Re: NATLANG: Chinese parts of speech (or lack thereof)

My observation is that while it is true that most Chinese characters have a
phonetic component, it is much more practical to learn to read Chinese *as if*
it is ideographic
than to do the same with a language written in a conventional alphabet. This
is particularly true in Classical Chinese, in which a much larger proportion
of the words are monosyllabic.  Since Chinese dictionaries are organized by the
radical  plus stroke count, not by the sound (the radical being usually the
"meaning" rather than the "sound" component of the character) one can look up
and learn the meaning of a Chinese character without the slightest notion of
its pronunciation.  One can also use texts such as the Legge editions of the
Chinese Classics (which give a translation of the Chinese
into English, and the original Chinese characters,but no phonetic
transcription of the Chinese into Roman alphabet) and figure out the meaning of most of
the words (that is, which character represents which word.) At one time, I did
a lot of this; I knew several hundred characters and could read the simpler
and more formulaic passages in the Classics, without knowing the pronunciation
of more than a handful of words. (I  am sadly rusty now.)   In theory, of
course,  one could learn to read English the  same way (that is, knowing the
letters E A T meant "eat" without caring what sound they represented)  but that
would be a very inefficient way to learn an alphabet-script-written language,
whereas it works fairly well for Chinese, if what one wants is a reading knowledge
of traditional texts, not a speaking knowledge of Modern Chinese.
Those early missionaries were mostly trying to master reading Classical
Chinese in order to impress Confucian mandarins, so thinking of the script as
ideographic made
some sense for their purposes.
John Leland

Replies