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

Trebor Jung scripsit:

> Not too long ago, there was a discussion here in which Philippe aledged
> Chinese has no distinction between noun and verb and Ray called the
> idea an urban myth. But what I understood before this exchange was
> that Philippe was correct. Could someone please enlighten me?
Chinese has a firm, not to say rigid, distinction between nouns and
verbs.  Without that distinction, it would be ridiculously hard to
parse Chinese sentences, especially serial-verb constructions like
N1 V1 N2 V2 N3, which mean things like "N1 V1 N2, which V2 N3".
Morphologically (yes, Chinese has morphology), nouns get noun suffixes,
some of which are meaningful and some aren't; verbs get verb clitics.

--
John Cowan  cowan@ccil.org  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
The penguin geeks is happy / As under the waves they lark
The closed-source geeks ain't happy / They sad cause they in the dark
But geeks in the dark is lucky / They in for a worser treat
One day when the Borg go belly-up / Guess who wind up on the street.

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