Written Chinese

Grammar Highly inflected languages such as Latin and Russian make scores of additions to, or changes in, the sound of a word to indicate grammatical differences; modern Chinese, on the other hand, never changes, and seldom adds, sounds for such purposes. Because no inflection of nouns exists to show whether they are, for example, subject or object, and no indication is given that verbs, nouns, and adjectives agree with each other in number and case, word order is even more important than it is in English as an indicator of the relation of words to one another in the sentence. In broad outline, Chinese word order is quite like that of English: subject-verb-object, modifier-modified. On closer inspection, the grammar reveals greater differences between the languages.

In English the subject is always the performer of an action, but in Chinese it is more often simply a topic set forth to be followed by a comment. An example is Nei-ke shu yezi hen da, literally "(As for) that tree, leaves very big," that is, "that tree has very big leaves." Further grammatical characteristics of Chinese are that, in general, verb tense is not expressed; and for lack of an equivalent of the English relative clause, quite complicated modifier phrases may precede the term modified. Jianle shu jiu mai de neige ren, "Having-seen-book-immediately-buy-is-that-man," is translated as "That man who instantly buys every book he sees."