- Joined
- Apr 11, 2015
Chinese is actually extremely similar in grammar to English. The phrase 'long time no see' which has been adopted into English language is a direct translation of the Chinese phrase "好久不见". There is no subject. This is not a 'proper' English sentence, but English speakers can still understand the meaning.ASL is most similar grammar wise to Chinese which does make sense because I can read the worst Engrish easily by just translating it to ASL 1:1 in my head.
Chinese can be more fluid than English "I go store", "store I go" both are acceptable when said in the various Chinese dialects but that's because it is within the 'rules' of the language.
Edit:
'engrish' is also a reference to how Japanese mispronounce 'english' because they don't have ano English style 'L' sound in their language though it's become synonymous with any messed up English. Japanese engrish results from it being a subject-object-verb language where English is a subject-verb-object language.
Chinese 'engrish' (chinglish) tends to result because the characters have many meanings and Internet translation can't figure out the proper English word to use. That's why in China you see signs in English that say "don't fuck the fruits" because the Chinese character "干" meaning "to do" has a slang meaning of "to fuck".
Japanese can avoid that because their additional alphabets of hiragana and katakana can make which version of the verb is being used more clear.
That being said I can believe ASL being like Chinese. Chinese is so english like while discarding words like ''a' or 'the' or other words I think would be done away with when signing unless they become necessary to make context clear. And THAT being said literary Chinese is different from spoken Chinese though writing the way you talk on blogs and stuff like Kyle is ok.
我操你妈 1:1 translation: I fuck you mom
Chinese 'engrish' (chinglish) tends to result because the characters have many meanings and Internet translation can't figure out the proper English word to use. That's why in China you see signs in English that say "don't fuck the fruits" because the Chinese character "干" meaning "to do" has a slang meaning of "to fuck".
Japanese can avoid that because their additional alphabets of hiragana and katakana can make which version of the verb is being used more clear.
That being said I can believe ASL being like Chinese. Chinese is so english like while discarding words like ''a' or 'the' or other words I think would be done away with when signing unless they become necessary to make context clear. And THAT being said literary Chinese is different from spoken Chinese though writing the way you talk on blogs and stuff like Kyle is ok.
我操你妈 1:1 translation: I fuck you mom
Last edited: