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

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> So I understood at least 3 main ideas :
The first two are correct.

> 3/ There are concepts, at last in modern Chinese, that require two or
> more written characters, and thus usually the same number of syllables.
This is what we call in English having a hold of the right stick, but
at the wrong end.  There are words (however difficult the definition of
"word" may be) which are polysyllabic and thus must be written with
multiple written characters.

> Knowing where such a concept begins and where it stops, when reading
> Chinese, can only come from, ehm, learning Chinese,
True.

> because sometimes the blank is really a separator and sometimes it
> is not.
In ordinary Chinese writing, no blanks are used.  When writing Chinese
in Latin letters, people can and do disagree on where the blanks should
be placed.

> There is no such system as the hyphen we use for ex in French in some
> compound words,  [...]
Correct.

> 2/ Alas, Chinese is NOT purely ideographic, since the system is polluted
> by the need of giving a clue to the pronunciation.
Indeed, no purely ideographic system of writing exists, unless one counts
Blissymbolics, which was invented very recently and has no underlying
spoken language at all; it is much like the language of modern signs,
with their arrows and stick-figures that mean "Men" and "Women", but
more extensive.

> BTW, I wonder: since part of the character gives information for the
> pronunciation, and since every Chinese dialect, or sub-language, or
> whatever, uses very different pronunciations for the same character,
> sometimes completely incompatible, then I understand that the phonetic
> information remains coherent ?
The phonetic information reflects Middle Chinese times, about 2000 years
ago, when all the dialects were one (or at least much closer together
than they are today).  So it is not coherent in any dialect, though not
completely useless either.

> 3/ It seems (but I may be wrong) that, when modern Chinese needs a new
> (concept / word), like "siderurgy plant" for ex, it doesn't invent a
> new written character, but rather uses a compound of two or several
> characters already existing, thus making a polysyllabic "word".
Again, it is better to work from the spoken language to the written
language rather than vice versa.  In English or French, when a new word is
needed because a new concept has been devised, it is possible that a new
monosyllabic word will be devised, but it is much more likely that the
word will be polysyllabic and derivable from existing words.  The same
is true in Chinese, except with meaningful syllables instead of words.

New characters are still being devised in Chinese, though relatively few,
when it is felt that an existing syllable has been given a new meaning.
A common case is that of names; every racehorse and newly discovered
species of fish will be given a unique written form, even if it is
pronounced the same as some existing one.

> But it very much seems that, in the past, some new characters WERE
> made by combining simpler ones. So what does that mean ?
That Chinese has a certain large stock of meaningful syllables.  At first,
only a few could be written, those for which pictures could be easily
devised, such as "one", "sun", "king".  Later the radical-phonetic
system was invented, and then any meaningful syllable could be written.
That process is now essentially complete (except as explained above).

> - hypothesis a. The process of making new characters needs time,
> much more than a few decades, and such new combined, (monosyllabic)
> characters will appear some day, and replace the present compounds ?
Only if new monosyllabic words arise to replace the existing polysyllabic
ones, which is unlikely.  Indeed, some polysyllabic words have replaced
monosyllabic ones.  The word for "elephant", a single meaningful
syllable, is no longer used alone, for it would be too ambiguous due
to the collapse of phonetic distinctions between Middle and Modern
(Mandarin) Chinese; to speak of an elephant, one uses the compound "big
elephant", in which "big" no longer has semantic force.  Where "elephant"
already appears in a compound, however, it remains, so "elephant bone"
(also two meaningful syllables) = "ivory" is still used.  (It would be
absurd to say "big elephant bone".)  There are many cases of this kind.
The other Chinese languages have not lost so many phonetic distinctions,
and are less polysyllabic.

> (Also, the idea of uttering "siderurgy plant" as just one syllable would
> increase the confusion with already existing meaningful-syllables,
> which are naturally in limited number). So Chinese would become more
> and more polysyllabic, simply because there are more and more concepts
> to handle ?
Yes.  Indeed, there are only about 1400 phonetically distinct syllables
in Mandarin, though many more distinct meaningful-syllables.  The other
Chinese languages have more.

> Perhaps a literal "English" equivalent could be high-schol-ar, or
> high-school-er ? (or high-learn-er) ?
Indeed, "high-schooler" does exist in American English, though it
refers to a student at a secondary school, not a university.

> - the "tou teng" example is very interesting to me. I understand that,
> if I say simply "Tou teng.", without any context, that will normally
> be understood as "My head aches." (or: I have a headache), even if
> "tou teng" simply means "head-ache" ?
Well, "tou" is the noun "head", and "teng" is the verb "ache", and
"touteng" is a verb+object compound, a frequent type of compound noun
in Chinese.  But the same two meaningful-syllables can be seen as a verb
followed by its object, so either interpretation is possible.

> Anyway, I clearly have to learn Chinese (just after Unix, XHTML, XML,
> JavaScript, Java, MySQL, Zope and PHP).
Short of that, Ramsey's book _The Languages of China_ will not teach
you Chinese, but it provides a wealth of accurate information *about*
Chinese, as will DeFrancis's book _Fact and Fantasy_.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com  cowan@ccil.org
SAXParserFactory [is] a hideous, evil monstrosity of a class that should
be hung, shot, beheaded, drawn and quartered, burned at the stake,
buried in unconsecrated ground, dug up, cremated, and the ashes tossed
in the Tiber while the complete cast of Wicked sings "Ding dong, the
witch is dead."  --Elliotte Rusty Harold on xml-dev

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