中国汉语的优势(英汉对照).doc

中国汉语的优势Chinese has been widely used in East Asia for thousands of years. It was supposed to be the leading global language, but an accident happened. English quite by chance took its place. Will Chinese seize the place? The answer is definitely YES! Because Chinese has many advantages over European languages including English.中国汉语已经在东亚地区被广泛的使用了数千年。它本应该是领先全球的语言,但随后发生了一些事件。英语很偶然取代了汉语的位置。新世纪汉语能够重新崛起吗?答案是肯定的!因为中文有着许多优点，而这些优点是包括英语在内的欧洲语种所没有的。 Chinese, especially Chinese characters, is more stable than European languages. An average student of higher schools in China can easily read the books, say Lunyu, Laozi et al, that were written 2000 years ago But a Ph D of native England can hardly read the books their ancestor wrote 500 years ago. In China a pupil of primary school can easily read The Romance of Three Kingdoms which was written more than 600 years ago. Because Chinese is a ideographic language in which the characters are generally true to their ideas while European languages including English are phonetic languages in which the words should be principally true to their pronunciations. For hundreds of years the pronunciation changed, as a result words of English changed; but characters of Chinese remained almost the same. In the next five hundred years, God alone knows what English will become. But Chinese, I predict confidently, will not change so much, especially its writing.汉语，特别是汉字，有着欧洲语种无可比拟的稳定性。一个普通的中国高中学生可以很容易的阅读书籍，如论语，老子。而这些文章都是在2000年前所写的。但是一个英国本地的博士生却很难能够阅读他们先辈500年前所写的文章。在中国，小学生们能够很容易的读懂600多年前所写的三国演义。因为汉语是一种表意语言，通过汉字就可以理解作者所思所想。然后包括英语在内的欧洲语种，是表音语言。只有通过发音，才能够理解当事人的所表达出的意思。数百年来，由于英语发音的改编，英语单词的意思也在改变；但是对于汉语来说，它依旧保持着固有的特点，千百年依旧稳定。我认为，只有上帝才知道未来的英语能演变成什么样子。但是对于汉语来说，我能很自信的预测，不会有多大的改变，尤其是汉字的写法。Chinese is more compatible especially the writing Chinese. Some experts in the ISO (international standard organization) classify Chinese as a language family which contains Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese Chinese, Minnan Chinese, Wu Chinese etc. In the speaking sense it's definitely right, but in writing sense it's absolutely wrong. We should admit that that the difference between Mandarin and Cantonese is greater than that between English and German. But that is just in speaking. In writing they are almost the same. No matter what kind of Chinese you speak, you can easily communicate with others by writing, because all kinds of Chinese are compatible in the way of using Chinese characters. So Chinese should be identified as one language. But English is different. Although English is considered as one language, An American is quite hard to understand Indian English and African English. Within just 100 years of changing, Americans have difficulties to understand Indian English and African English. In another 100 years Indian English may be identified as an independent language, not English any more. So may African English, Singaporean English, and even Chinese English. But different kinds of Chinese, which underwent thousands of years of changing, are still well compatible. People in the UK have a pride of their language. "English - A global language; English - A global language!" Everyday everywhere they say this. But this is a false pride. Indians speak and write in English, but in their own English, not the global one. So do Chinese, Singaporeans and Africans.汉语是包容的，而汉字更是如此。一些专家或者组织将汉语分成普通话，粤语，闽南语，吴语等等语系列，由于这些语言发音几乎不同，是非常合理的，但是，如果单从写作角度上来说，这又是错误的。我们必须承认，普通话和粤语之间的差异是大于英语和德语之间的差异的。然而，这只是在发音上的不同。如果在写作上来说，汉语和粤语的写法几乎相同，因为在中国，无论你说普通话，粤语，闽南语，发音可能不理解，但是你都可以很轻松的用汉字来与他人进行沟通。因为汉字是兼容的，它被广泛的使用在中国人之间。所以，无论哪种语言，都被认为是属于汉语的。但是英语就不是这样了。尽管全世界的人所说的英语都被认为是同一种语言，但是美式英语却很难能够理解印度英语和非洲英语。只经过100年的变化，美式英语就很难理解印度英语和非洲英语了，再过100年也许印度英语就会成为一门独立语言了，甚至可能就是印度语，不再是印度英语了。所以今后可能还会有非洲英语，新加坡英语，甚至还可能有中式英语。但是对于不同发音的汉语来说，经过了数千年的变化，仍然能够互相兼容。英国人对于自己的语言感到非常的骄傲-“英语-国际性的语言；英语-世界性语言”。每时每刻他们都在重复这句话。但是，这只是一种虚假的骄傲。印度说写英语，但是他们有他们自己的英语，而不是英国人所说的全球化。于此相同的还有中国，新加坡和非洲。Written Chinese is more informative. Chinese characters carry far more information than any other language. In the five official languages of the United Nation, Chinese is the most informative. According to the report by Benjamin K. Tsou in the Language Information Sciences Research Centre of City University of Hong Kong, the Entropy of Alphabets or Characters is Chinese 9.65 bits, followed by Russian 4.35 bits, then English 4.03 bits, Spanish 4.01 bits and French 3.98 bits. We can put it in another way to understand the report like this: if we use 100 pieces of paper to write a novel in English, it needs only 42 in Chinese, which is nearly 60 percent less than English. If the US uses Chinese as its office language, it will save at least half of its forest that is used to produce paper. So do computer disk and anything that is related to writing. The United States is always trying to save resources and protect the environment. One of the best ways, I suggest here, is to let Chinese become the official language, because Chinese is more informative and will save a lot of resources. 汉语包含这更多的信息。汉语的一个词组所包含的意思胜过其他语种。在联合国的五种官方语言之中，汉语能够包含最多的意思。根据香港城市大学研究中心的Benjamin K. Tsou教授的报告，一个汉字所带的信息量是9.65bits，俄语是4.35bits，然后英语是4.03bits，西班牙语4.01bits，法语是3.98bits。我们从另一个角度来理解这份报告，如果我们用英文写了一份100页纸的小说，用汉语只需要42页，比英语少了将近60%。如果美国选择汉语作为他们的官方语言，那么至少能够节约一半的森林用来制造纸张。美国总是试图节约资源和保护环境，那我把话撂这了，来吧，把汉语作为官方语言吧，因为汉语带着更多的信息量，能够更有效的节省资源。Chinese runs faster. Take memorizing times table for an example. English students take 1.5 times longer to read the table than Chinese student do, and correspondingly take 1.5 times longer to memorize it, according to the essay Aspects of Chinese Sociolinguistics by Yuen-Ren Chao, a Chinese American linguist. It was also found that reading Chinese is also much faster than reading English, because Chinese is an ideographic language that is very suitable for silent reading. When a Chinese student reads three books, an American student may read just read one. No wander why Chinese students of high schools get more Olympic prizes in science. When these students become a Ph. Ds, they use mainly English in their research, so their speed has been slow down greatly. If Chinese scientists translate all the scientific papers into Chinese and publish all their papers in Chinese, I believe that China will surpass the US in science very soon, because Chinese is a language that runs much faster than English. There was a case to prove it. It took US more one thousand times to invent the nuclear bomb, but it took only about 50 times for China to finish the same work independently.汉语的运行效率是更快的。我们来做个关于记忆表的实验。英语学生所花的阅读时间是汉语学生的1.5倍，而且也要花1.5倍的时间去进行记忆，根据中国社会语言学的华裔美籍语言学专家Yuen-Ren Chao所说，汉字阅读也是比英语阅读快的。因为中文是表意语言，非常适合于默读。当中国学生读了三本书的时候，美国学生可能才读了一本书。这就是为什么中国高中生就能在奥林匹克竞赛中获得好成绩。而当这些学生出国留学，在研究试验中所用的语言变成了英语，所以他们的阅读速度大大下降。如果中国科学家把所有的科学论文翻译成汉语并将这些论文在中国出版，我相信中国将很快在科学研究方面超越美国，因为汉语这种语言比英语应用起来快的多了。这也有个例子可供正式，美国花了一千次进行原子弹实验，但是中国仅仅只花了五十次就独立的完成原子弹实验了。Chinese is more vigorous in front of the challenge what is called the information explosion. Everyday lots of English words or terms are coined. There is going to be a vocabulary explosion of English, which really become a big challenge. Lots of new words or terms are created in Chinese as well. But this does not become a problem, because a Chinese new word typically composes of two or three characters which imply its meaning. A Chinese person can easily understand a new word which he/she has never seen. Let's take a look at the new words that the two languages have coined in the past few decades. China didn't have wine until the westerner brought it to China. In Chinese “wine” is translated as putaojiu（葡萄酒）in which putao means grape and jiu means a kind of beverage which contains alcohol. Every Chinese speaker can easily understand the meaning of putaojiu without any explanation or looking up a dictionary. Baijiu(白酒), translated to English in terms of Mandarin Pinyin, is also a kind of beverage. But it is really hard for an average English speaker to understand what baijiu is without looking it up a dictionary or getting some explanations. In the field of sciences, new term are created everyday. In English one new term in many cases means one new word. In Chinese a new term mean a combination of two or three or more characters to make a new sense. One can easily memorize a new term because the characters of the new term implys its meaning. For example, microcystin is a biological term. An average English speaker may have little idea about it, although they know that “micro” means small. Its equivalent term in Chinese is weinangzaodusu(微囊藻毒素)in which wei means tiny, nang means package, zao means algae, du means poisson, and su mean a kind of chemical. So an average Chinese speaker will perceive the term as a kind of poisonous chemical produced by a kind of algae the form of which is like a tiny package. This information is absolutely enough for every average speaker. Most of scientific terms in Chinese can be understood in this way by the average readers and speakers. For another example. I pick up 25 words or terms that are very basic in each of their fields as following (English followed by characters and Mandarin pinyin):tampon 棉球 mianqiu, flask 烧瓶 shaoping, exarticulation 脱臼 tuojiu, nephrolith 肾结石 shenjieshi, schizophrenia 精神分裂症 jingshenfenliezheng,senile dementia 老年痴呆症 laonianchidaizheng,cuboid 长方体 changfangti, rhombicosidodecahedron 二十面体 ershimianti, saleratus 小苏打 xiaosuda, selenium 硒 xi, theostat 变阻器 bianzuqi, manostat 稳压器 wenyaqi, sturgeon 鲟鱼 xunyu, pheasant 野鸡 yeji, drone 雄蜂 xiongfeng, ozonosphere 臭氧层 chouyangceng, troposphere 对流层 duiliuceng, monsoon 季风 jifeng, flute 长笛 changdi, granite 花岗岩 huagangyan, mutatis mutandis 作必要的变化 zuobiyaodebianhua,epistemology 认识论 renshilun, metaphysics 形而上学 xing'ershangxue, bourgeoisie 中产阶级 zhongchanjieji, proletaria 无产阶级 wuchanjieji. =汉语做好准备，更有活力的准备迎接信息爆炸时代。每一天都有着大量的英文单词或者术语被创造出来，而这些英语词汇的暴涨，将会是一个非常大的挑战。许多汉语词组和术语也在同时创造着，但这并没有带来什么问题，因为汉字仅仅用两三个字就能表达出这个词的意思。一个中国人哪怕之前并没有接触过这个新词组，也可以很容易的理解。让我们看看英语和汉语过去几十年所出现的新单词。中国过去并没有葡萄酒酒，直到从西方引进。在中国“葡萄酒”解释为putaojiu。Putao意味着葡萄，jiu意味这一种酒精饮料。所以每一个中国人不需要翻看字典解释可以很容易的理解葡萄酒的意思。Baijiu(白酒)，直接以汉语拼音的形式在翻译在英语之中。但是对于使用英语的人来说，如果不查字典解释，他们是不能够从字面意义上来理解Baijiu的意思的。在科学领域，新的术语每天都在创造。在英文里，一个新的术语往往意味着一个新的单词，而在中文里，往往只是用两三个字或更多的字组成一个新的词组，这个词组是容易记住的，因为它的特点和意义从字面上就表达出来了。例如microcystin(微囊藻毒素)是生物术语。使用英语的人可能只能从字面上理解一点点的意思，他们知道micro是小的意思。对于汉语来说，weinangzaodusu(微囊藻毒素)，wei指小，nang指包着的，zao意味着藻类，du意味着有毒的，su指的是一种化学元素。所以一般的汉语使用者从字面上很容易的明白这是一种有毒的被藻类包裹起来的化学物质。大多数的科学用语在汉语中都可以这样理解。再举一些例，下面我将列出25个在各自领域中基本的词语（分别用英语和汉语拼音）：tampon 棉球 mianqiu, flask 烧瓶 shaoping, exarticulation 脱臼 tuojiu, nephrolith 肾结石 shenjieshi, schizophrenia 精神分裂症 jingshenfenliezheng,senile dementia 老年痴呆症 laonianchidaizheng,cuboid 长方体 changfangti,rhombicosidodecahedron 二十面体 ershimianti, saleratus 小苏打 xiaosuda, selenium 硒 xi, theostat 变阻器 bianzuqi, manostat 稳压器 wenyaqi, sturgeon 鲟鱼 xunyu, pheasant 野鸡 yeji, drone 雄蜂 xiongfeng, ozonosphere 臭氧层 chouyangceng, troposphere 对流层 duiliuceng, monsoon 季风 jifeng, flute 长笛 changdi, granite 花岗岩 huagangyan, mutatis mutandis 作必要的变化 zuobiyaodebianhua,epistemology 认识论 renshilun, metaphysics 形而上学 xing'ershangxue, bourgeoisie 中产阶级 zhongchanjieji, proletaria 无产阶级 wuchanjieji.=If you takethese 25 words or terms (that are from fields of medicine, mathematics, chemistry, physics, zoology, musicology, geology, meteorology, philosophy and politics) to have a test,I can bet that an average reader of English can hardly understand five of them and that an average reader of Chinese can hardly miss five of them. Obviously Chinese has more vigor to deal with the new terms of sciences. It will be only Chinese, I predict confidently, that can undertake the big challenge of information explosion we meet today. 如果对这25个单词或术语进行一次测试（包括数学，医学，化学，物理，动物学，音乐学，地质，气象，哲学），我敢打赌，英语使用者很难理解之中的五个，而汉语使用者很难错上五个。很明显，汉语有着更多的精力去面对科学新术语。我很自信的预测，这是属于汉语的时代，使用汉语可以从容面对信息爆炸时代巨大的挑战。 Chinese is far simpler than English.Chinese is always considered to be the hardest language in the world. This is just because people including Chinese themselves have prejudice against Chinese language. Just on the contrast, Chinese is one of the simplest languages in world. I was told that “spoken Chinese is very simple” by lots of foreigners who are Canadian, Indian Canadian, Australians (one of them speak Chinese very well), Vietnamese Australian, American, Chinese American (who was sold to an American family when he was born), Croatian (one of my present coworkers who can speak very well and think in Chinese way), Indian (whose mother tongue is Tamil) Cameroonian (who speak one of African native language as mother tongue, French as official language, and English as third language), and foreigners who can speak both English and Chinese (but neither is their mother tongue) from Korean, Japan, Bombay, Vietnam and Malaysia. As a matter of fact the simplicity lies not only in spoken Chinese but written Chinese as well. Some Chinese learners have experienced the simplicity of written Chinese. If we let 5-years-old children whose mother tongue is neither Chinese nor English begin to learn Chinese and English at the same time, I believe that they will master Chinese before English. Chinese has no grammatical inflections it possesses no tenses, no voices, no numbers (singular, plural; though there are plural markers), only a few articles (ie. equivalents to "the, a, an" in English), and no gender*, although it do have some helper characters that accomplish the same function of English grammar, which are not the equivalents of English grammar in my opinion. More and more westerners who learn Chinese realize that Chinese, at least spoken Chinese, in fact is very simple. Chinese characters are quite logical. So do the words and phrases. Once you learn it you will love it.汉语其实比英语简单。一直以来汉语都被认为是世界上最难的语言。这仅仅是因为人们包括中国人自己对汉语存在着偏见。相反，我认为汉语是一门最简单的语言之一。加拿大人，印度裔加拿大人，澳大利亚人（其中一人汉语非常棒），越南裔澳大利亚人，美国人，华裔美国人（出生时被卖到美国家庭 ）克罗地亚人（我的同事，能够说很好的汉语并能以中国人的方式进行思考），印度人（母语是泰米尔语），喀麦隆人（母语是非洲当地语言，法语是官方语言，英语是第三语言），还有一些能讲英语和汉语的人士（但也不是他们的母语），这些人来自韩国，日本，孟买，越南，马来西亚。这些人都曾告诉我“汉语的口语是非常简单的”。事实上，不仅仅是口语简单，汉字写起来也很简单。如果我们让5岁的孩子，母语不是英语也不是汉语，同时学习英语和汉语。我认为他们会先掌握汉语，而不是英语。因为汉语没有语法的变化-没有时态，没有音调，没有数目形式（单数，复数，尽管存在多个形式）只有一些冠词（如英文中的"the, a, an"），也没有性别。尽管汉语确实有一些同英语语法中起同样辅助用的汉字，但我认为这和英语语法并不相同。越来越多的西方人已经意识到学习汉语，至少只是说汉语，其实是非常简单的一件事。汉语是非常合乎逻辑的，如果你了解它，你便会爱上它。To sum it up, Chinese has the advantage of stability, compatibility, informativeness, speed, vigor, and simplicity over English, and will probably replace English in this century. It's time for us to take action to reconsider Chinese now. It's time for every country to teach Chinese now. Any country that moves slow in this action will certainly fall behind.总而言之，汉语的有点就是稳定性，包容性，信息化，速度，活力，并且比英语简单。在这个世纪，汉语有可能取代英语的地位。我们是时候重新审视汉语了。我们是时候去各个国家教授汉语了。哪个国家在这次推广汉语的过程中行动缓慢，那么就会落后。AcknowledgementI would like to thank Abraham Smallwood and Ke Wang, my English teachers in my courses of P