BBRoundtable

Simplified Chinese (a written variant of Mandarin) has around 2500-3000 kanji that for the most part have been changed to be easier to remember (very reduced stroke counts for example). Mandarin Chinese has tens of thousands. I'm not familiar with Cantonese though.

Right, I was thinking of the original form of Mandarin with the tens of thousands of kanji. Unless Cantonese is more similar to simplified Chinese than it is to original Mandarin, then I can't figure out what'd make it any easier. Japanese is way easier, as you already know, since you only need to know about 2000 kanji to be able to read the average newspaper. Not that I know 2000 kanji, mind you. I'll be lucky to recognize 200 at this point.

Yeah, I'm not at all familiar with Cantonese either. I'm up to around 400 some odd kanji myself.

Are you guys still talking about this...? >.>

Seriously. Get back on the topic of how the English laguage is epic phail. Yes. Phail. With a 'Ph.' It's just that much phail.

Engrish, on the other hand, is awesome. There ARE no rules.

I dunno, English might be phail in the realm of making immediate sense with regards to spelling, but it definitely succeeds in being interesting. We just learned in class the other day about how even though the English borrowed about 10,000 words from medieval French, they started treating the words as if they were English words. A.k.a. putting them together in compounds, like "gentle + man = gentleman", even though "gentile" comes from French. French doesn't make compound words. Which might make for shorter words, I'll grant you, but they sound less interesting. Only in a Germanic language will you get freakish stuff like "butterfly" or "eyebrow."

And only in Engrish will you get phrases like "I danced with the peanut butterflies." I'd probably have gotten the mp3 for that song if the lady were a better singer. I love the garbled nonsense lyrics, but the singer just couldn't hit the high notes properly. It made my ears hurt to listen to it. Oh well.

And flying silver spoons eat melting marmalade moons.

Yeah, English might have some amusing points, but Engrish beats it on all levels. >_>

Toastyfuzz wrote:Only in a Germanic language will you get freakish stuff like "butterfly" or "eyebrow."

Umm...if you would translate "butterfly" 1:1 into German, you would get "Butterfliege" (butter = "Butter", fly = "Fliege") instead of "Schmetterling" (which would translate as "dashling" following the 1:1-rule, as "schmettern" = dash). Okay, the latter would even make some more sense, as that insect is indeed "dashing" its wings to fly around.
But the eyebrow remains the "Augenbraue" (eye = "Auge", brow = "Braue") - being pedantic, you would have to say "Augebraue" (minus the n) if you refer to only one eyebrow, as "Augen" is the plural of "Auge" (or do you own only one line of hair above your optical receptors? If, you should start to worry about your genetic pool... ). Which could be also being thrown back again, as you English-speakers should say "eyesbrows" if you mean the pair of hair above your eyes...

But I do understand that German can be very tricky, especially when it comes to numbers...as far as I know, German is the only language which is adding numbers in reverse, like in "24" for example - while in English, it's logically spelled as "twenty-four" (20+4), we Germans say "vierundzwanzig" ("four-and-twenty"; (4+20)).

Not to speak of "false friends" and other misunderstandings...yep, messing around with language(s) is fun indeed.

Frog wasn't actually talking about German itself, but rather the Germanic collection of languages. English is actually a Germanic language. Some others in the Germanic category are Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. There's a wiki here and Fuzzy might be able to elaborate more.

What I find more irritating about German numbers than the backward tens is that there are no spaces in them whatsoever when written out as words. So if you have to write out a really long number like vierhundertfünfundsechzigtausendneunhundertdreiundsechzig (465963 for our English speakers). At least with spaces there you could do ordinary line breaks. Fortunately though, I guess you don't have to write out incredibly large numbers as words very often.

Nakor wrote:Frog wasn't actually talking about German itself, but rather the Germanic collection of languages. English is actually a Germanic language. Some others in the Germanic category are Icelandic, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch. There's a wiki here and Fuzzy might be able to elaborate more.

The funky thing is Scots, a language which is seemingly bearing more similarities with German and/or Dutch than expected - like in the sentence "He turnt oot the licht" to 'He turned the light out', which is in German "Er machte das Licht aus". More about Scots here.

Nakor wrote:What I find more irritating about German numbers than the backward tens is that there are no spaces in them whatsoever when written out as words. So if you have to write out a really long number like vierhundertfünfundsechzigtausendneunhundertdreiundsechzig (465963 for our English speakers). At least with spaces there you could do ordinary line breaks. Fortunately though, I guess you don't have to write out incredibly large numbers as words very often.

Unfortunately not on my cheques.

At least when handling with banks, I think it's allowed to use spaces and a mix of numbers and letters when writing out such large numbers, as in "465 Tausend 963" or "vierhundertfünfundsechzig tausend neunhundertdreiundsechzig", but I'm not sure about that - after the (felt) third or fourth reformation of the spelling within a few years.

Oh, yes - our use of the punctuation is also differing from the US style which can be very confusing. When dealing with currency, we use the comma as in "1,35€" (note that we are usually placing the currency abbreviation or sign behind the numbers), when dealing with measures, we use the point as in "4.35 m" (by the way - AFAIK the Americans have to use the metric system since 1979 or so by law, but I guess that this is one law being generally ignored ).
Speaking of law abusers - the Germans are not too strict about these punctuation rules although there's a Duden and at least one DIN saying so, but when it comes to speed, the comma is used widely although the point is the correct grammar way. Until the early 80s, certain motor magazines had measured the top speed of vehicles up to one digit behind the comma. Yes, everything counted in a world when 50 or 60 hp were standard, 110 hp were outrageous and more than 200 hp beyond common imagination.

Oh, yes - our use of the punctuation is also differing from the US style which can be very confusing. When dealing with currency, we use the comma as in "1,35€" (note that we are usually placing the currency abbreviation or sign behind the numbers), when dealing with measures, we use the point as in "4.35 m" (by the way - AFAIK the Americans have to use the metric system since 1979 or so by law, but I guess that this is one law being generally ignored ).

Hmm, I never knew it differed between currency and measures. I know most non-English languages actually use the comma for most everything numeric. As far as Americans and the metric system, I don't believe that's the case—it is, however true in Canada. That's why, since most people are more familiar with pounds for example, you see on prices at the supermarket the price per pound in big print, and then in the corner in small print is the price per hundred grams.

A rule that is often ignored though is the thousands separator. In the USA it's still a comma: 1,000,000 is one million. In Canada, the thousands separator is supposed to be a space: 1 000 000 is one million. I've never seen anyone actually do that though. (For one, it looks really silly, and it also just doesn't work at all online due to line wrapping.)

Nakor wrote:As far as Americans and the metric system, I don't believe that's the case

I think it had something to do with something international, but please don't nail me on that (since I had also heard that this law was revoked later)...interesting is indeed that the tachometer are two different things in Germany and the U.S. - while in Germany, the tachometer (Geschwindigkeitsmesser) is counting the speed of the vehicle, it's counting the revs of the engine in the anglosaxon states. Well, speedometer sounds a little bit more dramatic, even in a '54 Nash Metropolitan.

So if you guys call the speedometer a tachometer, what do you call the tachometer? A revometer?

Anyway, it wouldn't make any sense to pluralize the "eye" in "eyebrows" in English because the "brow" is the subject, not the eye. The "eye" in "eyebrow" just describes where the brow is, though yes, it would be a problem if you only have one brow to go with both eyes. So by that same logic you used, we would have the words fingersnails, shoeslaces, earslobes, and birdsfeeders, among other things.

Frong wrote:So if you guys call the speedometer a tachometer, what do you call the tachometer? A revometer?

Basically, yes - you are also calling the Drehzahlmesser a rev meter. The fuel gauge is commonly called Tank- or Benzinuhr (the German term prefered by the automotive industry is Kraftstoffverbrauchstendenzanzeige...now translate this ), which would be the "fuel clock" after the 1:1 rule. At least in my old Commodore, the needle of the fuel gauge went almost as fast as the minute hand of the clock in the dashboard when running at full speed.