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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

I've been living in Vietnam and trying to learn the language for a while now and this confirms my impression that Vietnamese is very information dense. Most words are monosyllabic and the same syllable pronounced with different tones has completely different meanings. Also, a lot of things we state explicitly in English are left implicit in Vietnamese.

You'd expect that a language with greater information density would lead to higher rates of transmission error but people here don't seem to have any more trouble understanding each other on the phone or in noisy environments than we do in English.

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If Vietnamese is much like Chinese, I wouldn't be surprised. Chinese speakers don't specify much. They tend to hollar low-context imperatives at each other, and hope that everyone already knows their job. Linguists call this a "high context" language, because if you don't have a good idea of the existing context you won't figure much out.

I suspect it's related to the extremely strict and ridged hierarchies in China, and the extremely flexible and implicit social networks. Your boss doesn't ask you to do a favor. They order you. In contrast, you don't ask your neighbour if you can borrow a cup or sugar, you just take it, and pay back the favor some other time. If they don't let you (and don't have a good reason), you just never talk to them again (or if that's too severe, silently downgrade your relationship with them).

Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese. i.e. "My mother made me do my homework, then she made me watch TV".

What word is this? Learning Chinese now, curious. Thanks.

You can figure it out with google translate. Traduce "made me" and "let me" from english to chinese.

I think it is 让.

Google Translate notwithstanding, I don't really feel like 讓 means 'make'. It feels much closer to 'allow, give permission, let'. 逼 seems closer to 'make' then 讓.

Yea, I asked because I don't know of any word in Chinese that met his description.

It's 让. I think 逼 is vicerally forceful, also meaning "press" (physically or metaphorically). I think you use 让 in most circumstances.

Funnily, "let" and "make" are the same word in Chinese.

In Mandarin, the words for "buy" and "sell" are the same phoneme with different intonation. To my untrained ear, they both sound like "my" -- but they mean opposites.

Chinese and English are remarkable in how they address ideas. In Chinese, for the most part, there are only basic words -with little available in the way of synonyms for supplying nuance.'

So you ask someone how do you say big. How do you say gigantic, how do you say long, how do you say capacious, etc. It's all "da" ”大“。

So when people come to me in English and say something like you know, capricious is not exactly the same as whimsical, I can say, that's only because you think it can't be. But it can be. It only is because we've integrated words from French, Latin, Scandinavian, etc. which give us the breadth of choice. But it's kind of artificial anyway and if you force yourself to think about basic meanings -there is little difference. (Law excluded).

British English uses a hell of a lot of implicit meanings, though this is declining with the rise of both modern soundbite politics forcing public discourse to be more literal, which also combines with public discourse being less implicit to benefit a more multicultural society. Nuance takes a long time to learn, and it's easy to take things the wrong way if you don't have heavy experience with it.

I don't speak Vietnamese, so can't comment directly with that, but I can relate to my experiences in watching public Australian English simplify massively over the past 20 years or so. The wider public take a lot of cues from the media. Soundbite journalism be damned.

Can you give some examples of implied meanings in British/Australian English? As an native American English speaker, I've never had this opinion of British/Australian English. I mean, I do feel that Americans are more straightforward, whereas the British are rather reticent. But I don't think this is extensively reflected via linguistic differences.

It's difficult to come up with examples off the cuff, because, you know, it's implied.

hrm

a classic example of implied (but not really) is cockney rhyming slang

... but really it's about reading between the lines. I can recall the point when I realised that the 'old way' of implied speech was dead in public discourse with this article

http://blogs.smh.com.au/thedailytruth/archives/2006/11/dirty...

It's not going to make a lot of sense out of context. In context, it was an article that came out when a superstar athlete in swimming, a national hero, announced his retirement, and the media pundits were basically of the opinion that he was somehow being a traitor to Australia.

This article is lampooning the slavering media, not the athlete. To someone brought up with classic Australian English (similar in nuance to British), it's blisteringly obvious what this article is getting at by halfway through the second sentence. As in, 'it's not worth pointing out' obvious. I thought the article was tedious and waaaaay too long, but the premise was funny.

What was scary was that only about 10% of the people commenting understood what the article was about - the rest completely missed the point, thinking that this was another article calling the athlete a traitor, and rushing to his defense. The article was actually saying "leave the athlete alone, damn the media are reactionary idiots".

Like I said, you'll read it now and it'll probably seem more obvious out of context.

Examples are kind of hard to come up with off the cuff, so what other examples... When we first started watching 30 Rock, we were fairly puzzled and joked that "surely this doesn't have American writers" due to the high amount of innuendo and unpsoken communication in it; jokes that are woven into discourse without having to be focused on and made obvious.

Compare to the more frequent style of US TV, my classic example of a Friends episode where the joke is "Books are so expensive, if only there was a place you could borrow them, and give them back when you're finished!", which gets a dirty look from character B. Joke made, move on. Nope, character B has to say "There is, it's called a library". That kind of punchline being eviscerated from a joke and laid out on a plate is anaethema to British comedy.

I also find it more difficult to speak in metaphor with an American audience, who usually take a much more literal interpretation of what's being said (of course, it varies considerably among Americans - New Englanders seem to understand this kind of speech much more easily).

I do agree that British English speakers are more reticent, but in something of a different way. I spent three months going coast to coast in the US and one thing I loved about it was that Americans just talk to strangers in a way you don't get in other English-speaking countries. Random people walking in the same direction or on the same public bus would just start talking and you'd end up with a good conversation out of it. That rarely happens here.

I've probably waffled on enough at this point (I'm a little drunk), so perhaps best leave it there :)

NOTE: I hate the way HN expires internal links. What, am I going to maliciously link to this reply page? Just because the above took a while to write in this little box shouldn't mean I should run the risk of having to lose a comment I spent some time on. Luckily this time I had it in pageback, but I've lost other comments on other browsers. The point of proscribing pondered (perhaps ponderous?) positations is perfectly puzzling, I put forth. Pshaw!

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