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List:       xml-dev
Subject:    Re: [xml-dev] Can the Chinese language express more things in XML than can be expressed in English?
From:       Thomas Passin <list1 () tompassin ! net>
Date:       2023-02-12 14:02:19
Message-ID: 17c6e2c8-84f5-be03-ed32-b66401189614 () tompassin ! net
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On 2/12/2023 2:15 AM, Jean-Christophe Helary wrote:
> 
> 
> > On Feb 12, 2023, at 14:35, Thomas Passin <list1@tompassin.net> wrote:
> > 
> > On 2/11/2023 11:52 PM, Rick Jelliffe wrote:
> > > For English, imagine most of our sentences were formed by saying "Now let's \
> > > talk about X: ..."  Which is kinda how Japanese "wa" operates: you clearly \
> > > establish the topic X, then make your statement or question etc about it.
> > 
> > And in Japanese, you don't usually know if the sentence is a question, statement, \
> > etc until the end of the sentence is reached.
> 
> That's when you think from a language where it's the opposite, but word order has \
> little to do with meaning, generally speaking, and context is everything that you \
> need to infer what you can't get from mere sounds. 
> There are context-strong languages like Japanese that use less pronouns and \
> context-weak languages like French that use more, etc. 
> > This feature makes it hard to communicate in Japanese when the comm channel is \
> > unreliable, as the telephone used to be even in the 1950s and later.
> 
> No. It's the lack of (visual/interpersonal) context, not the word order that makes \
> it a bit more difficult to communicate in such situations.

That's always the case, I think.  And I didn't mean word order per se, 
just the marking at the end, which could be confusing if it gets lost.


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