Comment on Whales are Chinese
tristan@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 6 days agoEspecially, Chinese is not « structurally » complex. It’s got no numbers, no genders, no cases, the grammar is very analytical and straightforward.
Comment on Whales are Chinese
tristan@tarte.nuage-libre.fr 6 days agoEspecially, Chinese is not « structurally » complex. It’s got no numbers, no genders, no cases, the grammar is very analytical and straightforward.
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 6 days ago
Indeed, which is why it is generally classified as an analytic language (as opposed to e.g. fusional). It is sometimes misclassified as an isolating language, which it really isn’t, since Mandarin does have compounds. It is worth noting, though, that no natural language fits perfectly into the morphological prototypes.
That said, fewer complexities in one part of a grammar tend to even out in others. In fact, there is some tendency of tonal languages to lean isolating or analytic exactly because the ratio of morphemes-to-word is lower (often 1-to-1); given that syllables can only be so complex (a limitation of anatomy), analytic languages will tend to have more homophones than non-analytic ones, and thus the tone tends to be required to maintain the same information density. To look at it another way, tone is a method for distinguishing what are otherwise homophones.
Now, how any of that relates to whales… well, it very likely doesn’t.