2605: Penguins are not Business Geese Feb 1, 2022
There is a rumor that goes around that the Chinese word for 'penguin' translates as 'business goose', but this is false. The idea is not so far often however, since the second character of this Mandarin word 企鹅 (qǐ'é) would in fact mean 'goose' (鹅). The initial character 企 is found in the word for business, that being 企业 (qǐyè), but that is a sort of compound itself. The first element of the word 企 has more of a meaning of 'upright'. In this way, if the word 企鹅 (qǐ'é) means anything (besides 'penguin' of course) it would be 'upright goose' or even 'tip-toe goose'.
2503: satin Oct 19, 2021
China was famous historically for being the starting point of the Silk Road, but along with carrying satin it was a major means of language transfer. Satin is named for the Chinese city of 泉州 (Quanzhou) which literally means “spring prefecture”, but in Arabic this is زَيْتُون (zaytūn) meaning "olive tree", itself a translation of "Tung Tree City", for the many trees planted by its 10th century prince. The Arabic term was taken into French first before its adoption into English.
2416: Particles Aug 2, 2021
In grammatical terms, a particle is a function word associated with word without any lexical meaning of its own. These would include terms like 'not', 'oh', and 'to' (as a marker for infinitives) since these are integral for overall meaning and syntactic structure, but cannot be defined independently. In this way they are considered to be in their own lexical class, though in older definitions a particle was just anything that could not be inflected and could be part of other lexical classes like articles, conjunctions, prepositions, and even adverbs. Since particles indicate grammatical relation between words, language with lots of inflection tend to have fewer, and languages with little to no inflection, like Mandarin, will use particles instead of things like affixes to indicate grammatical functions.
2408: Renminbi Jul 25, 2021
The currency of China is known as the Yuan, a name shared or associated with other currencies of East Asia, but actually this is not its official name. It is actually known as the Renminbi, abbreviated RMB, spelt as 人民币 in simplified Chinese; it means 'people's currency'. As such, a yuan only a basic unit of the renminbi despite that being the basis for the currency as a whole and not actually a subdivision, though it is divided by the fen and jiao. This distinction between the name of the currency and the currency itself is also seen in '(pound) sterling' and 'pound'. with the currency of the UK, though not for the same reason.
2386: Chinese Morphology Jun 30, 2021
To say that Chinese is morphologically simple is an understatement. There is no verb tense, no voice (e.g. active; passive), and has no form of pluralization. All of these functions which in other languages are typically carried out through morphology are instead reliant on particles which indicates things like aspect and mood. This concept is not so foreign to English, which itself has no future tense, and relies on particles too.
2291: Stress in Tonal Languages Mar 25, 2021
It would be reasonable to assume that tonal languages, which already rely on changes in pitch to distinguish between words don't have stress or meter since those functions also involve volume, length, and even pitch. This assumption would be incorrect however. While it is true that these features are less relevant than in certain non-tonal languages, stressed syllables have been found in Mandarin for example by utilizing change in the fundamental frequency of the pitch (i.e. the swing in pitch of one individual tone) greater than that of the unstressed syllable, which would therefore have a more narrow change in pitch by itself.
1167: Writing Systems: An Overview Feb 18, 2018
There are many different writing systems from all over the world, used with varying frequency, but not all of these are alphabets. The most obvious example of this may be with pictographic and logographic writing systems (symbols that represent words but aren't images thereof), which aren't alphabets because little to no attempt needs to be made to convey the way that the word sounds. This is why Cantonese and Mandarin (are not mutually intelligible when spoken always, but are written in much the same way. However the list goes on, for instance with abjads, such as for Arabic, Hebrew, and also Tifinagh, Syriac, and ancient Phoenician for which consonants are represented, but not necessarily vowels; Greek and by extension Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are essentially Phoenician but written left-to-right and with the addition of vowels. There are also syllabaries—where a syllable is represented but not the individual sounds—such as for Cherokee or Katakana Japanese. Finally, there are abugidas, which represent consonant-vowel segments; this gives the vowel more prevalence than in an abjad, but not equal status to consonants, such as in an alphabet. Of course, some languages are more suited for certain writing-systems than others, which is why Inuit words look so long written in the Latin script, and but why the Cree abugida (used for some Inuit-Yupik languages) could not be used for Georgian, with its long consonant-clusters.
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