Intensive

Today, I have spent more or less seven hours listening to Chinese non-stop. For some reason that escapes me, I am probably sick in the head, I went to a meeting of several taiwanese astronomers that are preparing a big proposal of several projects to ask the taiwanese government for money to fund them. It has been very interesting to see the projects they are working on, or about to start, and the amount of money they need, or ask for. And it is a lot of money. But with the exception of a talk, that I suspect has been in English because the speaker is a Cantonese-speaker, everything has been in Mandarin. Fortunately, the slides of most of the talks were in English, it would have been impossible for me otherwise.

Anyway, it was very interesting too. Aside from being able to read some chinese characters, I could understand a word now and then, even some simple sentences; I could tell how different accents or ways of speaking allowed me to make out more sounds —maybe not so many words— from one speaker to another; and the best was the large quantity of English words they put in the mix. Some, as everywhere, are technical words. I have seen that many times since I started doing this Astronomy thing, even if I do not agree with it, because I think that you can find as good a word in any language as English does. But I am wondering since six months ago, why they use so many English words when Chinese probably has an equivalent word since centuries. I have heard some spectacular examples today. And I do not think it is because I was there.