Fundamental Properties (FP) of Languages: (9)

Phonetic Languages (PL) vs Ideographic Languages (IL): (Inflections)

According to the fact that most phonetic languages have more complicated syntactic rules with many inflections, making them harder to learn, Chinese is similar to an analytic language which tends to have relatively simple grammatical structures, with minimal inflectional morphology and is easier to acquire. In this section, we will discuss and analyze the differences in the grammatical rules of the Chinese language, particularly focusing on how to communicate without inflections grammatically.

As you may know, a special feature of the Chinese language is “one character, one syllable,”, “character + character = word.”, and “one word, more meanings”. Combinations of Chinese characters make meaningful phrases and sentences that are essential for intuitive comprehension, and cognitive understanding of the Chinese language. We believe there are similarities and differences existing between phonetic languages and ideographic languages. In the next sections, we will discuss the details of the inflections in PL and IL, especially the ways to handle inflections among the parts of speech with Chinese determiners and auxiliary words.

(To be continued)