Re: NATLANG: Chinese parts of speech (or lack thereof)
| From: | J. 'Mach' Wust <j_mach_wust@...> |
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| Date: | Sunday, August 8, 2004, 15:07 |
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On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 06:57:34 -0700, Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
wrote:
>and so I would be very much in trouble to know that
>there is no stop between "yun", "dong", "yuan" and
>"men", but there is one between "men and "ju" for ex.
>Except if I knew Chinese, of course.
What kind of stop should there be? I don't know any Chinese, but I don't
think that there would be any kind of stop, since there's no kind of 'stop'
between words in English or French or German etc. The separation of words
isn't based on pronunciation, only on tradition (which is partly based on
grammar). It's interesting that the first 'alphabetic' scripts (in the
broadest sense possible) had a word seperator, Phenician and very ancient
Greek, but when the fully alphabetic representation of vowels evolved, the
word separation was lost until the Middle Ages.
g_0ry@_ˆs:
j. 'mach' wust