The author wrote,"Because there is a vast interval between “good” and “bad,” it accommodates complex relationships." which, to me, shows they don't truly grasp the cultural context of his Chinese environment. There is the same interval between good and bad in both Chinese and Western values and thinking and terminology. What makes it seem there is a difference is the hesitancy to be affirmative in Chinese culture. To affirm some thing is to claim knowledge and expertise, and in doing _that_ comes an expectation that those around the Affirmer acquiesce to their expertise. This is another facet of Face. Very few people will claim such a level of knowledge and expertise and experience, so the words used are purposely "vague". It's not a issue with the terms.
I was once asked if I speak Chinese and I answered affirmatively, "Shi da" (very bad pinyin btw). Everyone thought that was hilarious! They were able to think it hilarious because, at the time, I was just a young single man, and my answer made it sound like I was affirming that I speak Chinese, _all of it_! But in my mind the conversation was in Chinese, I understood the question and gave an answer in Chinese, so of course I can speak it...just not fluently. I learned from that experience that a better answer is, "keyi", which is essentially "enough" but in a more humble mode and the breadth of that word itself is adapted to the context. If asked in a market about my Chinese, "keyi" means "enough to do shopping" with no claim to more than that. If in the context of a class at university, it meant "enough to do the work" but not claiming to be super smart, NOR, dumb (since it's at university). It isn't the words, it's the interpersonal culture, face, and both communicating and showing you know where you fit in.
This makes me think of a tool from semiotics called the Greimas square where you can have opposing concepts e.g. A and B (ugly & beautiful, for & against, legal & illegal).
At the surface level they can appear as binaries, but the negation of A is not equivalent to B and vice versa (e.g. illegal is not equivalent to not-legal) and encourages the consideration of more complex meta-concepts which at surface level seem like contradictions but are not (both beautiful and ugly, neither for or against).
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Others have pointed out that English speakers do have the capacity, and do use these sort of double negatives that allow for this ambiguity and nuance, but if you are an English-only speaker, I do believe that there are concepts that are thick with meaning and the meaning cannot accurately be communicated through a translation - they come with a lot of contextual baggage where the meaning can not be communicated in words alone.
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As a New Zealander who's lived in the U.S. for the last 15 years, I've realized in conversations with some native Americans where despite sincere (I think) efforts on both sides, I've not been able to communicate what I mean. I don't think it's anything to do with intelligence, but like author hints how language shapes how we think and therefore our realities.
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I've never found poetry to be interesting, but recently I've come to appreciate how I think poets attempt to bypass this flaw of language, and how good poets sometimes seem to succeed!
Western culture is predicated on a sort of positivist metaphysics, and our language reflects that. Whereas in the east, the langauges and cultures have both long ago (as in, thousands of years ago) assimilated the precepts of non-dualism, which brings with it a greater degree of subtlety, through its embedded understanding of equanimity, dependent arising, and so on. It's a different ontological root, and therefore a different schema altogether.
Knowing what I know of you guys in NZ, a lot of that sort of thinking has made its way into popular understanding by way of encounters with the Maori people, and some of it has to do with more modern notions of pluralism, and some of it has to do with British politeness.
All that to say, it is not your fault nor the Americans fault that there's a gap in understanding. It's the byproduct of where those two schemas do not connect.
The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things, like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas. It's just as silly to be overly dismissive of the language you're familiar with as it is to be overly dismissive of others.
> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome.
The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/chapter/bookseries/abs... Google will give you lots more info. on this.
> No language is more expressive than another,
Objectively false. This is the same meaningless logic that since almost all programming languages are Turing Complete and can simulate any Turing Machine therefore they are equivalent. In a abstract sense they are but for all practical purposes the notion is useless as anybody trying to program in C++ vs. Haskell vs. Prolog will tell you. This is why you have the concept of "Paradigms" and "Worldviews".
Every culture imposes a "Philosophical Worldview" on the Languages it invents.
An ancient Indian Philosopher named Bhartṛhari (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhart%E1%B9%9Bhari) actually founded a school of philosophy where language is linked to cognition-by-itself with cognition-of-content i.e. subject+object+communication as a "whole understanding". He called this Sphota (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spho%E1%B9%ADa) defined as "bursting forth" of meaning or idea on the mind as language is uttered. This is the reason why in ancient Sanskrit literature there is so much emphasis on oral tradition i.e. using right words, right utterances, right tones etc.
I made my own top level comment below about the ambiguity of "I don't want x" and how hard it is in English to distinguish between "I have zero want for x" and "I have negative want for x"
I didn't know about semiotic square, and appreciate learning about it. It points at exactly the property that I keep tripping over (and seeing others trip over).
Given that wants are an expression of values, and understanding other people's values enables empathy, I can't help but think this flaw in language is actually inhibiting empathy and cooperation at larger scales.
[0] by which I mean people prefer to use intuition when thinking on their own, but prefer others to be deliberate -- however inappropriate levels of intent also provokes suspicion?
As a native Chinese speaker that's always my confusion when communicate in English as I would feel that the word/phrasing can not express the meaning in my heart.
native Americans or Native Americans? the latter would be more like the Moriori and fit the context better, but somehow native English speakers who arent interlegible are also interesting.
The language pattern the author refers to is called litotes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes), but to say that English doesn’t use them is… not quite right.
Not quite right, but not quite wrong, no? The pattern seems similar, but I think of litotes (as the Wikipedia article suggests) as a rhetorical device: the assertion-by-negation carries an ironic charge, and strikes the (Western) ear by standing out from the ordinary affirmative register.
If I'm understanding the author's account of Chinese assertion-by-negation correctly, doesn't it sound like assertion-by-negation is the ordinary case in that linguistic tradition, and it's the assertive case that jars the ear? Same pattern, different effect?
This is all very familiar with this North Eastern American English speaker except the "quite good" one. The rest seem normal to me in my American English. Perhaps it's too many Dr Who and or Monty python as a youth. Though in New England the language can be very sarcastic and indirect.
Really? I read the same sentence (as an American) and immediately thought that they must be referring to British English. Certainly nobody says brilliant as an affirmation here.
And "no problem" and "not bad" are both common colloquial statements in American English.
> If I'm understanding the author's account of Chinese assertion-by-negation correctly, doesn't it sound like assertion-by-negation is the ordinary case in that linguistic tradition, and it's the assertive case that jars the ear?
No? Assertion by assertion is the ordinary case, just like you'd expect for everything.
But it's easy to say 他没猜错, because it takes advantage of a common element of Chinese grammar that doesn't match well to English.
Think of 猜错 as a verb with an inherently negative polarity, like "fail" or "miss". There is no difficulty in saying "he didn't miss", even though there is difficulty in saying "he didn't not hit" and missing is always the same thing as not hitting. 猜错 is similarly easy to use. (Though it's less opaque; it is composed of the verb 猜 "guess" and the verbal result complement 错 "wrong".)
The opposite of 猜错 is 猜对 ("guess right"), and it's very common.
English does construct things this way, maybe just not with the frequency of Chinese. In fact, "not bad" is a common expression.
That said, it's true that certain flavors of US English, like marketing speak, will avoid many phrases in this family.
This is because many American English speakers will see expressions like this, particularly when not used in a directly complementary way, as either bureaucratic and avoidant or slightly pedantic or both. Because for many Americans, leaving ambiguity implies lack of confidence in the statement or evasiveness. (At the same time Americans also know not to trust confident statements - they are separately known to be "snake oily" - but we still tend to see marketing that avoids directness as even less trustworthy.)
So this mode of expression is much more common in personal speech.
Kids in the Pacific Northwest use litotes constantly, to the point of annoyance, and possibly more often than they use the straightforward positive. Everything is "not bad" or "not great" or, if really bad, "super not great." I've always taken it to be a kind of avoidance of confessing one's real feelings.
Yeah this tracks - if someone says something is “not great” it’s probably extremely bad haha. or “super cool no problems here” (there’s tear gas streaming through the windows)
I reckon a decept part of that is due to American English vs. British English.
A great example of this is the Korean War, where a British brigadier in an extremely difficult situation told an American general "Things are a bit sticky, sir" - who interpreted it as "Could be better, but we're holding the line". The misunderstanding resulted in 500 dead and captured.
FWIW I’m not quite convinced there’s that much of a dialectical divide: “Not bad,” “he’s not wrong,” etc. sound entirely natural to me in American English.
"American English" has so many dialects and regional variations that aren't even mutually intelligible that making statements about it is pointless anyway.
I'd argue there's few Americans I flat out couldn't understand, even if it sounds like they're putting their words through a blender. And I say that having lived all over the country, Northeast, Midwest, West, and deep South. Accents can be thick but they're largely intelligible. Unlike, say, the Scots.
Especially compared to a language like German. I took 5 years of German and still didn't have a damn clue what anyone was saying if they were talking in dialect.
I've had this discussion with American friends quite recently, it's very much an American English thing to not use those constructions. Certainly in British, New Zealand, and Australian English we do all the time.
Yeah, same as a French speaker first living in the US, I have to sometimes refrain myself from calling things “just fine”, “will do” or “not bad”. These are still used in American English, but I tend to use them for cases were people normally use more positive/stronger version.
Like at a grocery store: “is that enough? That will do yes -> yes that’s perfect”
Ah ha, so.... come to Minnesota, there's talk with !False all the time. It fits very naturally brain-wise coming from Chinese. Just, hope you're from Dongbei or similar 'cus lol weather.
Actually in Minnesota it goes way past just !False construction, in a way that also translates well from Chinese, because you get a lot of face saving phrases. Like "that's different" as a polite way of saying something is bad.
I suspect you just learned a different kind of English.
Something that occured to me years ago is we have a quirk in English language that gets in the way of accurately emapthizing with each other, especially when trying to design things well (like products and experiences). We don't say "unwant", and we don't clearly differentiate between a lack of want and a repulsion or unwant or negative want.
Someone might say "I don't want x" or "I don't need x" and it's unclear if:
- they see no value in x
- they see small enough value in x that they don't care
- they see negative value
So much time and energy is wasted on misunderstandings that stem from this ambiguity.
It ruins products, is loses deals, it screws up projections, it confuses executives, etc.
It gets in the way of accurately empathizing with and understanding each other.
Because "I unwant x" means something extremely different than "I don't want x". Unwant implies some other value that x is getting in the way of. Understanding other peoples' values is what enables accurate empathy for them. Accurately empathizing with customers is what enables great products and predictable sales.
This is somehow real as I'm not so good at English but as a native Chinese speaker it feels a little bit hard to find the word/phrasing to express what I want to, but I guess your target audience should be more clear on what you are trying to express since it's the native thought process that the audience be familier with.
To me personally, the same meaning requires a lot of extra work to be expressed in English rather than in Chinese.
It seems what you're pointing out is coming out a lot in this thread. As a solely English speaker (with very little French/Spanish), it's actually a bit of a novel concept for me.
I'm curious though:
Do you find it particularly hard to differentiate or clarify between you having 0 want or negative want?
It would be convenient to have an unwant in common English. However plenty of children manage to express their utter -10 want of vegetables rather too well. ;)
Sure, but I have never heard anyone use this either. This is not common in discourse.
I also find the wiki description and your comment somewhat ambiguous. Even in this case it's hard to descern between absence of want or a negative want.
Edit: due to either my own personal misunderstanding or maybe cultural niche, "reject" is also ambiguous because it could mean an absence of want and not necessarily a negative want. However I just learned that in semiotics "reject" does mean distinctly a negative.
So yep, "diswant" is exactly what I've seen lacking.
Sure, I guess that's something people say. Though it's very new English.
In case I wasn't clear. By empathy I mean the ability to accurately predict how someone else will feel about something. For me to do this, I have to set aside my own values and beliefs, to know the other person's values and beliefs, and then use theirs to simulate how they may feel about something.
The point is I can't empathize with another person accurately unless I know their values and beliefs.
So to be empathetic is to be curious about other people's values and then accurately predict how they will feel about something.
So to me '"unalive" is an empathetic mood.' sounds something like "I am in an unalive mood (feeling apathetic and defeated), and people who can relate to my values beliefs and experiences will emapthize with me"
> Unwant could be too familiar, conjuring "unwanted".
This is a really interesting point on multiple levels. I've been so hung up on the ambiguity in the language I never even noticed the connection to "unwanted".
Given you brought this up and I assume immediately saw the parallel, when you think of "unwanted" do you think of an absence of being wanted (apathy, ignored, indefference), or a feeling of being repulsed (negative want, hate, disgust, fear, loathing, etc)?
I suspect that whether it's considered more rude will vary by culture, but yes I think "I don't care about x" is a way to specify a lack of want in contrast to a negative want. It's also probably the most common way, but still used rarely I find, maybe because people consider it more rude.
I suspect these sort of differences, which exist not only between Chinese and English, but also between different western cultures/languages (and I assume similarly eastern ones as well, although I'm not so familiar with them), is one of the reason why multi-lingual children typically test higher on empathy and adaptability. They learn through language the inherent different perspectives/thinking processes.
Every single example given under “In Chinese, affirmation is often compiled through negation:” sounds completely natural to me, as a midwestern American English speaker.
However the direct affirmations are also acceptable. Maybe the difference is more that both are pretty acceptable in English, but that is less true for Chinese. Or at least the version he speaks.
This is not exclusive to the East, but any culture with a high cost of expression. Recent interview with a Russian CEO, talking about how they have "growth across the board, only in the negative direction"
There are some direct ways to express agreement in Chinese, like 對 or 好. At the same time, the negative statements described are not unique to Chinese at all. It's not that deep, really.
The author states outright that this is not unique to Chinese, it's just much more prevalent than in American English.
不错 is literally "not bad", but it's more positive than the American English equivalent, being basically semantically equal to 很好 (lit. "very good", although in practice just plain old good/OK). You can even say seemingly absurd things like 很不错 "very not bad" (= excellent); or you can tamp it down with 还不错 "also not bad".
Funnily enough, in British English, "not bad" is high praise; but you still wouldn't say "very not bad".
In Australia from my experience "not bad" = "good", "pretty good" = "amazing", "bit shit" = "really shit".
I don't think its as much that everything positive is just a non-negative, but that everything (especially emotions) is shifted towards the medium. Maybe it comes from a desire to not be abrasive and always soften everything, but I'm not sure.
Related also to the way Australians and New Zealanders use understatement for humorous effect, e.g. that last example you gave could be used to describe any condition up-to the point of death.
I really need to caution against looking too deep into taking these generalized words literally and deriving some insight from them that does not have independent evidence for the insight. "great" literally means big and is related to "gross", "perfect" literally means "completed", "passion" literally means "suffering", but people who use such words these days don't even have such imagery in mind at the point that they utter these words in everyday use.
Given the site where this is posted and the screenshot, is the author an engineer turned fiction writer? Kudos if true. Posting these must take a lot of courage.
As someone who thinks about the co-evolution of language and culture quite often, I love this sort of think-piece. Gives me a bunch of my own threads to pull
I find the original post confused.
What it has to with code? Why putting the US as "the West"? Why the Eastern void is bad? (Oftentimes it's the Western void which is oblivion, Eastern which is nirvana.)
In Polish, 'niezły' (literally 'not bad') means 'very good'.
Even in English there are many such things, e.g. 'indestructible', 'immortal'.
When it comes to labels on food there is "no preservatives" or similar. It even has its parodies, e.g. "asbestos-free oat cereal" (https://xkcd.com/641/).
I think the writers classification of this being a Chinese vs English distinction is a bit presumptuous - the portion of the USA OP is familiar with maybe, but I'll jump on the bandwagon to say this kind of negated negative language is very very common in New Zealand.
Not bad, not wrong, no problem etc etc are all very common, and we have the following too:
At the risk of committing the same error as the author, I am wondering if they may have been exposed almost exclusively to American English. Many of the examples of things you can't say feel perfectly natural to me, and many of the examples of what you "would" say felt a little outlandish, but certainly more "American coded".
That said, the author isn't pulling this out of his ass, more like vastly overstating it and drawing some pretty questionable conclusions.
When I'm both reading and listening to Mandarin, there does seem to be a much stronger preference for expressing positives as negated-negatives, or even sometimes expressing fairly neutral things as the absence of their opposite, than there is in any variety if English I know. But the author has latched onto that difference a little too hard I'd say.
English does this kind of thing all the time, as others have pointed out, but often to understate things somewhat. "Not bad!" actually means pretty good, but the speaker does not want to sound as if gushing. (Maybe it wasn't "fantastic", but still more than acceptable.)
Even the opening example—like if Alice said something truthful but offensive or bombastic, and Bob objects, Carol can say "Well, she's not wrong..."
Back when Americans economically feared the Japanese rather than the Chinese, there was a myth that the Japanese were so conformist that the same word meant both "to differ" and "to be wrong"—chigau (違う). Well, Japanese society is pretty conformist, ngl, but the reality is a bit more subtle. In Japanese it's incredibly rude to tell someone they're wrong so instead they say chigaimasu, "it's different".
In English it's rude to say there's something wrong with somebody's child, so people will say "Jane sure is different." Though it's generally still considered saying too much.
Something about this article strikes home for me. I default to 'not bad' for something I don't actively dislike; past that it's a pretty substantial jump to get to 'good', at probably about the same point I'd be willing to actively recommend something to someone else, and then even more substantial to get to anything like 'great'.
> English would say: “He was right.” Or “He guessed correctly.” Direct. Affirmative. Landed. Right is right, wrong is wrong. You don’t say ‘not wrong.’
Is the article's assertion about English true, though? And specifically about British English and maybe a slightly outdated version of the language?
Because George Mikes in the humorous "How to be an Alien" (which is a comical book giving advice to foreigners like himself on how to integrate into UK society) explains again and again that "the English" [1] never say things directly. For example (I'm quoting from memory) he explains how a man may refer to his fiancé affectionately: "I don't object to you, you know". And if he's mad with love: "in fact, I rather fancy you". He also explains that when an Englishman says you're "clever", he's disgusted with you, as being "clever" is a bad trait, very un-English.
So it seems Chinese and (some versions of) English are not that different.
Do note Mikes book was written in the 40s though. And of course it's a work of humor, but there's truth to it.
[1] according to Mikes, when people say "the English / England" they sometimes mean the British Isles, sometimes Great Britain -- but never England.
> You name the quality directly. You point at it. You own it.
Fun thing: it works even better with Americans and Germans when it comes to negativity, because Germans also express negativity directly. For me, as a German, Americans want to be coddled and they do not like it if you clearly express to an American that he is bullshitting you. Germans (and I'd say, Germanic/Nordic-origin cultures as a whole) don't like wasting time coddling around and sucking up for no reason at all. We're an efficient people, after all.
That's also a part of why Linus Torvalds is such a polarizing figure across the Internet. To me as a German, yes, he could dial down the ad-hominem a bit but that's it. The constant American whining about his tone however is... grating on my nerves. He's speaking the truth, accept it for what it is and move the fuck on.
Oh, and it's also why Wal-Mart failed so disastrously many decades ago when they tried to enter Germany. Ignoring labor rights was bad enough, but we could have let that slide (given that our own discounters were all heavily embroiled in scandals)... but what was just way too uncanny from what I hear from older people who actually lived during that time was the greeters. And it matches up with many a write-up [1].
I was once asked if I speak Chinese and I answered affirmatively, "Shi da" (very bad pinyin btw). Everyone thought that was hilarious! They were able to think it hilarious because, at the time, I was just a young single man, and my answer made it sound like I was affirming that I speak Chinese, _all of it_! But in my mind the conversation was in Chinese, I understood the question and gave an answer in Chinese, so of course I can speak it...just not fluently. I learned from that experience that a better answer is, "keyi", which is essentially "enough" but in a more humble mode and the breadth of that word itself is adapted to the context. If asked in a market about my Chinese, "keyi" means "enough to do shopping" with no claim to more than that. If in the context of a class at university, it meant "enough to do the work" but not claiming to be super smart, NOR, dumb (since it's at university). It isn't the words, it's the interpersonal culture, face, and both communicating and showing you know where you fit in.
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