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> Chinese: wǒ bú huì shuō zhōnɡ wén.
> Japanese: nihongo ga dekimasen.
> German: Ich spreche nicht Deutsch.
> Spanish: No hablo español.

— A curated list of examples of the liar's paradox adjacent sentence "I do not speak [this language]" by mathematician Joel David Hamkins

Chinese is SVO much like English, so wǒ, huì shuō, zhōnɡ wén are meant to stand for I, speak, Chinese with (不,bú) being the negation of “no/not.”

Indeed, 「我不會說中文。」is the output of Google Translate when you ask for a translation of “I do not speak Chinese.” Personally, I find 中文 easier to write than to communicate orally in isolation. Because Chinese is properly written with a brush, it is not the shape of the letters but the high-dimensional space of brush movements that connects the printed, semi-cursive, and full-cursive forms, so stroke order is vitally important.

Chinese is a pitched language which means the rising and falling of the tone of each syllable is vital to spoken communication. Mandarin here has four main syllabic pitches: high, falling, rising, and falling and then rising. Thus the markers on the vowels are pitch marks, not stress accents.

But there are a lot of different characters. So there are same-tone homophones like 財 (fortune, wealth, assets) and 才 (talents). The right side of the first character resembles the second — not a coincidence, but also not a reliable predictor of pronunciation.

Due to cultural norms, 我愛你。(wǒ ài nǐ, I love you), while a perfectly grammatical sentence is culturally unacceptable to speak aloud to someone in public. Thus in Chinese it is possible to speak something perfectly but also completely wrong. ⇒⇐

Therefore, Chinese does not exist. □

Q.E.D. #Math #Paradox #Chinese