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A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification
Updated November 10, 2014. This post runs to 112 pages so far. On March 6, 2011, Sinologist Victor Mair took on the question of Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages. The Chinese languages have...
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The Place of Mandarin in Sinitic
In the comments, James Schipper suggests that Mandarin is to Sinitic what German and Russian are to Germanic and Slavic. He also offers that most Sinitic speakers also speak Mandarin and makes a...
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Response To Mike Campbell on Chinese Language Classification
An autodidact named Mike Campbell has issued a long critique of my Chinese language classification. There are problems with his analysis. First of all, Campbell says we need to defer to the Chinese on...
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More On The Hardest Languages To Learn – Non-Indo-European Languages
Caution: This post is very long. It runs to 200 pages on the Net. Updated June 23, 2014. This is a continuation of the earlier post. I split it up into two parts because it had gotten too long. The...
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A Look at the Chinese Language
From here. This post will look at how hard it is to learn Chinese for an English speaker. It’s fairly easy to learn to speak Mandarin at a basic level, though the tones can be tough. This is because...
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A Look at the Japanese Language
From here. A look at Japanese, with a view to how hard it is to learn for a speaker of English Japanese also uses a symbolic alphabet, but the symbols themselves are sometime undecipherable in that...
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A Look at the Korean Language
From here. A look at the Korean from the perspective of an English speaker trying to learn the language. The truth is that Korean is one of the hardest languages on Earth for an English speaker to...
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What Is the Origin of the Japanese Language?
A friend of mine, Jared Taylor from American Renaissance, asks: I have heard that Japanese is supposed to be a member of the Finno-Ugric family, but I don’t see how it could be. People tell me that...
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Mutual Intelligibility in Linguistics: Guideposts and Roadblocks
A colleague of mine wrote to me about my new paper, “A Reclassification of the Chinese Language” which has just been uploaded to Academia. This paper reanalyzes the Chinese or Sinitic language family...
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Some Arguments Against Using Mutual Intelligibility as a Criterion in...
KIRINPUTRA writes in response to this piece: I think Lindsay is right in using mutual intelligibility as the criterion for determining what’s a language. I also think that intelligibility can be real...
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Is There a Language That Is Almost Impossible to Learn Without Growing Up...
A question was recently asked on Quora. Here is my answer. Hello, I recently talked to a Westerner who is learning Min Nan, which is a Sinitic language often called a dialect of Chinese. He already...
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The Roots of the Alphabet(s)
Probably most of you do not know that we are all using a variant of the ancient Phoenician alphabet. Actually I am not sure if that is precisely true, as I think the Phoenician alphabet was preceded by...
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A Look at the Cantonese Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Mandarin Language
This piece ran earlier, but it underwent a huge revision to improve it and this is the new, improved version in case you missed it the first time. Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings...
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A Look at the Min Nan Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Dônđän Wu Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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A Look at the Classical Chinese Language
Method and Conclusion. See here. Results. A ratings system was designed in terms of how difficult it would be for an English-language speaker to learn the language. In the case of English, English was...
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What Race Is This Person (Singapore)?
An interesting phenotype from Singapore. This is the aunt of a friend of mine. The family is from Singapore. They are part of an ethnic group called the Pernakans, a Southern Chinese group that moved...
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Massive Update of A Reworking of Chinese Language Classification
My Internet enemies (you know who you are) love to rip me to pieces over this stuff, but I suspect that is because they operate under the cover of anonymity plus the general loud-mouthed jerk “troll...
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Linguistic “Science”: Let’s Get the Scientists out of Science and Let the...
As you saw in a previous article, the Chinese government, against all reason and for purely dishonest political motives, lies and says there is only one Chinese language, when in fact linguistic...
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