OT: Re: VMs: Chinese thoughts [ was: languages etc]

["Barbara Barrett" <barbarabarrett@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Barbara Blithered;
> > Under 500, about 450 last time I saw a chart. But don't forget the five
> > tones (so there's really over 2,000 syllables) and the huge number of
> > homophones! You'd think that a syllable would have only 5 meanings but
> > homophones increase this dramatically; MA for example, has over a dozen
> > semantic values!  In romanization the homophones are clarified by
context
> > IF the tone is indicated (Pinyin uses diacritics, Yale uses numbers,
> > Wade-Giles has complex spelling rules).

> Dennis Dotted;
> Here's something I still wonder about.  One always
> hears that each Chinese syllable constitutes many
> homophones, and apparently the Chinese themselves think
> of it this way.  However, Jacques once told me here
> that Chinese syllables in fact combine into groups that
> we Indo-Europeans would consider "words" - despite the
> fact that in Chinese all morphemes are free.  So
> meaning in fact must be determined by context.  You
> might as well say that 'un' , 'like' , and 'ly' are
> separate words, and that in 'unlikely' their individual
> meanings are only determined by context.

Barbara Babbles;

There's a difference between saying Chinese has only so many syllables in
the language and saying it's a monosyllabic language!

The whole Chinese language (mandarin) is composed of a limited number of
syllables
all of which via tone and homophones represent thousands of words in their
own right.
However, even if the 2000 tone syllables had a dozen homophones each
(24,000) that would not account for the 60,000 odd words in the Chinese
vocabulary. Granted there are many compound words, and some syllables are
used as affixes too, but there are many more muti-syllabic words which have
no apparent relationship to any of the meanings of their root syllables and
are true multisyllabic words in the indo-european sense.

The confusion arose because many roman transcription systems, particularly
with compound words would render the syllables separately; eg; "American" as
"mei gwo" rather than "meigwo", but this systems get kind of silly when they
render "neijang" as "nei jang" because the two syllables are a single word
that translates as "which" (as in "neijang hwar" = "Which painting?" ) even
although neijang is a compound of participles that we do not have in English
called Specifier and Measure.

The romanisation systems however were inconsistent in that place names,
regardless of the number of syllables were usually rendered as a single
multisyllabic word!

Nevertheless, even the Chinese themselves argue about their language being
multisyllabic or monosyllabic! And yes the monosyllabic proponents *would*
argue that "un" "like" and "ly" are words in their own right even though two
of them can not be used in isolation!

Barbara


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