English is different from Mandarin. In the international phonetic alphabet, English has 2 vowels and 2 consonants, so the number of English sounds will not exceed 2× 2 = 4. Conversely, any sound that is not within these 4 sounds is not recognized by English, or is considered as an incorrect pronunciation; What is said here is not a syllable. By comparison, we can see that the pronunciation of Chinese is three times that of English, and the ratio between them is much greater than that of Cantonese and Mandarin.
let's talk about why the more kinds of sounds, the faster the thinking speed. Last year, I discussed this issue in the "Peking University Chinese" forum for a month before I made it clear to everyone. I hope to make it as simple as possible here. Suppose there is a person who can only pronounce two sounds, specifically, he can pronounce two sounds, A and B. According to the theory of computer, we know that he can still express the whole world with these two symbols. Suppose again that there are only 4 things to be expressed in the world, then an Englishman can express one of the 4 things with each pronunciation, while a person who can only pronounce two sounds sometimes has to express one of the 4 things with nine pronunciations, because nine times of two is only greater than 4. For example, English people use' I' for' I' and people who only know two voices may use abbababba for the concept of' I'. It takes about a quarter of a second for the average person to make a sound. Comparing the two, we can see that people who only know two voices not only express slowly, but also make great efforts. When expressing the concept of' I', the British used a quarter of a second, while people with only two voices used two and a quarter seconds. If two people always live in this ratio all their lives, all the information they enjoy in their lives will be 9: 1. In the actual situation, the most obvious is the contrast between Japanese and Chinese. As we know, Japanese uses 1 different sounds, while Chinese uses 12 sounds, so many Chinese characters have to be expressed in two or three sounds when Japanese people want to read them. We assume that all words in Japanese are expressed by two sounds. Isn't that to say that the information that Japanese people can enjoy in their lifetime is only half that of China people? I have wondered whether this is related to the fact that there has never been a great thinker in Japanese history. We know that thinking is actually a process of speaking from the heart. If you express it quickly when you speak, then the speed of thinking should also follow. A concrete example is that Zhao Yuanren once compared the speed of reciting multiplication formulas in English and Chinese. Chinese took 3 seconds, while English took 45 seconds. Therefore, if two people recite in English and Chinese at the same time, by the time of 3 seconds, the Chinese user must have thought of 9981, while the English user must not have arrived here. Perhaps, he only thought of 7749. This proves that using a language with many pronunciations is faster than using a language with fewer pronunciations. This point has been confirmed by many scholars at home and abroad. As for whether thinking fast means being smart, it is acknowledged by many scholars.
My evidence is to explain a historical mystery: Why are the ancient Greeks smarter than others? Because Greek culture came from ancient Finichi, we know that Finichi invented human phonetic alphabet, which is a great progress in terms of sound decomposition and a great retrogression in terms of thinking speed. Because, in order to screen the easily distinguishable sound elements, Finichi people only use 22 consonants, so its expression speed is slower than that of any language now, while the Greeks use vowels. We know that after the combination of vowels and consonants, the types of sounds have increased several times. In fact, Finichi people also have vowels in their voices, otherwise they can't pronounce them. The so-called 22 consonants mean that they only recognize these 22 consonants as information carriers, that is, ma, me, mu, mai and muo are no different from an M in their ears just as the four tones of me are no different to the British. Due to the sudden increase in the types of sounds, the thinking of the Greeks advanced by leaps and bounds, resulting in the later phenomenon. Someone on the forum once asked why Chinese is not as advanced as Britain because there are still more kinds of voices than English. My answer is that when the types of voices suddenly increase, new ideas appear. On the contrary, when the types of voices decrease, the thoughts tend to be conservative. After the Yuan Dynasty, China lost an' ru' sound in his voice, and China's weakness just began at that time. Finally, when discussing Neanderthals, people also found that people who used fewer kinds of sounds would be eliminated by history.
The reason why I think Chinese will definitely win over English is not here. The key is to solve the problem of knowledge explosion that human beings are facing at present. We know that at present, there are more than millions of English words including various biological names and new terms of patent inventions, if we consider that there are some elements in English that can be deduced and associated; Such as prefixes, suffixes and compound words, it also needs to memorize one million basic words. And all these words can be expressed in 4, Chinese characters. The fundamental reason is that there are not enough kinds of English pronunciation.
For example, the word pork stands for pork in English, which has nothing to do with pig and meat, but only stands for a consortium of them. If pork pork pork, mutton Mutton, beef beef beef, lard lard, sheep oil suet and butter talon are compared together, it is found that all conjoined words in English are new symbols that have nothing to do with any of them, but they constitute English. The fundamental reason is that if pork is changed to the form of pig and meat together, it will be pronounced four times and pork will only be pronounced twice. Therefore, conjoined words can save pronunciation but increase memory, while separated words do not need memory but increase pronunciation times. Imagine that a butcher uses the word' pork' thousands of times a day, and words that are pronounced twice save two thousand pronunciations than words that are pronounced four times. Why not? But when it comes to uncommon words, English, like Chinese, uses decomposed words, such as donkey meat. Because of the words that are not commonly used, even if the symbolic form is established, others can't remember them. Chinese can decompose English conjunctions, which is very useful, and it greatly reduces the vocabulary that needs to be memorized. Not only that, it can also sort out the position of words in people's minds clearly. The birth of Darwinism is based on Linnaeus's binomial method, which makes all kinds of impressions change from the original plane to three-dimensional in the mind. For example, before Linnaeus, people gave all creatures a name. As a result, due to too many kinds, the same creature may have two names, while other creatures may have no names. Linnaeus classifies all creatures first, gives a class name, and then puts a word under the class name, which forms the name of binomial method. This is not only clear, but also greatly reduces the symbols that need to be memorized; For example, there used to be 1, names, but now they are divided into 1 categories and 1 kinds in each category. What we need to remember is only 1 class names and 1 species names, * * * 2, not the original 1,. With the problem of knowledge explosion getting worse, it is necessary for human beings to reform other terms according to this method, and the only way at present is to reform according to the structure of Chinese. The reason is still the number of pronunciation types.
This phenomenon was first realized by Leibniz in Germany. He thinks that Chinese is the group meaning language that the western world has been dreaming of since Aristotle. However, he didn't see the real characteristics of sound, but because of the quantitative performance of Chinese characters, he defined Chinese characters as the most advanced characters in the world. I think, if he sees today's knowledge explosion world, he will definitely ask all countries in the world to abolish pinyin and adopt Chinese characters.
Finally, talk about how many words or symbols people can remember in their life. The number of Chinese characters used by China people is usually 3, to 4,, while there are only 3, words in Shakespeare's English, and he can master them all. However, by Churchill's time, his vocabulary was still 3 thousand, but at that time, English had nearly one million words. Therefore, I think that Shakespeare's proficiency in using English words is beyond the reach of future generations. I once asked many English language institutions in higher education online how many words should be mastered in learning English, but their answers were always vague or pulled something else. Later, in some articles that can't avoid this problem, I found that linguists' requirements for English words are: an educated English user should master 5, to 25, words, which is not only a big gap, but also, by this standard, Shakespeare and Churchill should be illiterate, at least uneducated people. In my opinion, this is the weakness of anyone who admires English. As long as they can avoid being asked this question, other aspects ......
My views have been discussed on the Chinese website of Peking University. However, it can be seen that there are still many people who don't know, and they all think they are inferior nations and cultures. Therefore, there are still many things to be done to inspire the confidence of China people. In fact, as long as people can regain their confidence, China people should have been ahead of the world in many things. However, we are too obsessed with getting to the bottom of things. When foreigners set a set of standards, we chase after them desperately. Why can't we set our own standards and let them change their tastes? I remember that a few years ago, western countries had a habit of pointing fingers. At that time, I also had a habit of dragging my legs. There is a cox report in the United States, in which a lot of comparisons are given to illustrate that it is impossible for China people to achieve the same results as more than 1, nuclear tests in the United States through 3 or 4 nuclear tests. The only explanation is that China stole American technology. Some people also call this incident the Li Wenhe incident. I sent an e-mail to all the senators in the United States at that time. The content is that if they want to investigate this matter thoroughly, they should set up another investigation team to study the differences in thinking between Chinese and English. Only in this way can we find out why the progress made in China's thirty or forty nuclear tests is almost the same as that made in the United States' more than a thousand nuclear tests. At the back of the letter, I attached my calculation book for the comparison between the two languages. Later, I received many replies asking me to tell them my real address before I would continue to consider it.
..... I also understand that no American senator will propose any relevant bill, because the proposal of any relevant bill itself is a disguised form of propaganda for Chinese and a demeaning of English. No American wants to debate it. The reason is very obvious. If the debate goes on, it will inevitably involve many problems in phonetics and linguistics, and each problem is a scar for them. At present, the United States has been asking China to lower the RMB exchange rate, but its attitude is still not beyond the scope of politeness, so this theory is not suitable. Once they are beyond reason, it is very easy to get involved in linguistic issues. In other words, because of the narrow scope of thinking in English, we can't consider the problem from the longer-term interests. However, I dare not say this, at least not to Americans. Because I study engineering, I'm a little sure about engineering, but when it comes to economic problems, I have no idea.
A similar thing is to have a debate with Esperanto bbs. Everyone knows that Esperanto is actually a language designed to transform English, but of course it doesn't know how to use' tones'. My question is, English words have far exceeded the memory limit of ordinary people. Is there any way for Esperanto to make up for this defect? At that time, someone answered me that the use of derivative structures in Esperanto is more obvious than that in English. However, when I explained the types of sounds in Chinese and the use of' tones' to them, no one spoke again.
There is also an 'english only movement in the United States, which once sought opinions from the whole world. You can imagine what my opinion is. I told them that your single-minded promotion of English is actually pushing American culture into the abyss and destroying American culture. The only way to save you is to choose a new language with a' tone'. For those who haven't learned Chinese, they generally don't know what' tone' is, so they have to explain it to them with the scales when singing; Any English syllable can change at least eight different sounds with the scale, which is similar to the function of tone. What I said above is actually the weakness of Americans. If it is not necessary, I will not touch it and affect unity. Moreover, with the increase of China's national strength, we can say less and less, because if we say too much, we will give people an excuse to say that China is threatening them.