As a fresh linguist with two and a half semesters of experience, my linguistic curiosity makes me do wild and wacky things. This semester I dumped my Swedish course out of boredom (no offense Swedish, but you’re just not challenging anymore) and signed up for Chinese instead. In my linguistics courses I had heard so much about this language, which is always named as a prime example for analytic languages. But obviously most of my lecturers don’t seem to have ever taken a Chinese course.

And you are probably still wondering what an analytic language is, am I right? Here’s a small excursion into language typology before I hit Chinese. There are three basic language types; analytic, synthetic and agglutinative. Analytic languages don’t use word inflections. This means that the meaning of a sentence has to be derived from the word order within a sentence. English is a good example for an analytic language (despite having a leftover of 8 inflections). Take the example: “The king rides the horse“. If I change the word order to “The horse rides the king“, the meaning of the sentence changes.

Synthetic languages, on the other hand, use inflections to convey meaning. These languages usually don’t have such a strict word order as English. German is a synthetic language and has 4 grammatical cases. The example sentence “Der König reitet das Pferd” retains its meaning if I change the word order to “Das Pferd reitet der König“. Agglutinative languages are even tougher – they glue together words which in other languages would be entire sentences. An example is the Finnish language, Wikipedia gives a good example for istahtaisinkohan which means “I wonder if I should sit down for a while”.

Chinese is an analytic language for one obvious reason: it uses a writing system which doesn’t allow variation. A Chinese symbol always has one specific meaning, and it would be impossible integrate inflections into that system. Instead, Chinese relies on particle words which have pure grammatical meaning. The following example sentence should illustrate this nicely:

Charakter 我 们 的 老 师 是 中 国 人
Pinyin wǒ men de lǎo shī shì Zhōng guó rén
Literal Meaning 1st person Plural Particle Possessive Particle old master to be central land person
Translation Our teacher is Chinese

As you can see, the meaning of “our” consists of three different words which all have to be in that order. “wǒ” by itself would simply mean “I” or “me”.

I’m currently mostly learning Chinese in the Pinyin transcription system, which uses Latin with diacritics for the 4 tones of the language. We also do some Chinese characters, but not in much detail. They are quite fun to learn though, due to the interesting back stories our 老师 always comes up with. A lot of Chinese characters consist of radicals. These can for example be “person” 人, “moon” 月, or “horse” 马. By far my favorite back story is that of the character for “mama” 妈. It consists of the radicals “woman” 女 and “horse” 马, and our teacher describes “mama” as “a woman who works like a horse”.

Aside from learning a few thousand characters, the biggest difficulty in learning Chinese is of course the tones. The four tones of Chinese are high (ā), rising (á), fall-rise (ă) and falling (à). These distinguish meaning and take a relatively long time to master. I certainly haven’t even come close to mastering them yet.

In fact, I don’t believe that I will ever be able to effectively communicate in Chinese, because it doesn’t interest me enough to do so. I’m not immensely interested in China itself (though I would certainly like to visit it some day), I’m merely doing this out of pure linguistic curiosity. Chinese is the first non Indo-European language I’ve taken a closer look at, and it’s an interesting experience. What bothers me most about my class though, is the fact that our study book is somewhat useless for linguists. There isn’t even a transcription of the words in the phonetic alphabet in it, and the particles are explained rather badly. The book relies on learning in context, whereas I’m more interested in the framework of the language. Nevertheless, this course will give me interesting insights into the different kinds of languages in the world. And if I ever use Chinese as an example in front of my future students, at least I’ll have a general idea of what I’m talking about. 😉

Depending on my enthusiasm for the language after this semester, I might or might not continue with the next course. However, there’s one thing I know for certain: the next language I’ll examine from a linguistic viewpoint via a language course will be Arabic. Arabic is a very special kind of synthetic language which uses an unusual root-and-template system. That should definitely be interesting.