Does Chinese not use 化 or something similar to mean "ization?" If not, how do they turn "global" into "globalization?" (I'm just curious)
In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."
That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.
Yep, you're right, and I could have chosen a better example =). Globalization is usually referred to as 国际化, "international" + suffix to mean "evolving to something"; ie - becoming international.
So yes, this is one of the ways whereby when Chinese is succinct, it's really succinct, hence loved by many of the older generation. But since Chinese doesn't share the recursive and context-free grammatical structure of English, and because tense isn't explicit, you lose some flexibility.
Eg: Instant Messaging can be shortened to IM, and can be turned into a transitive form but adding 'ing' to form IMing.
And of course, I'm confident that a language affects the way you think, as well as the memes that can be passed around. Best example, the word LOLcat and the associated lulz could never have evolved in the Chinese language.
Something else could have evolved perhaps, but different things for sure, with a different focus.
Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.
Or put slightly differently, Chinese is kinda like Java. Japanese is more Clojure-ish, with the ability to abandon formal declarations (arigato + many trailing speech placeholders) yet retain the good parts of its core.
It's not just the example. Your entire point is ehrm, incorrect. Chinese uses radicals and entire characters to serve as the prefix/suffix. It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang, and there are spontaneous word generations all the time... I mean how else could new ideas be expressed?
>Should probably also bring up the fact that acronyms are near impossible in Chinese, at least in it's strict sense. I like Japanese for the fact that both the language and the culture is willing to evolve.
Lol wut. There is some interesting bias and stereotyping going on here, but I find this so novel and shocking that I'm unable to respond.
> It's perfectly capable of performing character mashups or other mutations to create slang
Except that you can't just "create" new characters on a computer, as opposed to alphabetic languages, where creating a new word on a computer is trivial.
I think he means the written language doesn't work well for acronyms and other shortening. Each character is already so much work. You could never get words like SNAFU.
Chinese shortens words by replacing two-character words with one-character ones, e.g. 北京天津高速铁路 (Beijing-Tianjin High-speed Railway) is abbreviated to 京津高铁 (lit. "Jing-Jin High-Rail).
Yes, but that is still 4 characters = lots of strokes. Also, not everything can be reliably shortened this way. You can't get the kind of shortening you can with things like "TNT", "DNA". And what about when there are no two character words to be shortenened? Like WTF.
In Japanese, the kanji 化 is almost perfectly equivalent to the English "ization," and I think it's very elegant. For example, 機械 is machine and 機械化 is mechanization. Or another very popular one in Japan these days is 高齢化, old-age-ization, used to refer to the phenomenon of Japan's "aging society."
That's actually one of the main benefits I see with kanji is the elegance and succinctness. The worst thing to translate from Japanese to English is a table (figure in a document). Kanji allows you to express things so succinctly that you can have lots of tiny columns with one or two kanji for the heading (no longer than the digits in the content). Often that heading has to be at least three or four words in English, and it's impossible to recreate the table in the same space.