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

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

"Maurizio M. Gavioli" wrote:
> 
> 2) MORPHO-SYNTACTIC 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).

	This is what I thought.  So several characters may
represent one "true" (syntactic, that is) word.  

> In some cases, these are very similar to compound words of most Germanic
> languages (like "sandbox" or "Weltanschauung"); 

	This is what I had believed.  

> but in many cases, they
> have been created to disambiguate mono-syllabic words which, because of the
> modifications of Chinese phonology, became homophonic. It is supposed that
> ancient Chinese had a much higher rate of mono-syllabic words than recent
> or modern Chinese.  

	In practice, though, might these "true/syntactic"
words might be indistinguishable in structure and form
from the ones mentioned above?   

	The point, though, would be that Chinese, written in
some sort of phonemic system, comprises independent
syllables, which in turn combine into larger, syntactic
"words" in the Indo-European sense.  That would be
something conceivably consistent with Voynichese.  Am I
correct about this?

	The statistics aren't entirely consistent with this. 
Stolfi's numbers show similar entropies for Chinese and
Voynichese.  About 250 Voynichese words account for
about 80% of the character count.  (I don't know about
the token count.) However, there are about 8200 total
Voynichese words, which I don't think one would expect
for something like Chinese.  

Dennis

PS: Not relevant to the VMs. Is it true that every
syllable in Chinese can be a free-standing unit?  Bob
Brzustowicz said that not all Chinese morphemes are
free, so this must not be true.
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