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興趣頗廣,心得全無;文理不通,感情用事;what's next?

Sunday, October 5, 2008

I've got a sense of freedom in words

In English words in particular. There're less rules to follow.
To know that you can write freely is enough to be a reason for joy.
This freedom is present for any writing system that uses alphabets.
I can use this -- kgnockgnoc -- to mean a deep sleep for example,
which by itself is funny enough..

honestly, I think that Chinese language is too succinct..
and this takes away some of our creativity..

so, we still don't have any courses on Creative Writing in Chinese..

yet I learnt these days that Chinese and English are actually very similar in terms of grammar.
They are both analytic language. So, scholars actually claim that Chinese is closer to English
than say, German, Italian or those European languages, even though English is a Germanic language.

The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language.
I ain't that clear about the definition yet.
But a synthetic language usually involves a lot of "inflexions" of words,
singular, plural, subject, object, etc. they all got different word forms..

For example, Spanish is a crazy synthetic language. You can have 20 forms for the same word!!
The consequence is, the word order isn't that important..
I can say "you beat he" or "he beat you" or "beat he you" or "beat you he",
and the meanings are all the same,
because the "he" or the "you" in Spanish will be of different form,
to indicate which is the subject & which is the object..
and the "beat" will change too, but I don't know how..

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