The language...of love, beauty and euthanasia

I love the language...or rather I have a great deal of respect for the language. It is incredibly challenging, extremely complicated and unbelievably frustrating. But above all these issues...it is without doubt a language of beauty and reason.

The sounds are horrible, essentially it is a language of several distinctive sounds, combining to make more distinctive sounds...but still leaving a relatively small group of sounds compared to English. The way they get all the words they need is through tone and context.

4 tones, same sound in the four tones = 4 different words
Same sound, same tone but different character = a different word, therefore the Chinese have many many homonyms. In English we can think of a few...eg. whether and weather, which and witch etc etc.

In Chinese, almost every word will have a homonym. So when there are so many homonyms, listening and speaking is all about the context. The word that comes after/before it, what you are generally talking about etc etc.

What about when you want to tell someone your name? You can't spell in Chinese as there isn't an alphabet. You do the next best thing...you describe the characters of your name. If this description went something along the lines of..."there is a small straight line on top, underneath that there is a square etc etc". I would imagine it would take forever to be able to "spell" your name to someone. So instead all Chinese words are made of radicals (or subparts which are also words).

Eg. my surname is 陈， I'd describe this Chen as ear-east, because 阝is the radical for ear 耳 and 东 is the actual character for east.

Although it is incredibly difficult, with no alphabet and a different character for everyone word...the written language is pure poetry.

Today I found out the word for hold 拿 is a combination for close 合 and hand 手. I love the logic.

I also found that the word for euthanasia 安乐死术, begins with 安乐 which means comfortable or at peace. I find that both moving and apt.

I will grapple with it for the rest of my life...but today...just today...I love the Chinese language.