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

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> I can't help
> thinking that there is an essential difference between
> Chinese and Westerner ways of writing, though I can't really explain
> which one. It just seems obvious, and it's something about concepts
> (meaning).
No, it's about meaningful-syllable writing vs. writing with consonants
and vowels.  Here is a reduction (in the culinary sense) of the history
of writing:

The oldest known writing systems are based on meaningful-syllables;
this has been invented three or four times independently (Sumerian,
Chinese, Mayan for sure; Egyptian possibly).  This system has repeatedly
been simplified, especially when applied to new languages, to a purely
syllabic system (one symbol for each syllable).

Then, a radical new invention was created, just once: the abjad, in
which all syllables starting with the same consonant are written with
a single symbol.  Phoenician is a pure example of this.  The abjad
developed in three directions:

a) adding optional vowel points to distinguish the vowels (Hebrew,
Arabic, Syriac); sometimes the vowel points become required (Yiddish).

b) adding marks to each symbol to cover all vowels except one; these
systems are called "abugidas", and include Ethiopic and all the various
Indic and Southeast Asian systems.

c) reusing some of the consonant symbols to represent vowels: this led to
the Greek alphabet and the descendant alphabets Latin, Gothic, Armenian,
Georgian, Coptic, Cyrillic.

In the meantime, various other systems have been devised more or less
independently: these turn out to always be syllabic.

--
John Cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com  www.ccil.org/~cowan
[R]eversing the apostolic precept to be all things to all men, I usually [before
Darwin] defended the tenability of the received doctrines, when I had to do
with the [evolution]ists; and stood up for the possibility of [evolution] among
the orthodox -- thereby, no doubt, increasing an already current, but quite
undeserved, reputation for needless combativeness.  --T. H. Huxley

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