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

--- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:

((many interesting informations about Chinese)

Hmmm. I tried to think this over a little. Being no
sinolog, I have to start from the basic concepts, and
my main problem is, as it seems, the correspondance
between the ideograms, or whatever they should be
called, and the spoken "words".

To me, a Chinese character always meant a concept of
some sort, this being the main difference with
alphabetic writing systems, but also with Egyptian
hieroglyphs, where the sign "Ra", for ex, first meant
"Sun", but later also meant simply "syllab [ra]".

I skimmed a little through my documentation. I have
for example a small notebook entitled "Writing Chinese
- the 214 keys". It is entirely in French, I mean,
they just give the Chinese sign and its meaning,
without any reference to pronunciation. Clearly here,
the word "ideogram" is fully justified, since I see
different single drawings, and I learn that such or
such six-stroke sign means, for example, "insect", or
"blood", or "boat", or "tongue".

Then I notice, in another book, that the sign meaning
"man" can be pronounced in completely different ways,
depending on the dialect (Peking Mandarin, Cantonese,
Hakka, Suchow, Fuchow, Amoy, T'ang Min). I can't
really read the phonetic writing that's used here, but
clearly, several of these pronunciations are totally
different and not mutually understandable by Chinese
speaking only their own dialect; but as it seems,
every Chinese able to read will recognize the written
sign for "man".

Then the Japanese also use Chinese signs (kanji), and
very likely pronounce them their own way, having
probably very little to do with any Chinese dialect.

Well, so far, the term of "ideogram" seems fully
justified.

But, in fact, it seems that the Chinese use many
polysyllabic words too, and these polysyllabic words
are represented by several single characters following
each other. For ex (sorry that I use "normal" English
letters): daxuesheng = student, zhongxuesheng = pupil
of a lyceum. Clearly, in both these "words", the signs
"xue" and "sheng" are the same, only the first (word ?
character ? syllable ?) differs. Alas, my manual
doesn't say what "xue" and "sheng" respectively mean,
or maybe it says it, but I don't know where. I can't
believe that these are simply meaning-empty
"syllables", just like "stu" and "dent" in English. I
understand "daxuesheng" is a compound of three
concepts, "da", "xue" and "sheng", whatever they may
mean. Are there single Chinese signs pronounced as two
or more syllables, this I don't know, but I haven't
found examples yet (BTW, I understand that some
complex ideograms, using many strokes, also are
compounds of simpler ones).

So when we talk about "prefixes" or "suffixes" in
Chinese, I suppose they are also separate written (and
conceptual) signs placed before or after a main sign.
To me, this is not the same as in English or French
prefix or suffix, where for ex "rewrite" cannot be
separated into "re" and write", because a word "re"
doesn't exist on its own (though "write again" is
split). Of course I might be wrong here, I'm just
trying to understand the system.

So what is a word in Chinese ? It looks yet more
unclear than in French or English. In French for ex,
you have groups like "clin d'oeil" (a wink) or "bon
marché" (cheap) which act exactly as they were one
single word (*clindoeil, *bommarché). In English there
are too, for sure. Is this similar to "da xue sheng" ?

Anyway, at the moment, I can't see why ideograms
should not be called ideograms any more. I even heard
somewhere that, with the development of Unicode, the
Chinese might get ahead of us (in artificial
intelligence for ex), because one single of their
codes may need 5, 10 or 15 of our own (alphabetic)
codes to express the same thing.



=====
Philippe Caquant

"High thoughts must have high language." (Aristophanes, Frogs)


		
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