fluffysaurus wrote:
shlaifu wrote:
another similarity I guess: "politeness".
However, having lived in the UK I have to say: comparing politeness between languages and cultures doesn't work.
A culture is a somewhat closed framework and something that sounds relatively polite to an outsider can still be a scathing insult -or fauxpas- to someone who understands the connotations.
oh yeah: regarding the UK being mixed and international: they did conquer the world and forced their comparatively simple language on everyone (It's also friendly to accents). The japanese only tried ti conquer china, again and again. and their language/writing system is stupid complicated and foreign accents make it hard to understand for native speakers..... that's why japan is 99% japan...
Do you mean English is simple in comparison to Japaneses? Wouldn't it depend on which language you were familiar with already ie one with the same alphabet. English is the larger language.
japanese is painfully hard, due to them having borrowed chinese characters, and chinese vocabulary, at different times - meaning there is usually at least one japanese reading of a character, and at least one chinese- yet often there's more than one chinese reading, stemming from different times or regions of china.
That, in combination with a alphasyllabaric system that has a rather limited range of sounds and doesn't allow much in the way of clustering consonants.
then there's different vocabulary for different speakers - female, male - and different vocabulary depending on status - whether you're speaking down to someone or up.
hell, I once failed to order 4 cups of coffee because I used the wrong word for "4" ( there's three different words I know of)
even chinese is easier, it has one only one reading per character - yet chinese pronunciation is sooo hard.
yes, of course it makes a difference whether one starts with the same alphabet - but really, one should say: it makes a difference if one starts with an alphabet at all.
chinese ideograms were great across asia, because they allowed for a shared writing system that was independent of language used - but that only meant that people could roughly read what was written in the other language, using the same ideograms.
When the aliens come we need to put them in isolation with both languages and let them decide which one is harder