fluent in. I think in kiddie-Chinese and my pronunciation is pretty good. Although she was from Sichuan and I still have traces of a Sichuan accent. They get the tones right, but they reverse S C Z with SH CH ZH. Final NG after certain vowels becomes N and final N becomes a nazalised vowel like French or Portuguese.

 

I think, easy. Brit speech word short, China speech word short. I speak China speech use Brit word, you understand.

I can't always come up with a one-syllable English word to match a one-morpheme Chinese "word," but the opposite is also true so it balances out. The simplified grammar would need to be adapted carefully. There are only nouns and verbs. "Short" is a verb: "to be short." When I say "short man" it is really "being-short man," with no participial suffix since Chinese has no inflections. The meaning is obvious from the word order, which is very rigid in Chinese. Sometimes a sentence gets so complicated that the relationships between the words are not obvious. In that case the particle de is inserted strictly as a parsing aid, indicating that the previous phrase or clause is complete and is a modifier of the following word, phrase or clause.

This is not so necessary in writing, where the 1,600 phonetically possible syllables of spoken Chinese explode into several thousand distinct homonymic morphemes and the possibility of misunderstaning is greatly reduced.

This exercise would be much easier for speakers of English than many other languages. We are not used to heavy use of inflections, our syntax is fairly similiar, and we build new words by shoving old ones together just like they do. We'd have to drop the notions of tense and number, and discover that they're really not as useful or necessary as we think. It would be great to dump our useless articles, and to replace our pathetic stock of Stone-Age prepositions with verbs that describe relationships far more precisely.

 

Hindi and Bengali also have huge numbers of speakers. Arabic, Japanese and Portuguese are also in the top ten. I'm not sure which languages are #9 and 10 these days. German was hanging in there for a while.

I would recommend learning languages that are as unrelated as possible, because this will introduce you to vastly new ways of thinking. Assuming you're a native speaker of English, why not pass up the other Indo-European languages? That excludes everything mentioned so far except Chinese, Japanese and Arabic. You could choose Hebrew instead of its cousin Arabic because it's easy to find a teacher in any country with a large Jewish community. Vietnamese, Thai, Tagalog and Korean come to mind. Also the family that includes the major non-Indo-European languages of Europe: Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish and Estonian. Or something offbeat that's in the news like Georgian, or one of the myriad African languages.

If your goal is to be able to travel and talk to people everywhere you go, then that's different. But if you're interested in expanding your mind, I recommend that you consider not selecting languages more-or-less closely related to English like Spanish, French, Gaelic, Greek, Russian, Farsi, Hindi, Armenian, etc.

If you chose Arabic, Japanese and Xhosa, you'd have your life's work cut out for you. ^_^

 

Sure. I'll give you three examples from one language: Chinese.

1. Tone is phonemic. You can't use tone of voice to indicate how you feel. You have to express it in words.

2. There are no inflections. No gender, number, case, tense, mode, etc. "Dog eat fish." If it's really necessary to make it clear that there was one dog, three fish, and this took place yesterday, you say, "Yesterday one dog eat three fish." If it's clear from context you don't need the extra words: a general statement that dogs like to eat fish if it's available, or my dog eats fish every chance he gets, or if you leave your fishbowl on my coffee table when we come back from the movies your fish will be gone.

3. There are no prepositions. No vague words like "in," "at" and "for," with so many meanings that they are now essentially meaningless. Chinese has only nouns and verbs, so you have thousands of verbs to choose from to help you express relationships very precisely. Instead of "the apple is in the box," you say, "apple occupy box interior." In the last century we began struggling to free ourselves from our Stone Age paradigm of prepositions by inventing a new kind of grammatical construction, as seen in a steady stream of unorthodox compounds like user-friendly, carbon-neutral and labor-intensive. The Chinese have had that facility for thousands of years.

(Okay, in addition to nouns and verbs Chinese also has a couple of particles, which are nothing more than placeholders to help you parse a complicated sentence.)