Quote:
Originally Posted by komitsuki
Then they would describe in Japanese instead of English. You have 2000 Chinese characters that would dwarf English's many meanings in individual words.
As for English's position, mostly it's because English is the medium of modern pop culture and "advanced" sectors of academia.
You gotta live in Asia to understand this.
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From my understanding, English has far more words than Japanese, for description or otherwise, and for good reason. English is a hodgepodge of many languages and was developed by numerous cultures. Japanese, however, is somewhat limited by the available phonetic sounds. Currently, the main purpose of kanji is to help separate the language into parts when written where without intonation of spoken Japanese, can blur together. Also, Japanese relies heavily on context to understand unspoken meanings (which can be rather deep) so the words need not be as varied as English.