The Reason of Chinese

Yesterday, I told some number about the reason, now I’d like to talk some detail of language comparing. The following table will show it:

Words written in blue are Esperanto. You may see, for a Chinese, once they learnt the characters of left column (9 characters) and top row (9 characters), they would be able to create all rest words by themself. For instance the first one of left column is 猪 (pig) and the first one of the top row is 肉 (meat). Put them together is 猪肉 (pork). For English, they have to learn all the words that written in black; the blank box have to be compound words. For Esperanto, they have some property similar Chinese as ‘ajo’ for ‘meat’, ‘vir’ for male, ‘ino’ for female, ‘ido’ for ‘young’, but they have too many syllables to utter, not to speak of sounds.  In fact, once they add ‘ajo’, ‘vir’, ‘ino’, ‘ido’ on  a word, they add two syllables on it too. Besides this, they don’t give castrated animal either a prefix or a suffix.

Compound word is a good plan to reduce the burden of learning. Suppose very two basic words could form a compound word, then once you learnt 100 basic words, you could form 100x100=10,000 compound words by yourself. If every three words could form a compound word, then after you learnt 23 basic words, you could form 23x23x23=12167 compound words. The Chinese people normally learnt 3,000 characters. You might think each character was a basic word, then how many compound words could they know? Since every Chinese character only used a single sounds so that most Chinese compound words were shorter than English term, for instance ‘sodium alkyl benzene’ was the main ingredient of detergent, the Chinese word was 烷基苯磺酸钠 six sounds, while the English one was ten sounds.

In following table, we found the word of Esperanto even longer:

Remember each Chinese character is one sound. Then in the last box, the English ‘filly’ is two sounds, Chinese is three sounds, the Esperanto was five sounds, more than doubled the speaking time of English. Suppose, if we speak such a language, through the whole life, isn’t that means to say we only enjoy half the information than current English?