Q. And yet one frequently hear people describing Chinese as a totally chaotic language, that its characters are unwieldy and impossible to learn, that its word order and syntax are so loose and illogical that a single Chinese sentence can be translated in several different ways.
A. That's exactly how many people experience Chinese, especially if they don't get beyond a certain learning stage. But this business of chaotic, illogical sentences, isn't this all a bit familiar? Haven't we heard this all before in another context, isn't it just what the French say about English? Let's take the classic example of "a French teacher," which the French quite correctly point out could mean either un maître français or un maître de français. Or the example that Vinay and Darbelnet use, un moteur de propulsion à jet, which we in English hopelessly distort by calling it a "jet propulsion motor," let alone a "jet motor."

According to the French, we are suffering from cumulative linguistic breakdown by omitting these vital charnières or hinge-words such as de and à. But what the Chinese would do is take the whole example one step further and express "jet propulsion motor" in terms of their own language of course, as something like jepromo. They're even more speeded up than we are. And their language allows them to get away with it. One could in fact formulate the general equation that
Chinese : English = English : French.
Q. Then you're saying that Chinese in general, and especially Chinese medical language, is so much more speeded up than English that the translator has to slow it down and provide explanations in order to make things clear. But don't other people in the field recognize this?
A. Unfortunately not. Whether it's speeded up or simply more concise, I'm not sure. Everyone in translation is accustomed to seeing a text in other languages shrink when it turns into English. But characters are intrinsically more concise than words—they take up less room and also take less time to say. English shrinks when it goes into Chinese, Chinese expands—sometimes double or triple—when it becomes English. But not too many people want to admit or even hear this. It has to be linguistic chauvinism, though that's the last thing we need in this field. Chinese Medical Linguistics is so new that there really are no experts yet, but one practitioner who knows some Chinese recently generalized that "because Chinese has 5,000 characters and English has 20,000 words," anything expressed in English is thereby far more valid than anything expressed in Chinese. His figures were totally mistaken, and the whole notion is basically pretty shaky anyway, but this is typical of the blundering and blustering going on among those trying to build a bridge in this field on both the Chinese and Western sides. But the real relationship between the two languages may end up being a bit less favorable to us. Let's suppose for a moment that the Chinese only had 3,OOO characters...
Q. How many does it have?
A. That's a can of worms. About the only thing people agree on is that you need from 2,000 to 3,000 for basic literacy. Beyond that we get into grounds for technical disputes—claims run from 6,000 to 40,000, and even higher...But even with only 3,000, you have to remember a Chinese character is not the same thing as a word. Benjamin Whorf said it best and first—there is no Chinese word for word.

A character can be anything from a piece of a word, sometimes similar to a prefix or suffix, to an unbound particle to a full unmistakable word on its own to a free-standing abbreviation for a two-character phrase, which might be either one word or two words in English, or even an abbreviation for a four character construction (or "aphorism," as they're sometimes known). But let's just assume it's part of a two-character phrase, by far the most frequent construction. Here you have to visualize a table 3,000 characters across and 3,000 characters down, and wherever any of these pairs of characters intersect, you have the possibility for something like a word as we know it. That makes 9,000,000 possible slots for words in Chinese. Let's assume they put only 1% of those to practical use, that still gives them the possibility of 90,000 words, with over eight million slots left potentially free for new meanings as they come along.
This also explains how they have been able to swallow western medical terminology whole—and numerous other western technical vocab-ularies—with only a few predictable bouts of indigestion. But it also explains why we are still just nibbling at the edges of Chinese Medicine in this country and possessed by myriad preconceptions when we try to deal with it. We may be dealing with so vast a network of ideas that we are quite literally unable to conceive of its scope or import. Also, their translations of western medical terms are much more transparent than our originals...

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