OBSERVATIONS

Violent. Of the 227 radicals used to construct all Chinese language, consider how many are war-related. In ascending order, according to the chart of modern radicals: knife, strength, march, to die, knight, lame, dart, surround, bullet, corpse, lance, slice, axe, claws, club, clan, sick, dragon, arrow, spear, bolt, thorn, mortar ...

"... There is, however, one relationship between thought and language which is not myth. That relationship is exemplified in Chinese by the tendency of ordinary Chinese to understate, or to convey meaning indirectly. Not only do the Chinese not share our predilection for expletives of a superlative intent such as "Terrific!" "Great!" "Fantastic!" and the like, but they frequently describe situations through understatement, double negatives, apparent vagueness, euphemism, and allusive language. In negotiation, an agreement to a proposal may be given as wenti buda, which literally means "The problems are not great." This tendency is related to formulaic expressions in Chinese such as bucuo "no error" = "right you are," bushao "not few" = a lot," chabuduo "off not much" = "approximately." Similarly, a denial may take the form of "Perhaps it's not convenient" or "Possibly the time isn't right" for a refusal to respond to a proposal that is seen as impossible to implement. Criticism is often given indirectly, but effectively. Frequently historical allusion is used to describe a situation that the critic does not like, and the reader or hearer is left to infer who in contemporary life is being castigated. The former head of state, Liu Shaoqi, was labeled as "China's Khruschev" in the months before he was publicly identified and brought down. The late premier, Zhou Enlai, was identified with Confucius in the Anti-Confucius/Anti-Lin movement of the early seventies. Naturally, political labels and symbols form a major part of the vocabulary of both criticism and approbation, though it seems that the vocabulary for identifying deviants (right winger, right deviationist, capitalist roader, ultra-leftist, those who use the red flag to oppose the red flag, etc.) is much greater than that for identifying model citizens (as is equally true of the language use of the Christian Church)."

There are about thirteen dialects of Chinese, and all of them can differ from each other as much as English, German, and French differ from each other. However, if a speaker of one dialect were to write down some sentences, a speaker of any other dialect will understand them. Yet if the two tried to communiate orally, they wouldn't understand a thing! So the Chinese writing system actually allows you to communicate simultaneously in 13 different languages! I read somewhere that apparently there has never been anything like this in human history.