Re: Can the Chinese language express more things in XML than can be expressed in English?

I am not an expert, or even a novice. But I think often it is more if a
question of what can be said readily or with more difficulty in each
language.

But I think there is a feature of East Asian (CJK) languages that may kinda
fit what you are asking about.

That is that they all have grammar (particles) to establish the "topic" for
the rest of the sentence and assumed in subsequent sentences. This allows
simplification of subsequent sentences, and even omission of verbs.

For English, imagine most of our sentences were formed by saying "Now let's
talk about X: ..."  Which is kinda how Japanese "wa" operates: you clearly
establish the topic X, then make your statement or question etc about it.

 Or imagine we formed questions using topics: "X is hot; what about Z?"
That is kinda how the Chinese terminal particle "ne" works.

So the difference with Command, Question or Information is that, in a
sense, it sets what can be elided in subsequent exchanges, and how things
will be interpreted.

Merely talking of "sentences" as if they were atomic units of communication
is misleading: each phrase builds on each preceding one, and can be
clarified by each subsequent one, in the exchange.

The relevance for message passing should be clear: the issue of "what can
be elided for efficiency?" on our proticols is to some extent subsumed by
the question "how do we mark up that some information can be implied true
for the rest of the exchange?" (which is not simple REST.)

This might be generalized to the question of how does a message alert the
recipient about which part of its data is of interest or importance? What
has changed?, what should be responded to?, what is A1 or E5?, and so on.

Plus, you might see it as related to the question of, if you are
serialising a relational database into hierarchical elements, which
elements go at the top-level, the second level, etc: this is a question of
setting the "topic" of each major branch, context information by which the
lower level facts are known.


Regards
Rick


On Sat, 11 Feb. 2023, 01:44 Roger L Costello, <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> A couple days ago Michael Kay gave this great post:
> --------------------------------------------------
> Consider three English sentences:
>
> (a) There are tomatoes in the fridge.
>
> (b) Go to the shop and buy more tomatoes.
>
> (c) How many tomatoes are there in the fridge?
>
> English is flexible: A sentence can provide information, give
> instructions, or ask questions.
>
> XML is equally flexible.
> --------------------------------------------------
> I showed that to a colleague and he replied:
>
> > I don't remember details, but there are some things that English
> > can't do well linguistically that e.g., I think Chinese can do.
> > It would be interesting to see if XML can do those things.
>
> Is that true? Is there something that can be expressed in Chinese that is
> not a statement of information, not an instruction, and not a question?
>
> /Roger
>
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