Language Trivia - Inflectional Meaning
There are three types of languages in the world:
- Alphabetic (ie; English, French)
- Syllabic (ie; Japanese, Tagalog)
- Logographic (ie; Chinese)
Japanese is a syllabic language that uses “inflection” (one type anyway, there is another that we use in English with suffixes) in addition to spelling to indicate meaning. It’s one of the hardest languages to acquire, some say, because one word, for example “ma,” might mean mother in one inflection and something quite pofane in another. Inflections are a form of pronunciation emphasizing the sound low, med, or high. Sound complicated? Language can be. But there’s a lot that all languages share in common. For example: they all assign meaning to one or to a combination of symbols. More on the Japanese language below:
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