【讨论】汉语和周边语言的关系（English）

pluiepoco

I beg to differ, japanese and chinese are not correlated languages, it\s true that japanese lended one of its writing system form China (and modified it) and absorbed many words (just as every language around the world), but that is not enough to say they have the same origin, there\s even less reason to say that one descends from the other. Chinese is an isolating language from the sino-tibetan group. Japanese is a aglutinating language, and (as basque) is commonly agreed to be isolated (non related to any other language).

As to the this topic, there\s no "mathematical" measure of difficulty concearning languages. For instance, just as french, portuguese has many tenses and modes (present, perfect past, imperfect past, more than perfect past, future of the present, future of the past (conditional) and indicative, subjunctive and imperative modes). None the less, there are languages with more tenses, modes and aspects. For an english native speaker, it can be difficult to deal with the conjugation of verbs (and application), declinations, concordance (agreement among words in a sentence) etc.

For a portuguese native speaker it can be difficult to learn japanese. The main reason for this is cultural, japanese and western people think and state differently. For instance, there are auxiliar verbs in japanese that create a semantic layer not usually existent in western languages. For example kureru e yaru, while kureru (as an auxiliar verb) attaches the idea that an action takes place for my benefit or of others (close to me), yaru (also as an auxiliar verb) attaches the idea that an action takes place for somebody\s benefit (not necessarily close to me). It\s a subtle difference for those who are not used to the way of thinking of the native speaker.

I don\t speak arabic, though I hope someday I will. For now, I\ve been studying hebrew, a language that belongs to the same group as arabic (semitique, though from different subgroups, if I\m not mistaken arabic is a southern semitique language and hebrew is northern (west or east, I don\t recall). Hebrew is not a difficult language; though not indo-european, its structure (intuitivelly and superficially) resembles a lot western languages (such as english, portuguese etc)*, the phonetical system is not as difficult as arabic (for a english, or latin-based languages speaker) with all those gutturals.
* I believe this resemblance is due to the contact between the languages; japanese, being restricted to a small portion of land isolated from other countries by the sea, didn\t have as much contact as hebrew, so the strong difference (notice that this is a conjecture, one might say, a hunch).

I apologize for mistakes I\ve made (concearning, both, english and content). For information (non academic) on languages one could refer to "Abenteuer Sprache: Ein Streifzug durch die Sprachen der Erde" by Hans Joachim Störig.

Since I\m brazilian (by the way, my native language is portuguese, not spanish), I\m gonna give my opinion from my point of view.
If you speak a latin based language (portuguese, spanish, french, romenian, italian among others), it should not be too difficult to learn the others (for instance you are used to conjugate verbs in 500 different forms, and all the irregularities). English should also be easy, as well as german, russian (thou one\s gotta study declinations), hebrew etc. Japanese has a interesting (not too difficult) grammar, the main challenge it to get used to the way of thinking, for example "I read the book that was bought by my older brother", in japanese would be in a polite form "watashi ha (wa) ani ni kawareta hon o (wo) yomimashita" (literally, I, by my brother, bought book, read). In portuguese the sentence above translate to "eu li o livro que foi comprado pelo meu irmão mais velho", in hebrew it should sound like this "karati ha sefer she ha akh sheli niknah".

By the way, I don\t believe that the basque language, neither the basque country are obsolete. For more information on Basque Country check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basque_...ous_community)

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Derni

FHB13

你不翻译估计没几个人会看

八亿农民

第一段译文：

请允许我提出一个不同观点，日语和汉语不是相关联的语言，真相是日本借用了中国的文字系统（而且修改了它）且吸收了许多词汇（就象世界上的每种语言一样），但这不足以说明日语和汉语的起源相同，更没有理由说一种是由另一种演化而来。汉语是一种源于汉藏语群的孤立语。日语是一种粘着语，且（就象巴斯克语一样）通常被认为是一种独立的语言（与其它语言没有关系）。

pluiepoco

打个比方：如果一个杂种，大家是说他独立呢，还是说它是杂种？

yuggu

但巴斯克语至今为止仍然没有找到它的“亲戚”啊，怎么能说它是“杂种”！还有布鲁沙斯基语Burushaski、尼夫赫语Nivkh等语言属系不明！

克里奥尔语和皮钦语属于典型的语言上的“杂种”，它们自成一派。

夜深沉

现代汉语是非常典型的融合语，北方汉语和阿尔泰语接触较多，南方汉语同台语接触较多。

pluiepoco

樓上也承認有南島語系呀?

abcxyz1

引用：

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原文由 夜深沉 发表于 2006-2-17 11:15:44 :

现代汉语是非常典型的融合语，北方汉语和阿尔泰语接触较多，南方汉语同台语接触较多。

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南方漢語同越壯語接觸較多吧。台語只是閩南語的一支而已, 即是漳州話音加泉州話音的混合, 而偏向泉州音。