#3 - 不

March 19th, 2008

Bu!

I wish my language had this… a negative operand that is grammatically correct. Absolute brilliance, this thing is. English uses this a little bit, but it’s taken to its extremes in China. There all kinds of ways to use this word… some of my favorites include the “Is not is? (是不是)” variant, which is like saying “Is it?” in English. There’s the “Not Want (不要)” thing, which is brilliant in its brevity. And my favorite: “You Not Good (你不好)”. The opposite would be French, where one of dozens of phrases could be used to negate something. (Il n’est pas vrai, Je ne voudrais pas, and Vous n’êtes pas bonne would be the equivalent phrasings for the three previous phrases).

You could argue that English does have this, but try saying “Not want.” in front of a picture of the Queen of England. It’s impossible. Her image will know what you did and she will send the red coats after you to beat you up. You want that? Probably not.

I like it when the extraneous bits of a process are taken out, and what I see here is a mathematical tautology expressed in a single phenome. Awesome.

But what about George Orwell’s 1984 and the simplification of the language proposed by the authorities? Isn’t this the same kind of thing? Won’t we lose our expressiveness and ability to influence thought if we reduce our words to be as simplistic as possible? I don’t think so, as this is an aspect of language used to determine if it is true whether you want more potatoes or to determine how tired the other person is. You don’t need expressiveness in this case; you need the facts.

Entry Filed under: Language