> my favorite has always been 火雞 (fire chicken) for turkey.
Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense.
The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet.
Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.
Turkeys are not native to Asia so it had to be added late to the language, which is why it doesn't make much sense.
The problem with Chinese is that when you have a new thing like turkeys you have to either create a new character, which then people have to memorize forever, or you have to string together sort-of related ideas into a compound word that has only some tangential relation to its parts. When you have thousands of words that are only somewhat related to their parts, the parts lose their meaning and become not much more than a really large and complicated alphabet.
Chinese was over-engineered to work great for maybe a few thousand words, but the world keeps getting bigger and bigger and every new thing makes the Chinese language worse.