Re: [xml-dev] Can the Chinese language express more things in XMLthan ca

[Jean-Christophe Helary <lists@traduction-libre.org>]

> 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.


-- 
Jean-Christophe Helary @jchelary@emacs.ch
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