Chinese is the most logical language in the world?

6 Comments

1. J. S. says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   First I think you should explain to us why you have come to this conclusion. I have studied Mandarin (Chinese) for many years, but to call it ‘the most logical language in the world’ is a stretch of the imagination. Other than English, what languages have you studied to make this comparison? To call it ‘the most logical language in the world’, I think you would have to study every language in the world to make a comparison – and I know you haven’t done that. Once you give me the basis for your conclusion, I can tell why it isn’t ‘the most logical’ langauge.
2. abbcdfinv says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   That’s not a question?
3. spud says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   Is that Mandarin, or?
4. Taivo says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   Since all languages are the direct result of tens of thousands of years of evolution, there is no such thing as "most logical language". All languages have parts of their system that are very logical to the speakers, but are completely illogical to anyone else. The Indo-European gender systems are a good example. They make perfect sense to the native speakers of those languages, but no sense to anyone learning them. The Chinese languages (there is more than one) are the same way. There are parts of their grammars that make perfect sense to their speakers, but are confusing to anyone else. That’s just the way language is.
5. Nemo Credete says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   it is not very efficient to learn or get the message across, but in my opinion as my first language is European. it is stange because it has a writing system of thousands of symbols which you have to learn idividually, not like an alphabet. there are about 20 different ways of saying sword, but no word for yes or no, and also they dont distinguish between singular and plural, but this may be ok for the chinese, i think that it is fairly illogical from my point of view
6. SilverTonguedDevil says:

   November 20, 2009 at 9:30 am

   Others mention how difficult it is to nail down what you mean. Spoken language or written language? Mandarin or Cantonese or…? Simplified characters or traditional characters?

   I don’t consider writing to be language ("tongue") so much as it is a picture of how we think. In western languages with phonetic alphabets and such, writing is also a picture of how we want our words pronounced. Beijing has adapted Pinyin to show how they want their language pronounced but it doesn’t get very much use other than advertising and computer typing. Chinese characters don’t really give a clue as to how they should be spoken. Oh, I know about radicals but that just gives you a clue that if you already know some arbitrary pronunciation for a radical, you should stick to it.

   In fact, if you never heard any spoken Chinese but had a picture book to illustrate the meaning of a few thousand basic characters, you could learn pretty well how to read Chinese characters without even knowing how to pronounce any of them. When you see 九 you don’t need to know the two very different Cantonese and Mandarin ways of pronouncing it. You just think "9" and bingo, you’re reading it just fine. As a matter of fact, in some ways it is better than hearing it since you can read "he" and "she" in characters but you can’t hear any difference at all when the Chinese speak these characters. Once you get the hang of the grammar and syntax, off you go translating each character in your mind into English. Nothing wrong with that. It’s the way Chinese did it centuries ago. They just translated the characters into their many different languages instead of English.

   Mandarin grammar is simple and often seems logical. No verb tense change for a character, only fit it together with other characters to give a sense of tense ("I go to bed last night"). No noun number change for a character, only add a number or other character to indicate more than one ("6 goose"). No varying placement of adjectives before or after nouns, as they are in French (maison blanche, petite maison). But there are 2 ways to say "not" and you’d better choose the correct one for your chosen verb.

   Mandarin does have several ways to say "yes" and "no". If you ask a waitress if corn is available, she will either say "Have" or "Not have". That’s the same as "Yes" and "No". Even in English nowadays, almost no well-educated person says "yes". If you ask "Will you be going home for the holidays?", the positive response is almost always "I will".

   English is perhaps the most arbitrary language I know. British think Americans are daft to say "I have gotten smarter since last week" because everybody who speaks the king’s English knows you should say "I have got smarter".