Draven wrote:I thought English grammar was very isolating already. Asians are generally bad at learning foreign languages because they insist on thinking in theirs. Though I have to admit I once had a hard time understanding the concept of using prefixes and suffixes to build words.hanumizzle wrote:Your command of English bears almost no signs of the peculiarities of strict isolating grammars, such as that in Vietnamese.
English is isolating, but it still has stuff like traces of a genitive case. Vietnamese has nothing along those lines. It's a very pure isolating language.
Draven wrote:Why him and not someone else???hanumizzle wrote:I can quite frankly see you as the even more Western-oriented, more democratic, more inwardly Germanic version of Hồ Chí Minh.
BTW, if that image were the portrayal of me, I must be Big Foot
There was some linguist/mathematician from Vietnam who learned Russian in three months, but I can't remember his name anymore.
Zorba wrote:hanumizzle wrote:Did the Vietnamese really adapt the Latin alphabet to reduce Chinese influence?
Originally, the Portuguese (not the French!) invented the alphabet to translate the Bible and spread their faith. While Catholicism couldn't make any big impact, the alphabet thrived. The young people at that time were particularly fond of it, and I'm sure you can understand why - it can bring literacy to the poorest of folks, unlike those cryptic Chinese characters that only the rich can afford to learn. Of course, the aristocrats hated hated hated it; they called it ridiculous, barbaric, rebellious etc.
That follows. The Khmer-derived alphabets used by your neighbors are far more complex than their antecedents, such as a Devanagari and Malayalam, even taking tone and extra phonemes into consideration. As such, I have always suspected that they were deliberately with forethought to be difficult for 'commoners' to learn.