VMs: Re: Paradigms Regained

[Jacques Guy <jguy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

15/10/02 03:06:28, Rene Zandbergen <r_zandbergen@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Also that is not without problems. There are quite
>a number of VMs words which seem really too long to
>be mono-syllabic, but then again, mono-syllabic
>languages can (and do) have loan words which are
>polysyllabic.

Not necessarily loanwords. Many Chinese words are
polysyllabic, formed from monosyllabic _roots_.
For instance she4hui4 "society" is form of she4 and
hui4, but only hui4 can be used as a word ("meeting,
to meet"). Others, like hu2li "fox", are truly
disyllabic. Hu2 alone means "lake" (and is written
differently from the hu2 of hu2li) and li means
"in" (and, again, is written differently from the
li of hu2li). In this case, we cannot even say
that "fox" hu2li is made of two roots, because 
those "roots" occur in no other word.