Re:Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard
by fgf on Friday May 21, 2010 @11:11PM
(#1369688)
The point that english employs more polite words and phrases than many (most?) other languages is still valid tough.
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But is it true? You should see some of the crazy fluff used in Spanish in even moderately formal documents or occasions.
I'm not sure about the most part as the "?" implies, but there is more fluff in english than in chinese, scandinavian languages and hebrew. This goes for daily speech of the I need to ask someone for the butter kind.(what's up with the downvote?)
Re:Why Chinese Is So Damned Hard
by tokenadult on Saturday May 22, 2010 @08:32PM
(#1371375)
what's up with the downvote?
I don't know, but I guess my follow-up question to your factual statement would be, "Do you have any examples attested by professional linguists who have carefully compared languages, or is this based on your personal experience?" The reason I would ask that way, which I hope doesn't sound impolite, is that my experience is to the contrary. I find English to be a rather informal language among the dozen or so languages I have studied most closely.
This is hearsay from some linguists studying and some native speakers of the mentioned languages. Looking at the comment again I realize that it's not really up to the rigorous hacker news standards.