On Sat, 4 Oct 2008, Cheng-Zhong Su wrote:

> [trim]


> I have explained it by the number. Supposing if English has 2600 letters
> instead 26 letters, then all the mistakes would disappeared.

What on God's green earth does this even mean?  It sounds like
nonsense.

>                                                              Most of the
> everyday used words could be as short as one letter.

Words consist of sounds, not letters.  Letters are representations,
with varying degrees of accurancy, of sounds.

>                                                      But for the moment,
> English has 400 different sounds;

False.  My dialect of General American English has forty phonemic
sounds (counting some diphthongs and affricates as phonemic.)  I don't
think that there is any language on earth that has 400 different
sounds.  If I recall correctly from my reading, the top is about sixty
or seventy sounds (phonemes).

>                                   on the other hand, any developed language
> has at least few hundred thousand words.

Some may have more, and some may have fewer.  I once took a class in
which the professor said that classical Latin had about twenty thousand
words.

> [...]
>                                                                     The
> Mandarin has 1200 different sounds 1,200x1,200 makes 1,440,000 combinations
> it is quite enough for the vocabulary so the Chinese people familiar words
> between one sound (syllable) and two sounds (syllable).

I am not an expert on Chinese languages, but I will comfortably flatly
deny that Mandarin has 1200 different sounds.  It might have that many
syllables (I don't know), but sounds and syllables are different
things.  I have read an estimate that English has almost 8000 different
syllables, but it still has only forty or so sounds (depending on
dialect).

-- 
Paul Bartlett