Western and eastern language differences

I don't know a terrible lot about Eastern languages, but I think the main difference is not so much in the lack/addition of gender/case/etc, but more on the syntax and use of those elements. Mainly, that Eastern languages tend to be isolating rather than inflecting like Western ones - so instead of having case and agreement be affixed onto words, the modifiers are themselves separate words placed in certain places relative to the word they affect. I'm probably not making any sense. But this would be an inflecting/agglutinating language:

Dog-subj bites man-obj
or
Man-obj bites dog-subj
Bites man-obj dog-subj

As long as you mark the -obj and -subj affixes, the words can be in any order. An isolating language on the other hand:

subj Dog bites obj man
obj man subj dog bites
etc.

Instead of it being an affix, it's a word placed in a specific place relative to the word it modifies.

No language is totally one way or the other, but Western languages tend to be more the former, and Eastern ones the latter. Also, I think there are more Eastern languages that are ergative, but that's just something I heard - don't quote me on it.

I think I see what you're talking about. So the symbol or sounds for the noun wouldn't change, but there'd be like a "this is the subject" symbol or sound to signify that the noun that comes next or came before will be the subject. Something like that?

Something like that. I think there's discrepency between the written characters and how things are actually spoken, but I'm not too clear on that.

Hi Silver, Rufio.

I'm just passing through and found that your subject is quite interesting. Hope you both don't mind my "intrusion."

I'll try answering a little bit about " 2nd person familiar and formal (do both exist?)" in Vietnamese language.

As far as I know, for the 2nd person, in Vietnamese. We have different terms to use... and the word used depends much more on who is in front of us.

a young lady = cô
a kid = con or mày (this is very familiar)
an old man = ông
an old lady = bà
a young man = anh
if the person is younger than oneself = em (female & male)
if the person is older than oneself = anh (male), chị; (female)
man around one's father's age, father's friends = bác trai
woman around one's mother's age , mother's friends = bác gái
man around one's uncle's age, uncle's friends = chú;
woman around one's aunt's age, aunt's friends = Dì (mother's side), cô (father's side)
same age as oneself's = call each other by their first name, or use "anh, chị,; mày (this is very familiar)" depends on the individual.

For now, I can only think of these. If you have any other questions, please ask. I'll do my best to be of any help.

Have a good day.

Hope you all don't mind if I jump in too.

I my opinion the greatest single difference is tones. This means the same word when intoned in a different way can have a completely different meaning.

Also, tenses are all but non existent as are irregular verbs.

The counting system usually is in groups of 4 rather than 3 in western languages (i.e we have thousand, million, billion in Korean and Chinese 10,000 has it's own name as does 100,000,000 which is why many orientals start having problems with conversion with the larger numbers).

Time , counting and usage can be quite different. In Thai there are four groups of six rather than 2 of 12 for example.

And as was pointed out there are many more names relating to family members than western languages, 4 words for uncle , 4 for aunt and so on.

There are many phases and words I don't think have a direct translation. I think you can learn such a great deal about people and culture by studying a language, I hope if you choose to study an Eastern language you have a great time and enjoy yourself in the process.

Wow Aqua, that is very interesting. I wouldn't have guessed something like that. Thanks for the real examples too If you don't mind me asking more, how does Vietnamese and English compare in terms of tenses? Basically, can you uniquely express all of these different English tenses in Vietnamese (or is there overlap or gaps)?

Simple: I jump, I jumped, I will jump
Perfect: I have jumped, I had jumped, I will have jumped
Continuous: I am jumping, I was jumping, I will be jumping
Perfect continuous: I have been jumping, I had been jumping, I will have been jumping

I hope it's not a time-consuming question though. Thanks for any insight you can give me!

Thanks for the info Michael. Could you clarify this:


That would definitely be a different way of thinking.


I don't doubt I would. I'm going to look into it!

Wow, what an interesting thread!

A few things to keep in mind.

There isn't really any such thing as "Eastern" versus "Western" languages. I think people using those terms really mean something like "Chinese-type" versus "Indo-European" languages.

So-called "Eastern" languages would include Japanese, Korean, and many others with no genetic relationship to Chinese (note: vocabulary borrowing does not constitute genetic affinity). Just for one example, Chinese and Japanese grammar are completely different.

Chinese is more or less an "isolating" language, where each unit of meaning is expressed as an independent word, rather than as a prefix or suffix.

Japanese is more or less an "agglutinating" language, where there are tons of prefixes and suffixes attached to the verb, creating larger and larger words.

Both are "Eastern", but there are no generalizations one could draw about them.

"Tone" is another fascinating subject. Most people think of Chinese when they think of tone, but actually, looking at languages around the world, the usual state is HAVING tone, rather than lacking it, like English. Estimates put tone languages at 60-70%, while non-tone languages comprise the rest. Roughly speaking, a tone language can be defined as one in which the intonation pattern of words in isolation cannot be predicted; it must be memorized by the language learner. As native English speakers, this seems bizarre, because it doesn't matter how we pronounce a word like "bicycle", as long as we don't change the order of the sounds! For a speaker of a tone language, saying BI-cy-CLE vs. bi-CY-CLE (caps indicate a high tone, NOT stress) might change the meaning of the word altogether.

Finally, to address the questions of the original poster:

Here's your list:
Gender, Case, Verb conjugation, 2nd person familiar and formal, Subjunctive, Agreement, Accentuation rules.

All I can say is that the generalizations that are possible are at most within single language families, rather than a particular geographic region. So the answer to your questions will vary from language to language, with similarities between related languages, and great differences between unrelated ones.

If you're intersted in a particular language, let us know! I'd love to hear what speakers of other languages have to share.

Hi Silver,

Thanks for your question.

I'll need to check this out before replying.

Please be patient.

Will get back to you soon.

Have a nice day.

Thanks for your clarification mezzie that Eastern languages are not all as similar to one another as I might have thought. I admittedly had some naive assumptions because of how little I know about the languages.

I think I understand the idea about tone. One thing you mentioned


sounds similar to the english words "present" and "present" (one the noun and the other the verb), except instead of not being able to identify intonation here, you can't identify stress without context or saying the word.

I wonder if the agglutinating aspect of Japanese correlates to the symbols that are used? I'm mainly speaking about the classic picture-symbols and not the versions written with a, b, c... Are "prefix" symbols combined with other ones to create a symbol with the new meaning?

Thanks!

Hi Silversturm,

the "preSENT"/"PRESent" distinction is a similar idea to tonal distinctions, but the difference in English is based on stress, not tone, as you pointed out.

So for example, compare the following:

1. Please give me a present! (tone of "present" goes high-low)
2. Please let me present. (tone of "present" goes high-low if spoken in a normal declarative manner)

1a. Do you want a present? (tone of "present" goes low-high)
2a. Do you want to present? (tone of "present" goes low-high)

In 1 and 1a, the stress is still on the 1st syllable, but the tone pattern varies. In 2 and 2a, the stress is still on the 2nd syllable, but the tone pattern varies.

In a tone language, the high-low or low-high or other tone pattern marks the difference between words, as the stress pattern does in the above 2 words.



I'm not sure I understand your question properly, but I think you may be referring to the writing system as opposed to the spoken language. Keeping in mind that writing and speech are only loosely connected, and that speech is the primary form of language, I'll outline briefly how the Japanese writing system works. Keep in mind that there are countless exceptions to all of the below.

Kanji
These are Chinese character borrowed by the Japanese to write their language. In Modern Japanese, they are used to write "content" words, such as nouns, verbs and adjectives.

Hiragana
A cursive syllabary (one symbol stands for one syllable), this writing system is used for grammatical ending, such as suffixes and case markers. Japanese doesn't have many prefixes.

Katakana
A square-ish syllabary used for writing foreign-borrowed words and some onomatopoeic expressions.

The tricky thing about Japanese writing is that all 3 of the above scripts are used simultaneously to form one mishmash of a writing system. The Roman alphabet (a, b, c, etc.) is used sparingly (for example in some acronyms), if at all.

Unfortunately, as many of you know, I am not at home right now, so I can't provide examples. If you're interested, I will do so when I return to Philadelphia.

Hi Silver,

I realize that in English, people differentiate clearly the action happened in the past, present or future, and much more…
While in Vietnamese, people stress more on the time that the action takes place.
I really don't want to make an equivalence on tenses between English & Vietnamese. However, if I may say… it'd be something like this :

In English , one must say :
- I jumped (yesterday)

In Vietnamese, we don't conjugate the verbs.
One says :
- Hôm qua(yesterday) tôi nhảy

The verb is always the same, except for the adverb of time .

In English, one could just say "I jumped" then the other will understand right away that it happened some time ago. While in Vietnamese, it can't be done that way, one needs to state the adverb of time …

Why is this ? (This is just my own point of view.) It is because Vietnamese language is more or less influenced by Buddhist philosophy. Everything is happening in the NOW. Thus, the verbs in Vietnamese are not conjugated; I could say that in Vietnamese, every action is mentioned as in "present" time, only the adverb of time is added to clarify the sentence.

Sometimes, people use "đã" in front of a verb for past tense, or use "sẽ" in front of a verb for future tense. Yet, if these 2 words are used too often then the sentences will be quite awkward.

This might not be a very good explanation. However, I've done my best, just hope that you'll be satisfied (more or less).


Also, I'd like to quote Mezzie.




This is very true in tonal languages.
Vietnamese is one, therefore one word with different accent marks will give a different meaning .

I may try to take 2 accent marks in French that is more or less equivalent in Vietnamese .


e.g. : Ma - (no accent) means Ghost

Má - with a pointed accent = > Mother, Mommy

Mà - ………a grave ……… = > while, during… & many other meanings depends on what comes before or after it.

The other 3 accent marks don't have an equivalence in French.

Mã - … = > horse, code, cipher & many other meanings depends on what comes before or after it.


Mạ -….. => mother (central region), rice seeding & many other meanings depends on what comes before or after it.

Mả - = > tomb, grave

In general, there are 6 accent marks in Vietnamese language.
However, this could be changed, depends on the regions.
Nevertheless, I could say that there are 3 main regional pronunciations that are known in Viet Nam. The North, the Central, the South.
Each regional accent has its advantage & drawback. I think that if we could combine 3 accents altogether, we'd have the best "correct" accent.
It's just my imagination. Differences make the world more interesting. What do you say ?

PS: BTW, if you spot any mistakes that I've made in English. Please feel free to correct me. TIA .

Aquamarine, very cool stuff I've always had a pet interest in Vietnamese, though I've never studied it formally. The extent of my studies amounts to having a bowl of pho once a week!

You said:



This is a very noble opinion! Linguists would disagree however, for a variety of reasons. Many many many languages work the same way; adverbs of time are used to express tense and the verb doesn't inflect (conjugate) at all. That just happens to be a common grammatical feature of isolating-type languages. It is interesting to think about how religion, philosophy, etc. may influence language, but those influences are usually found in the lexicon (vocabulary), rather than in the underlying grammatical structure of the language itself.

I've seen the "ma" example a lot in various linguistics textbooks - I've never quite been able to figure out how to apply tones to individual syllables volitionally, but I suppose there's always time to learn.

That's really interesting about the tenses - I've been making a conlang, which doesn't have (much) tense either, and I've been thinking about how to express times and so forth without it. Is there a way of expressing things other than simple past/present/future? Different adverbs that indicate aspect, or mood? Also, I don't know if the tenseless system was influenced by Buddhism - but there's always the possibility Buddhism was influenced by it. Or, even if they developed seperately, the structure still carried Buddhist connotations. If culture and religion can influence things like metaphors and idioms, it could also at least temper the way people interpret the structure of their language as well.

Mezzie, if you have it, I would be interested in seeing the Japanese characters.

flight cancelled today after spending 7.5 hours at the airport...

will be back in Philadelphia tomorrow (hopefully!), but off to NY for the weekend. I'll be back early next week to catch back up on this interesting conversation!

Ick, I hate that. I had to fly through O'Hare in a snowstorm to get back to school this year, and wound up spending 8+ hours on a single plane. Luckily, my connections were all snowbound too...

I see the difference in tones here, and how it contrasts with stress. It's subtle and something I may have noticed it. Basically English has declarative tone and interrogative tone, I gotchya.


Very cool stuff! Recently someone gave me a brief overview of how Japan developed its writing system. It's quite a unique history. It's hard to map the symbols of one language (Chinese) onto another spoken language (Japanese). That's where Hiragana comes in if I'm not mistaken. It provides the ability to represent the suffixes and case markers that weren't found in the symbols they were adopting from Chinese. Cool stuff, thanks for the explanations!

That's interesting. This is definitely a big difference when compared to Indo-European languages....uggh I can't remember how many verb forms I've memorized for a Latin verb in all its tenses, voices, and moods...yuck This seems a lot simpler.


Sounds like this could start to get complicated when learning a tonal language. Sounds like an interesting challenge.

Silversturm,

that's largely correct about the development of hiragana. It was actually a simplified form of the Chinese characters (a small subset of them), which were used for their purely phonetic content to write the suffixes, etc. in Japanese. That became cumbersome because of the agglutinative nature of Japanese, so the shorthand was developed.