Indeed, I've often wondered why so many consider the KJV the only right version.When last I looked, they weren't speaking it in Israel 5,000 years ago. I once say a fundy quote that said,' The KJV is the only right translation,even more so than the original hebrew.'

I'm sure there aren't any bible literalists here.I was one though.

"I could not write this sentence if I wanted to without using a majority of Germanic words as I just have...."

Ich könnte diesen Satz nicht schreiben, wenn ich zu ohne Gebrauch eine Mehrheit Germanischer Wörter wollte, wahrend ich nur habe.

Thanks Thomathy, and I couldn't agree with you more, especially about people  knowing the basic history of their language.   Believing that English evolved primarily from Latin is indeed inexcusable.

Perhaps the question to ask is, "Does god understand Esperanto?"

*head-desks himself into oblivion*

I do ahve a hard time believing one of them said something that stupid, but then again I don't.

That and the utter ignorance I see in this country every day is what makes me not surprised.

[TA]

This helps explain many linguistic quirks of English: Germanic languages are highly flexible in terms of descriptive power, much more so than some others.  E.g., we use different words for some animals depending on whether they are alive or dead (we raise cows and pigs, but eat beef and pork).  I suspect that this doesn't apply to poultry as food due to the rather late introduction of chickens into continental Europe from Asia.  Then again, "bird" is any of a class of animals, but "poultry" is generally a bird we're about to cook and eat.  Interesting.

[/TA]

Less formally, English is a very slattern language.  It has no problem taking words from any language it encounters; people routinely use greek, latin, arabic and german rooted words.  Like all good sluts, it is very flexible; much more so than romance languages or some Asian languages.  Germanic languages are great for describing new concepts (hell, if you need a word in modern German for a new thing, you stick old words together to approximate.  Bang, new word!); some other languages resort to using modified English words (such as with franglais: "l'Internet&quot or transliterations (iirc, "the internet" in Spanish is "el red", literally "the net&quot.  Yes, some of this can be attributed to the utility of English on the net, but not all of it.

Can any Chinese or Japanese speakers here tell me if there are instances you know of where those languages use the same word (meaning same ideogram combinations) for two different things, either objects or concepts?

Ahh, I get that.  Thank you.  It looks like it applies to pork/pig as well.

Thank you for the terminology correction (I can never remember the term logograph).

What I meant was, the word "bank" has three distinct meanings; two nouns ("of a river" and "of Nova Scotia" ) and a verb/adjective ("bank a billiard ball"/"bank shot" ).  I know French has words that differ in meaning depending on gender (le/la livre), but not always (l'avocat).  My question was if this is ever the case in languages that do not use letters.

(edit: fixed hosed quotes)

your post got me curiously reading the preface in my house's bible:

"The English translation accompanying the Hebrew text is the Authorized Version, otherwise known as King James' Bible. The publishers have deemed this Version a fit companion to the original text because its language is regarded as classic English and because it is held in great esteem throughout the English-speaking world.

It is not in its entire original form, however, that the English version is presented here. It has been revised and a considerable number of necessary emendations has been made. Among the passages emended are all those which have been mistranslated or colored to suit Christian dogma. The reviser's view is that a translation of the Bible has not to be dogmatic, but conformable with the rational meaning of the text.

In changing phrases or sentences the reviser has followed the general style of the language of the Authorized Version."

so you see, there's no need to worry about whether or not god speaks or understands english. it's the popularity of the edition in combination with the revisor's views that matter.

**off topic**

FIRE      FIRE!  Save me

I love uniforms.....

Actually:

Thus we see that the majority of Chinese words (they are words and not phrases, linguistically referred to as lexical items or lexemes) are bound and semi-bound morphemes and most certainly are not monosyllabic ((that is, as with deludedgod's example [shangwang] (internet) the majority of Chinese words are in fact not monosyllabic, while their constituent pieces may be)) and that the spoken language, while reducible in text to monosyllabic characters (which can be both morphemes as well as phonemes -see English word [I] and letter /I/) would literally be non-functioning if every single word was monosyllabic, which is obviously not the case.  The thing that confuses people most, I think, is that the Chinese phonemes can be longer than phonemes in other languages.  That is, a Chinese phoneme can have one syllable (or more) where an English phoneme always has no syllable (with the notable exception of some vowel sounds).

Ugh... sorry for how convoluted that is.  I'll try cleaning it up.

Er, this is not what I meant. Each word, or ci, is composed of monosyllabic units or zi. This is not the case in English, but is always the case in Mandarin. For example, "Internet" is simply a word. "Inter" and "net" not necessarily reflecting certain subunits that would form individual constituents of the word. This is not to be confused with the radicals, or pianpang which make up each hanzi. Every concievable word can be reduced in this manner. Thus, while, in English, the word "modernization" cannot be meaningfully broken up into "mo" "derm" "i" "zation", the Chinese equivalent "xiandaihua" can be broken up into xian, dai and hua. Each module is associated with a single hanzi, which in turn, forms the basis of a word, or phrase.

Why are you bothering to learn Esperanto?

Second, English isn't too difficult to learn depending on the first language of the learner.  You're correct in pointing out that Mexicans can have a hard time at English.  Most speakers of a romance language do.  The Chinese do not have too hard a time by comparison and vise versa.  German and English are related, but a German speaker will find English virtually devoid of inflection and can be held up by the reversed and fixed syntax and so will find certain aspects of the language difficult.  An English speaker will typically find Japanese virtually impenetrible and will have some difficultly mastering the highly inflected German while adapting well to the syntax.

Chinese is an analtyic language, like English.  Unlike English, most new words in Chinese are formed by agglutination and the writing system does not make use of punctuation like spaces.  The similarity to Esperanto in Chinese is the formation of words by agglutination.  That's about where it ends except for the fact that, like English, both are highly uninflected.  Esperanto can have a free syntax (it is not analytic), which is dissimilar to Chinese and English.  Also dissimilar is that Esperanto can be considered an agglutinative language like Finnish or Hungarian.

Chinese is a great language.  I've always liked it.  My partner's parents are from Hong Kong and he speaks Hakka.  Unfortunately, I am virtually tone deaf and am effectively unable to speak Chinese because of that.  My ponunciation sucks too, I'm told and whenever I try to learn words I get laughed at because I can't say any of them properly.  It would take lots of training and trial and error for me to fosilise the correct tones and pronounciation, other than that, the language is so easy and I find it easy to learn (even if I can't speak it) exactly because it has no inflection... languages that are similar to English are so easy to learn. 

I live in Hong Kong, and my ability to speak Mandarin is effectively useless here. Most people speak at least passable English, and all the locals speak Guandonghua, which I cannot speak, or even read, since it employs fantizi (traditional characters) while Mandarin employs shentizi (simplified characters). I'm told I should learn it but I am reluctant. Tonally, it is much harder than Mandarin, with nine tones versus four, and it sounds...terrible. Mandarin sounds beautiful. Cantonese sounds sort of guttural. Anyway, the problem with tones is difficult to overcome, I agree. I was very fortunate, since I started learning Mandarin at age 10, which made it much, much easier, believe me. My advice is to never memorize tones. Over time, the tones will become automatically incorporated into your speaking. To this day, I don't memorize tones. So, for example, when writing in pinyin, one usually indicates the tones by writing, for example, jue3de2 (think) instead of just juede. For me to do that, I have to say the word out loud to confirm which tones to put in, because the tones have become a thing of habit only in speaking.