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!
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?
Related, that in English "must not" means that it's forbidden, while in German the analogous "muss nicht" just means "don't have to". Also "need not" means "don't need", instead of actually needing the negation.
> and how hard it is in English to distinguish between "I have zero want for x" and "I have negative want for x"
"I do not want to X"
"I want to not X"
These are both pretty natural English constructions, though the second is usually used as a retort for clarification after saying the first but meaning the second.
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.
That's beautiful. E.g., I have Chinese coworkers and now I realize what they meant with "that's not wrong". I felt those expressions like humbleness, but now I realize they were trying to keep their authenticity. Mind blowing.
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.
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.
It is pretty unanimously agreed by linguists that all language is equally expressive, which makes sense considering they were all made by humans to do the same thing.
No; I had already refuted this in my earlier comment.
Language is a product of Geography and Culture to express a "Philosophical Worldview". Mere study of its Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar are not enough. What is important is whether a given language has specialized technical vocabulary to express specific concepts/ideas i.e. the "complexity of semantics" involved. These are usually context/culture dependent.
As an example, compare the language of the Xhosa people living in equatorial Africa with that of the Chukchi people living in the Arctic Circle. It should be obvious that they each have concepts expressed via language unique to their Geography/Culture and which are unknown to the other.
As another example, consider the Sanskrit word Karma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma). It is impossible to understand this word in all its connotations (it actually is a stand-in for a whole lot of concepts) without having an idea of Reincarnation which is specific to Hinduism/Buddhism philosophical worldviews.
Not all opinions must be taken on authority, they can be assessed on their internal coherence. The views he is putting forth are coherent and he has cited sources in a very precise manner. We can infer that he knows what he is talking about (spoiler: he does, as these are the same ideas I was referring to in my original comment).
Huh? It seems like i have showed up your ignorance on this subject and hence you are just trying to "appeal to authority" which is funny given that you have actually not mentioned any one Authority nor any papers/books in support of your argument.
I have studied Linguistics from the pov of Philosophy which any intelligent person should be able to infer from my references.
I don't think you even understand what the phrase "All languages are equally expressive" means. It means very different things when applied to Natural Languages vs. Formal Languages. The latter is where this expression is usually used/studied which is what you are parroting without any understanding.
Indeed but we have veered far from Plato's school of thought ever since the dualism of Descartes and it was further reinforced by the rise in materialism following the "death of god" and the discovery of the atom.
I hear you on that, but it's not like Laozi's thought is particularly useful to Chinese capitalism, either. Certainly any remnant gestures towards the dialectics of Marx by the CCP are farcical. We can allow for some local variance, of course, while still seeing the vulgarization of the whole world, so to speak. I think it's important to appreciate that the seed of dialectical thought can never be vanquished; Kant accidentally paved the way for Hegel's abolition of Cartesian dualism, and Hegel had no problem making use of the German language, so seemingly divorced from Plato's Greek, to do that. Dialectical thought can't help but appear over and over again, no matter the language, because all language is a product of the real world.
Again, it would be a mistake to not afford some degree of autonomy to language. The question is to what degree language is free to structure the world. Ultimately any language, I believe, can be expanded to express whatever new ideas arise in society, so that it is the real conditions that have ultimate power "in the last instance".
I afford that "autonomy" (in the sense of a sponptaneous emergence of phenomena, not in the sense of having agency); nevertheless, thousands of years of culture going one way here and another way there lend themselves to pre-built apparati of perception. See other comments in this thread for a more articulated explanation of what I mean; I don't have the time to re-express it here.
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.
I (American) regularly use litotes both for ironic emphasis (like saying "not bad" at an amazing restaurant) and when I genuinely mean "it's not great but it's not terrible". Honestly not sure which is more common. It all depends on context and tone.
American english doesn't use them as much. But british english uses them more. English spoken by someone from finland, sweden or norway would use them even more
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)
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.
I think your issue is just that your grammar was wrong.
是的(Shide) is the closest thing to yes in Mandarin, but it's as universal. Answering 是的 on the question 你会中文吗 is like answering "yes I am" on the question "do you speak English?". 可以 isn't correct either, unless they asked 你可以说中文吗？, which is more like "Can you switch to English?" And not "are you able to speak English?" if I'm not mistaken.
Answering 我会 is perfectly fine, even if you don't speak perfectly Chinese. If you want to sound be more humble you can say（我会）一点点/丢丢. 还可以 doesn't fit the pattern either, but it is ok too I think.
Not a native speaker though.
More on topic: To me not bad/不错，no problem/没事 are just as positive in English, maybe even more in the case of no problem. But I'm not a native speaker of either.
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”
Scales of goodness of expressions are shifted relative to English: "good" (gut) to a German means "it totally fulfills all my needs and expectations, so it is perfect for my purpose". "very good" (sehr gut) means "it exceeds all my expectations" and to a German already sounds like total hyperbole. Anything like "delightful" or "excellent" to a German sounds either totally sleazy or sarcastic.
When something is not perfect but adequate and we are happy with it, we would say something like "not bad", "it's fine" or "you can leave it like that". Which to the english speaking world has totally different connotations and can lead to rather interesting misunderstandings.
And especially "not bad" ("nicht schlecht") can be confusing in that it is sometimes something rather positive. It, in German and said in the right tone of voice" can mean "this is suprisingly good".
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.
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.
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.
I lived in thailand for a few years and one of their words/phrases stood out to me in situations like this:
Ow: want
Mai ow: don't want
These words are used eg. when ordering food or accepting/declining an offer at a checkout. Translated directly to dictionary English, they sound quite shockingly direct and rude - "would you like a drink? Don't want! How about bread sticks? Want!" - but after a while realized they were actually just very useful, special purpose words for making it known what you were interested in, with no other subtext.
It's funny how many gaps we have in English where there's just no good way to say something, at least concisely, and you don't even realize it until you see how other languages handle it. You'd think we'd have evolved it by now.
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. ;)
I think I've used the phrase 'I actively don't want X' to emphasize unwant before. In my work I do try to disambiguate between the things I care about and don't, especially when delegating to people.
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.
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.
This applies to many different things, depending on the pair of languages you are using.
In Spanish the closes approximation would be "ni mal ni bien" (Not bad not wrong) but I understand the Chinese expression has a strong lean on "not being wrong".
Not so long ago (I'm 50+, Spanish native speaker, and I've spoken English for the past 30 years almost daily) I learnt about "accountability".
Now before I get a barrage of WTFs, the situation is that in Spanish we only have "Responsabilidad" and that accounts for both responsibility and accountability, with a strong lean on responsibility.
So basically we recognise what is it to be responsible of something, but being accountable is seriously diluted.
The implications of this are enormous, and this particular though exercise I'd leave for people that spend more time thinking about these things than I do.
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.
> 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 found this article pretty interesting to think about. The ideas it discusses are adjacent to a lot of what I sometimes struggle with in communication.
Meta note: my description was accidentally a great example of what I mean
> Adjacent to (not exactly the same as, but the overlap could be nearly complete)
> a lot of (not necessarily all of, but also not explicitly excluding all of)
> what I sometimes (not necessarily always, but also not explicitly excluding always)
Considering this more, I think my purpose in this intentional ambiguity is slightly different than the purpose of "not revealing one's true position" as described in the article. Rather, the problem I'm trying to pre-empt is responses that latch onto parts of what I say that aren't perfectly precisely true, but also aren't the point of what I'm trying to communicate.
It's frustrating when I'm trying to communicate a very specific idea or message and the discourse that follows ends up not engaging with that idea, so I've come to make the specific idea clear, and keep any contextual information more ambiguous to encourage focusing on the more well-defined thing.
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.
when the guy is making sentences like "affirmation is often compiled through negation" you know hes just trying to sound clever. the entire premise of the article is bunk, we DO use these patterns in English. He also treats (in that wide eyed western admiration for the orient) the Chinese like a simple monoculture where everyone has the same speech patterns.
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.
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"
And I suspect that in general more people (and sub cultures) in the US will start using more non-committal language in the coming decades. When repression grows harder it might become more important to not be noticed.
It would be interesing to know if the regional differences in the US that people are talking about here could be traced back to those places having a more homogeneous population with regards to hierarchical religious practices, country of origin, single-ish way to make a living or similar so that it is very important to not be cast out of the group.
Another perspective is also how this phenomenon relates to what I think is called "code switching" that individual persons from oppressed groups often use in contact with an individual from the oppressing group in daily life. Like how BIPOC interact with white people, women with men or young people with adults - where a not insignificant part of the interaction is about keeping the oppressive party calm and content.
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English is not my language and I'd like to learn better. Please help me by correcting spelling, expressions and idioms.
> 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.
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".
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.
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
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'.
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:
A very interesting article hidden behind a cryptic headline. I almost didn't read it because the title makes no sense to me. That would have been my loss.
In modal logic sense, Chinese is inherently more □ oriented while the language in US is using ◇ more. so in Chinese ¬(□¬A) can be used to represent a possibly concept ♢A
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.
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/).
True, but on the other hand they always give themselves away so it's very easy to spot and adjust expectations.
I found this article and discussion valuable anyway.
I would also encourage you to stop using "Americans" as synonymous to "US:er", there are many countries, cultures and peoples in the American continents that are not from the USA and quite a few that geographically exist within it too.
By pointing out that they are US:ers we can help each other to remind ourselves and them that they are not in fact the only version of human that exist.
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.
In it, the author contrasts 无 (Wú) and 有 (Yǒu). For some extra context of that specific contrast, here are a couple excerpts from the first poem of the Dao De Jing. (spacing is mine)
无 名天地之始
有 名万物之母
---
故 常无欲，以观其妙
... 常有欲，以观其徼。
---
The duality of 'with' and 'without', existence / non-existence is central and embodied heavily by those 2 words.
I am (slowly) trying to learn Chinese by reading the Dao, or possibly the other way around. I ran across this site (which I have 0 affiliation with) but it seems to be a small and unique site made by someone who just wanted it to exist, which very HN: https://dao-de-jing.com/
not a native chinese speaker, but couldnt this have to do more with requiring qualifiers?
There seems to be a very strong preferrence to adding qualifiers, especially to single character words. And 不 is just one of them
很好 (very good) is strongly preferred to just a plain 好 (good). similarly youre seldom going to just say 錯 差 or 行.
So if you want to say good, and not verrryyy good, youre left with "not bad" 不錯
it still holds for 2 character words. i was told that just saying 無聊 (boring) can have a very rude conotation, though i dont quite understand the subtext (maybe someone can elucidate). But if you say 很無聊 (very boring) it weirdly enough sounds better
unqualified words as far as i understand also often look archaic. tied to the preference for 2 character words vs 1 character words (my guess is bc classical chinese is written and its hard to make out a single character word with tone when speaking)
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).
--
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.
--
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.
--
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!
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.
Agreed. The flaw seems to be subtle though, a kinda sorta mismatch between intuition and deliberation (intent?) [0]
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/314666472_The_Exact...
[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?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-025-00320-8
Personally, I feel that jokes have the potential to cut through all that (barriers to empathy)
Related, that in English "must not" means that it's forbidden, while in German the analogous "muss nicht" just means "don't have to". Also "need not" means "don't need", instead of actually needing the negation.
> and how hard it is in English to distinguish between "I have zero want for x" and "I have negative want for x"
"I do not want to X"
"I want to not X"
These are both pretty natural English constructions, though the second is usually used as a retort for clarification after saying the first but meaning the second.
“I would prefer not to.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener
> I've not been able to communicate what I mean
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.
That's beautiful. E.g., I have Chinese coworkers and now I realize what they meant with "that's not wrong". I felt those expressions like humbleness, but now I realize they were trying to keep their authenticity. Mind blowing.
I have found myself using "decent" frequently (especially in code comments) for situations that are technically ok, but far from perfect.
"Passable" is my go to for just below that.
Sometimes it's also interesting how gen-z lingo fills gaps - such as "that's a choice"
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.
Not foreign Americans
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.
How about tripartism of ideas?
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08886...
https://www.academia.edu/45462252/The_Logic_Structure_of_Tao...
Okay, these are probably posthoc retcons
I've just noticed this hierarchal tripartism so I'm happy to see that other people have retconned it too.
> 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.
Previous discussion Words for the Heart: A treasury of emotions from classical India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43249766
Also see the book The Word and the World: India's Contribution to the Study of Language by Bimal Krishna Matilal which gives an overview of Bhartrhari's (and others) ideas - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...
It is pretty unanimously agreed by linguists that all language is equally expressive, which makes sense considering they were all made by humans to do the same thing.
No; I had already refuted this in my earlier comment.
Language is a product of Geography and Culture to express a "Philosophical Worldview". Mere study of its Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar are not enough. What is important is whether a given language has specialized technical vocabulary to express specific concepts/ideas i.e. the "complexity of semantics" involved. These are usually context/culture dependent.
As an example, compare the language of the Xhosa people living in equatorial Africa with that of the Chukchi people living in the Arctic Circle. It should be obvious that they each have concepts expressed via language unique to their Geography/Culture and which are unknown to the other.
As another example, consider the Sanskrit word Karma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma). It is impossible to understand this word in all its connotations (it actually is a stand-in for a whole lot of concepts) without having an idea of Reincarnation which is specific to Hinduism/Buddhism philosophical worldviews.
Frankly, you are not qualified to make the claims you're making. You're not a linguist; you're just some guy. Not all opinions are equal.
Not all opinions must be taken on authority, they can be assessed on their internal coherence. The views he is putting forth are coherent and he has cited sources in a very precise manner. We can infer that he knows what he is talking about (spoiler: he does, as these are the same ideas I was referring to in my original comment).
Huh? It seems like i have showed up your ignorance on this subject and hence you are just trying to "appeal to authority" which is funny given that you have actually not mentioned any one Authority nor any papers/books in support of your argument.
I have studied Linguistics from the pov of Philosophy which any intelligent person should be able to infer from my references.
I don't think you even understand what the phrase "All languages are equally expressive" means. It means very different things when applied to Natural Languages vs. Formal Languages. The latter is where this expression is usually used/studied which is what you are parroting without any understanding.
For your edification, i highly recommend reading about the well-studied Pirahã language - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language Note in particular the reference papers/books by Daniel Everett on the Pirahã - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Everett
Are there any languages in existence that lack a facility for counting numbers, to your knowledge?
"idiotsecant" is clueless but according to Daniel Everett's studies/research the Pirahã language lacks a proper numeral system - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language#Numerals_...
Thank you. Exactly the frame of reference I was speaking from.
See also the psychologist Richard Nisbett's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Nisbett) works specifically;
The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Geography_of_Thought
Ever read Plato?
Indeed but we have veered far from Plato's school of thought ever since the dualism of Descartes and it was further reinforced by the rise in materialism following the "death of god" and the discovery of the atom.
I hear you on that, but it's not like Laozi's thought is particularly useful to Chinese capitalism, either. Certainly any remnant gestures towards the dialectics of Marx by the CCP are farcical. We can allow for some local variance, of course, while still seeing the vulgarization of the whole world, so to speak. I think it's important to appreciate that the seed of dialectical thought can never be vanquished; Kant accidentally paved the way for Hegel's abolition of Cartesian dualism, and Hegel had no problem making use of the German language, so seemingly divorced from Plato's Greek, to do that. Dialectical thought can't help but appear over and over again, no matter the language, because all language is a product of the real world.
Again, it would be a mistake to not afford some degree of autonomy to language. The question is to what degree language is free to structure the world. Ultimately any language, I believe, can be expanded to express whatever new ideas arise in society, so that it is the real conditions that have ultimate power "in the last instance".
I afford that "autonomy" (in the sense of a sponptaneous emergence of phenomena, not in the sense of having agency); nevertheless, thousands of years of culture going one way here and another way there lend themselves to pre-built apparati of perception. See other comments in this thread for a more articulated explanation of what I mean; I don't have the time to re-express it here.
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?
I think it's especially American English that doesn't use litotes as much as British English or the other Western European languages.
This piece seems to be very much about American English, when I read something like:
> In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say: Nice Great Perfect Brilliant
You would absolutely say "not bad" as an idiomatic variant of "good" in American English.
"not bad, not bad at all"
Yes, that sentence is simply untrue for, at the very least, BrE. For example: https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/chart-show... (2015)
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.
I think Hiberno-English uses them even more.
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.
I (American) regularly use litotes both for ironic emphasis (like saying "not bad" at an amazing restaurant) and when I genuinely mean "it's not great but it's not terrible". Honestly not sure which is more common. It all depends on context and tone.
According to Wikipedia, bu-chuo is a Chinese litotes
You're quite not wrong :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes#Chinese
American english doesn't use them as much. But british english uses them more. English spoken by someone from finland, sweden or norway would use them even more
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.
Best examples of litotes can be found in social media, Chinese or English or any language
My guess is that "bu chuo" _was_ a litotes (or originated as one) but the ironic component evaporated with familiarity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes#Chinese
The literal English translation still seems to be a litotes
"super not great" IS a real feeling :)
(fellow PNWer, I'd never before thought of this as a regional thing!)
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)
also, TIL the word "litotes" -- thank you, brother!
The verbal construction words you learn in Classics are excellent. Litotes, chiasmus, synecdoche...
> In fact, "not bad" is a common expression.
“Not too bad” is also common and even weaker.
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.
I think your issue is just that your grammar was wrong.
是的(Shide) is the closest thing to yes in Mandarin, but it's as universal. Answering 是的 on the question 你会中文吗 is like answering "yes I am" on the question "do you speak English?". 可以 isn't correct either, unless they asked 你可以说中文吗？, which is more like "Can you switch to English?" And not "are you able to speak English?" if I'm not mistaken.
Answering 我会 is perfectly fine, even if you don't speak perfectly Chinese. If you want to sound be more humble you can say（我会）一点点/丢丢. 还可以 doesn't fit the pattern either, but it is ok too I think.
Not a native speaker though.
More on topic: To me not bad/不错，no problem/没事 are just as positive in English, maybe even more in the case of no problem. But I'm not a native speaker of either.
Almost related:
Check out the various translations of the subtext of this manga (to Chinese.. etc)
https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%82%8F%E3%81%9F%E3%81%97%E3...
Wow. The funniest part is the last !? just getting dropped in most title adaptations.
Most titles read like the publisher just giving up and going for anything that doesn't sound crazy. Which is exactly opposite to the original title.
As a Brit, I'm not quite sure this article is right in it's declaration it's a universal "English" thing and not more "American English".
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.
I would say Australian English relies on this negation even more than British English, to the point of being confusing without more cultural context.
Yeah nah... nah yeah, you're right.
Yeah, Kiwi English also, e.g. describing something as "not bad" rather than "good" is normal.
> How's things? > Not bad.
Yep, "not bad" is very very common here - definitely more so than "decent".
"How are you?" "Not too bad" always makes me smile. Such a British answer.
I say and hear it all the time in the US...
"Can't complain"
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”
Same for a German.
Scales of goodness of expressions are shifted relative to English: "good" (gut) to a German means "it totally fulfills all my needs and expectations, so it is perfect for my purpose". "very good" (sehr gut) means "it exceeds all my expectations" and to a German already sounds like total hyperbole. Anything like "delightful" or "excellent" to a German sounds either totally sleazy or sarcastic.
When something is not perfect but adequate and we are happy with it, we would say something like "not bad", "it's fine" or "you can leave it like that". Which to the english speaking world has totally different connotations and can lead to rather interesting misunderstandings.
And especially "not bad" ("nicht schlecht") can be confusing in that it is sometimes something rather positive. It, in German and said in the right tone of voice" can mean "this is suprisingly good".
Two countries divided by a common language . . .
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.
I couldn't help but think of that classic "How to talk like a Minnesotan" video.
Maybe there's a difference in frequency of usage, but we also say things like "he's not wrong" pretty often in English.
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.
The main difference may be in the range of meanings.
In a scale of 0 to 10 where "bad" is 0, one side will take "not bad" as a 4~5 while the other side meant it as 7~8.
"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.
Is that really the same thing? We aren't just talking about understatement.
ngl
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.
I lived in thailand for a few years and one of their words/phrases stood out to me in situations like this:
Ow: want
Mai ow: don't want
These words are used eg. when ordering food or accepting/declining an offer at a checkout. Translated directly to dictionary English, they sound quite shockingly direct and rude - "would you like a drink? Don't want! How about bread sticks? Want!" - but after a while realized they were actually just very useful, special purpose words for making it known what you were interested in, with no other subtext.
It's funny how many gaps we have in English where there's just no good way to say something, at least concisely, and you don't even realize it until you see how other languages handle it. You'd think we'd have evolved it by now.
The same goes in the other direction, of course!
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?
E.g. "I want x" = 5 want
But
"I don't want x" = 0 want or -5 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. ;)
I think I've used the phrase 'I actively don't want X' to emphasize unwant before. In my work I do try to disambiguate between the things I care about and don't, especially when delegating to people.
I think you mean https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diswant, or “reject”.
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.
Now the question is why don't people use it more?
I'll try.
Thanks for sharing.
There's a construction I use for this all the time that seems to be in common usage although maybe not picked up by the textbooks yet
The scale goes in order: - I want X - I don't want X - I want not X
"unalive" is an empathetic mood.
Unwant could be too familiar, conjuring "unwanted".
> "unalive" is an empathetic mood.
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)?
For me, I am inclined to go for "absence of being wanted" (repelling others through a personal fault I might not be wholly responsible for)
Using my intuition here :)
"I don't care about x" clearly indicates a lack of want but is considered ruder than "I don't want x".
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.
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.
This applies to many different things, depending on the pair of languages you are using.
In Spanish the closes approximation would be "ni mal ni bien" (Not bad not wrong) but I understand the Chinese expression has a strong lean on "not being wrong".
Not so long ago (I'm 50+, Spanish native speaker, and I've spoken English for the past 30 years almost daily) I learnt about "accountability".
Now before I get a barrage of WTFs, the situation is that in Spanish we only have "Responsabilidad" and that accounts for both responsibility and accountability, with a strong lean on responsibility.
So basically we recognise what is it to be responsible of something, but being accountable is seriously diluted.
The implications of this are enormous, and this particular though exercise I'd leave for people that spend more time thinking about these things than I do.
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.
"Jane is special": also rude, right?
That's also a consequence of the euphemism treadmill.
> 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].
[1] https://medium.com/the-global-millennial/why-walmart-failed-...
How do you feel about Austrians :)
https://youtube.com/shorts/pbzNiBps4N0
As an Australian can I just say of this article: yeah nah
One thing I remember from languagelog is that almost all English speakers have a form of "yeah no" and they all think they invented it.
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=30758
Might be Scottish.
Not only did Australians invent it, we also invented Pavlova, Sam Neill, etc.
This is like when Australians tell me they invented drinking coffee.
(Conversely, I've seen Australians who dislike Halloween because they think it's an American invention, but it's also Scottish.)
Yes we also invented drinking coffee.
As a New Zealander, I can say: it's not bad.
I found this article pretty interesting to think about. The ideas it discusses are adjacent to a lot of what I sometimes struggle with in communication.
Meta note: my description was accidentally a great example of what I mean
> Adjacent to (not exactly the same as, but the overlap could be nearly complete) > a lot of (not necessarily all of, but also not explicitly excluding all of) > what I sometimes (not necessarily always, but also not explicitly excluding always)
Considering this more, I think my purpose in this intentional ambiguity is slightly different than the purpose of "not revealing one's true position" as described in the article. Rather, the problem I'm trying to pre-empt is responses that latch onto parts of what I say that aren't perfectly precisely true, but also aren't the point of what I'm trying to communicate.
It's frustrating when I'm trying to communicate a very specific idea or message and the discourse that follows ends up not engaging with that idea, so I've come to make the specific idea clear, and keep any contextual information more ambiguous to encourage focusing on the more well-defined thing.
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.
when the guy is making sentences like "affirmation is often compiled through negation" you know hes just trying to sound clever. the entire premise of the article is bunk, we DO use these patterns in English. He also treats (in that wide eyed western admiration for the orient) the Chinese like a simple monoculture where everyone has the same speech patterns.
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.
Mandatory reference tonthe Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
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"
I really think this is it.
And I suspect that in general more people (and sub cultures) in the US will start using more non-committal language in the coming decades. When repression grows harder it might become more important to not be noticed.
It would be interesing to know if the regional differences in the US that people are talking about here could be traced back to those places having a more homogeneous population with regards to hierarchical religious practices, country of origin, single-ish way to make a living or similar so that it is very important to not be cast out of the group.
Another perspective is also how this phenomenon relates to what I think is called "code switching" that individual persons from oppressed groups often use in contact with an individual from the oppressing group in daily life. Like how BIPOC interact with white people, women with men or young people with adults - where a not insignificant part of the interaction is about keeping the oppressive party calm and content.
----
English is not my language and I'd like to learn better. Please help me by correcting spelling, expressions and idioms.
That's great, I love it.
Let me try it: I think LLMs are advancing my career into the realm of nonexistence.
> 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.
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 British English, rather than "very not bad", you might say "not bad at all", which is higher praise than just "not bad".
Well, if you must…
American Southerners say “ain't half bad”.
"American English" is just a data point and not representative for non-Chinese languages at all.
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.
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
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'.
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:
Nah yeah = yes
Yeah nah = no
Yeah nah yeah = yes
Nah yeah nah = no
...extend outward to your hearts desire
(yes people commonly say all of the above)
The debug log was not without its charms. The article was not bad yet not my favorite.
That's not ideal. I'm not a fan of this.
> In English, this feels bizarre. If something is good, you say:
> Nice
> Great
> Perfect
> Brilliant
Flawless
Spotless
Impeccable (Latin: in (not) + pecare (to sin))
Immaculate (Latin: in (not) + macula (stain))
Unerring
A very interesting article hidden behind a cryptic headline. I almost didn't read it because the title makes no sense to me. That would have been my loss.
In modal logic sense, Chinese is inherently more □ oriented while the language in US is using ◇ more. so in Chinese ¬(□¬A) can be used to represent a possibly concept ♢A
> Language itself is political; it forms a feedback loop that shapes both individual cognition and social order.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was disproved.
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.
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/).
> Why putting the US as "the West"?
This line of thought seems to be extremely common among Americans, and honestly it is quite annoying for the rest of us.
True, but on the other hand they always give themselves away so it's very easy to spot and adjust expectations.
I found this article and discussion valuable anyway.
I would also encourage you to stop using "Americans" as synonymous to "US:er", there are many countries, cultures and peoples in the American continents that are not from the USA and quite a few that geographically exist within it too.
By pointing out that they are US:ers we can help each other to remind ourselves and them that they are not in fact the only version of human that exist.
Fair enough. I am Spanish, so I am very much aware of the situation, I have plenty of friends and acquaintances from LATAM xD.
If I am speaking Spanish I would say "estadounidense" or "gringo" depending on my mood, but I have yet to find a satisfying word in English...
Gringo works in en_US too and imo conveys the feeling we seem to share quite well.
I'll try it out for a bit and see how it feels.
US:er is kinda clunky.
Such lingistic differences of phrasing are the source of much conflict in my opinion.
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.
As a native speaker of both, "he didn't miss" is my adaptation.
Inserting negation to words is a very bad practice.
Instead of saying: "Not cloudy at all today", say "Clear sky today, some scattered clouds though".
In general, always speak in a positive straightforward way, even when you want to confuse someone.
In it, the author contrasts 无 (Wú) and 有 (Yǒu). For some extra context of that specific contrast, here are a couple excerpts from the first poem of the Dao De Jing. (spacing is mine)
无 名天地之始
有 名万物之母
---
故 常无欲，以观其妙
... 常有欲，以观其徼。
---
The duality of 'with' and 'without', existence / non-existence is central and embodied heavily by those 2 words.
I am (slowly) trying to learn Chinese by reading the Dao, or possibly the other way around. I ran across this site (which I have 0 affiliation with) but it seems to be a small and unique site made by someone who just wanted it to exist, which very HN: https://dao-de-jing.com/
ok but Germans also use not bad as their highest praise and are from the west etc.
All these languages!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes#Dutch_and_German
Well, except American, I suppose
not a native chinese speaker, but couldnt this have to do more with requiring qualifiers?
There seems to be a very strong preferrence to adding qualifiers, especially to single character words. And 不 is just one of them
很好 (very good) is strongly preferred to just a plain 好 (good). similarly youre seldom going to just say 錯 差 or 行.
So if you want to say good, and not verrryyy good, youre left with "not bad" 不錯
it still holds for 2 character words. i was told that just saying 無聊 (boring) can have a very rude conotation, though i dont quite understand the subtext (maybe someone can elucidate). But if you say 很無聊 (very boring) it weirdly enough sounds better
unqualified words as far as i understand also often look archaic. tied to the preference for 2 character words vs 1 character words (my guess is bc classical chinese is written and its hard to make out a single character word with tone when speaking)
hopefully a native speaker can weight in...
Now I’m wondering what the Chinese version of intuitionistic logic would look like.
[flagged]
Is identifying a difference between two cultures racism? Or did I miss something?