A little too many!

Leonard Wong sits next to me on the structuring desk. Like every other male of his race - he's got those enigmatic thin eyes, and the second-long smile that accompanies every sentence. But he's a nice guy, I decide. After all, he had expressed involuntary surprise at hearing that I'm between years at my institute where I'm doing MBA...and that to most of our kind is a shot in the arm.

So back to Mr. Wong. Lunchtime is just over and I'm at the pantry again, looking around for something to wash down the footlong sub with. He asks me, Subway? Again? I respond with my usual "veggie" lament and the fact that the Chinese didn't actually think of us coming in 5000 years later when they drew the boundaries of their country. And thus the conversation goes to China.

ME: So you're Chinese?

LW: No, I'm Malay. My family's back in Malaysia. I get to see them once or twice a year only.

ME: Wow. That must be some life. (inside, I'm like shrieking away)

LW: Haha

ME: Hey just tell me the difference between the Yuan and Renminbi?

LW: It's the same thing. But in Chinese, Renminbi means money of the people, which is like a 3 letter word. Yuan, on the other hand, is like single letter in our alphabet.

ME: How do you know all that? You're Malay right? You wouldn't know Chinese...

LW: No no. I'm Malaysian Chinese. So that technically means that my ancestors would have been Chinese, though that really seems distant as I graduated from London.

ME: Hey by the way how many letters do you guys have in your alphabet? There must be like a zillion of them!!!

LW: Ya - too many.

ME: So by what age does a kid learn all this stuff?

LW: I don't know. You kind of pick up stuff on your own - and when you're a kid there's pretty much nothing else to do.

ME: (why didn't I think of that?) So what - there'll be like 1000 letters? Wildly guessing?

LW: Way,way more than that. (he googles, then wiki's) See - there are about 56000 characters in the Chinese language. But then we hardly use more than 20000 of them, so that's a reasonable approximation.

ME : So it must take like very little words to say anything in Chinese, and I quote that on my hotel's address card, the English address is like a whole 2 lines, whereas the Chinese address is in 1 word!!

LW: That's common. But I don't know how true that is elsewhere. 'Cos I've seen Chinese translations of English books, and they're almost the same thickness.

ME: (deciding it's time to show off my math skills) So let's assume that on an average every word in Chinese has like 5 letters, each of these could be one of those 20000 letters, or a blank, which would account for most of the less-than-5-letter-words. So that's like 20001^5 words which would be an upper bound...and the same calculations for English give me 27^10, assuming that on an average, English words have 10 letters. No where close, is it? So that means the languages must have a major disconnect in their vocabulary. That is, something that takes very little time to say in English, must take a lot of verbosity to express in Chinese, and vice versa. Maybe that's because the language is so specific about every minute detail, that every shade of meaning is a different word altogether.

LW: Ya, that's true. We read English translations of Chinese material, and it makes no sense...and then we read the original...and we're like Wow, now it makes sense..

<there are titbits of this conversation, not really important, that I don't remember, so I'm not going to type some things out. Our conversation trails off into nothingness, with me getting back to going through interest rate swaps, and Wong going back to his Bloomberg terminal>

Interesting conversation at an I-bank, I must say ! Be back with more.