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

[Bruce Grant <bgrant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dennis wrote:

> 	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.  
I think you can say that a character maps to a syllable (actually, many 
characters map to the same syllable), but that some words are written 
with a single character and some with two (or maybe more). Also, not 
every character can be a free-standing word. (I remember reading that 
there are at least a few characters which appear only as part of a 
two-character word, never alone.)

Regards,

Bruce


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