When I created this blog it proved exceptionally difficult—as is almost always the case—for me to just hunker down and produce a piece of writing, of decent enough quality to serve as the very first post hosted on this site. Ironically this is the case every time I approach my desk, sit down, and think about what I ought to write in a personal capacity, whenever I'm not constrained by any expectations or rules to write work of some certain nature. One of the things that managed to pop up in my mind after a solid half-hour of racking my brains, though, is the rather niche topic of the differences that exist between different languages. But more specifically, I want to talk about not the differences as a whole, but the specific differences relating to concision of expression; that is to say, how much brevity can different languages display when attempting to convey the same message.
It'll be quite difficult for me to put my point across if we don't consult an examples, so that's what we shall do. Below is an example of two languages that I'm fluent in, Cantonese and English, conveying the same message in different ways.
English: "We went skiing."
Cantonese: "我哋去咗滑雪." (This is most certainly not the correct punctuation for Chinese but I can't be arsed to use the right ones.)
In this case we can see a simple difference in syllables. Both English and Cantonese use two syllables to say "skiing" (滑雪), but whereas English only needs one each for "we" and "went", Cantonese requires two/three for "we" (depending on whether you think "哋", pronounced "dei", is monosyllabic or polysyllabic) and two for "went". Perhaps it's not the biggest difference, merely one of 2-3 syllables to be precise, but isn't it inherently fascinating that two languages express the same sentiment with different levels of concision? I must provide the additional context that I've deliberately formulated those sentences to be basically the exact same as each other in their meaning—the English phrase doesn't say anything more than the Cantonese equivalent, or provide any more information than it; the same applies the other way around. So the difference really is there, not something I artificially created. Now we may be able to attribute this simply to differences in sentence structure between the two languages, as well as other specific differences between them, but where's the fun in that? Even if this is a question whose answer can already be found, it's nevertheless inherently interesting.
Plus, just to drive home the point about syllabic differences, let's revisit the skiing example but add Korean and Japanese formulations of the same message alongside the English and Cantonese ones.
English: "We went skiing."
Cantonese: "我哋去咗滑雪."
Korean: "나는 스키를 타러 갔다."
Japanese: "スキーに行きました。"
If you thought the syllabic differences between English and Cantonese are small in the specific example of the phrase about skiing, then I'm certain you'll find the differences between English and Japanese/Korean more striking. The Korean and Japanese formulations of the phrase have nine syllables each, a full five more than the English formulation.
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