For your weekend enjoyment (and education)

Language is amazing. Without it, communication would be interesting, to say the least. Language is a gift from our Father, the means whereby He communicates His Word to us, and how we respond to Him.

One of the things that I have enjoyed most about being in China is the opportunity to learn the Chinese language, specifically, Mandarin. Although I have only been here a week and a half, I have been given many opportunities to learn words and short phrases to aid in communication. The following will give you a small taste of the complexity of the language, but the fun invovled in learning it. Quick vocab lesson: Pinyin is “a system for romanizing Chinese ideograms in which tones are indicated by diacritics and unaspirated consonants are transcribed as voiced” (www.merriam-webster.org) .

The following is from http://www.wku.edu/~shizhen.gao/Chinese101/pinyin/tones.htm.

Mandarin Chinese has four pitched tones and a "toneless" tone. The reason for having these tones is probably that the Chinese language has very few possible syllables -- approximately 400 -- while English has about 12,000. For this reason, there may be more homophonic words , words with the same sound expressing different meanings, in Chinese than in most other languages. Apparently tones help the relatively small number of syllables to multiply and thereby alleviate but not completely solve the problem. Learning Chinese in context, therefore, is very important.

Can you imagine that the Chinese use only three syllables when expressing the same meaning as each of the following sentences conveys? (Each sentence is followed by its equivalent in Pinyin, demonstrating the use of few syllables but many tones)

1. A mother who is riding on a horse thinks that it is slow and so she curses it.
2. A little girl who is herding a cow finds it stubborn and so she pinches it.

Maybe this will give you a rough idea of the language. It is truly fascinating. I remember thinking when I learned Greek that it was like a puzzle, and each day of class or study fit a little bit more of the puzzle together. If Greek was a puzzle, then Chinese is a Rubik's Cube. It's great!