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

["Maurizio M. Gavioli" <mmg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 11:41 17/03/2004 +0000, Barbara Barrett wrote:
> Barbara Blithers;
> Chinese monosyllabic words are written with two characters per syllable. The
> first character is the phonetic component (the syllable itself) and the
> second is the semantic component.[...]
>
> In multi syllabic words, say a three syllable word,  the syntax can be
> [sound] [sound] [sound] [sense/meaning]  or it can be a group of 3
> sound/sense compounds - these are written with spaces between and give the
> false impression that Chinese is monosyllabic.
>
> As for characters that never appear alone, these are called "radicals"[...]

First of all, I am not a sinologist and I know about characters mainly from 
my studies of Japanese. However, as already noted by R. Brzustowicz, this 
description is not accurate and probably there is a possible confusion 
between two levels.

1) GRAPHIC level: i.e. how characters are written. It is true that the 
great majority of Chinese characters are *composed*. i.e. they can be 
analyzed in two (or more) parts. They are, nevertheless, SINGLE characters, 
i.e. the sign, even if composed, is a single sign, which occupies ONE 
standard character 'box'; in order to fit the various parts in the single 
character box, they are very often squeezed.

So, for instance, the character which means "material, timber,..." is made 
of a left part which has the same shape of the sign for tree and a right 
part which has the same shape of the sign for "ability, talent,..."; each 
part occupies half of the character box and is therefore narrower. (There 
are other ways to combine shapes, but this is not a Chinese course....).

Phonetically, each character is rendered by a single syllable, no matter 
how complex it is graphically.

Usually, drawings corresponding to the constituent parts also exist as 
independent characters; in this case, though, they are DIFFERENT 
characters. So, properly speaking, the "timber" character is not MADE of 
two independent characters "tree" and "ability", but rather it combines in 
a single characters both shapes.

This analysis possibility greatly helps in memorizing characters and allows 
to order them in vocabularies. In each character, one of the elementary 
shapes has been chosen as its 'radical'; according to the most common 
system, 214 'radicals' are used to classify all the characters. So, a 
vocabulary lists the characters grouping them by radical (then other ways 
are used to order all the characters with a same radical, but again this is 
not a CJK course...).

Almost all radicals also exists as independent characters; for instance in 
the above example, the radical is the 'tree' part and a character with this 
same shape exists (but in this case this shape takes the whole 'box' and is 
again a single character in itself).

2) MORPHO-SINTACTIC level (so to speak...). Here we stop to speak about 
characters to start speaking about words. In modern Chinese, many words 
(for instance most of the nouns) are multi-syllabic (usually bi-syllabic). 
This means they are made of several syllables, each written with its own 
character (simple or compound, it does not matter).

In some cases, these are very similar to compound words of most Germanic 
languages (like "sandbox" or "Weltanschauung"); but in many cases, they 
have been created to disambiguate mono-syllabic words which, because of the 
modifications of Chinese phonology, became omophonic. It is supposed that 
ancient Chinese had a much higher rate of mono-syllabic words than recent 
or modern Chinese.

It is important to note that these two levels are COMPLETELY INDEPENDENT. 
One combination, which is purely graphical, has nothing to do with, nor had 
any influence on, the other which is purely lexical.

Hoping I did not confused even more the matter...

        Maurizio



 Maurizio M. Gavioli -  VistaMare  Software
 via San Bernardo 5, I-16030 Pieve Ligure, ITALY
 http://www.vistamaresoft.com/

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