Another Short History of Linguistics (10)

In the view of my language law, the shortage of basic symbols (either the writing or the sound) would lead to extend the length of writing word or pronunciation. Since the longer pronunciation cause inconvenience, so, in everyday use, people tend to cut short the size in either writing or pronunciation. I have given the prove that since compound words male-cattle, female-cattle, young-cattle, male-sheep, female-sheep, young-sheep, male-pig, female-pig and young-pig are too long for everyday use, then people invented the word of bull, cow, calf, ram, ewe, lamb, boar, sow and piglet etc. the target is no other than cut short the expressing time, think about if a farmer speaks a compound word as female-pig instead sow one thousand times a day, how boring he will be? But the cost is you have to learn another group of words. It was the main reason of why the English vocabulary soaring up to one million words yet the Chinese vocabulary still keep in the level of three thousand characters. For the short pronunciation allow that language using compound words widely. But the Chinese language is not always like this. In the ancient time, Chinese did have single characters as bull, cow, calf, ram, ewe, lamb, boar, sow and piglet etc. The most typical character is 牡=bull, 牝=cow. The Chinese is pictogram language, you may see both the character have a symbol as 牜, it is the simplified writing of 牛， this symbol is from:

So every Chinese characters about cattle have this symbol as牜. Now let’s talking about the other part of that two character. The other part represent the gender.