Jay, this shows that English is more efficient as a language. < Mandarin speakers use more areas of their brains than people who speak English, scientists said on Monday, in a finding that provides new insight into how the brain processes language.>
People using Mandarin have to run their brains flat out to figure out what the heck is going on.
That means that Mandarin is a dying language. The Japanese ditched it centuries ago in favour of hiragana [a phonetic language] and katakana [to handle foreign words].
Brain scans show that intelligent people, confronted with problems, do very little mental processing. Dumb people's brains blaze away at high energy levels, all over their brain, trying to solve the same problem.
Smart people go straight to the solution. They don't do a lot of fast processing. Which is somewhat counterintuitive. A bit like Kasparov's brain is on idle compared with Deep Fritz and Deep Junior, let alone Deep Blue, but comes up with about equal conclusions.
Similarly with smart languages. They don't need a lot of brainpower to use. They cut to the chase, use tenses, plurals, and all that fancy grammar stuff. Archaic languages like Chinese and Maori are circumlocuitous, hieroglyphic, [though Maori had no writing so they weren't even that good], stone age languages, depending on context and guesswork. They lack sophistication.
The research that shows brain stimulation is good for Alzheimers victims is wrong. It confuses correlation with causation. People with well-functioning brains seek a lot of brain stimulation. Those with Alzheimers don't. The false conclusion is that because people with lots of brain activity don't have Alzheimers is that activity prevents Alzheimers. Duh!!
The Japanese had the good sense to ditch most of Kanji. China has tried simplifying it and using Pinyin. The best answer is to ditch all those crazy Chinese symbols in favour of reconstituted phonetic and alphabetic language [without the ridiculous English idiosyncracies - Japanese hiragana are always the same sound and spelling isn't whacko, unlike English - crazy Poms with their pounds, shillings and pence, inches, feet, yards and miles, ounces, pounds, quarters and hundredweight, poundals and other madness not to mention weird spelling ideas].
Nearly all the good inventions are made by English speakers - due to them having plenty of processing power left over after dealing with language demands.
Well, that's my apres-golf and wine-primed theory... [even French still has some use].
Mqurice the philologist.
PS: It would also be really convenient for me if everyone used English, or American or Kiwi instead of all those weird languages. At least Aztec has had its day. That narrows the field. |
