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

--- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...> wrote:

> > Knowing where
> > such a concept begins and where it stops, when
> reading
> > Chinese, can only come from, ehm, learning
> Chinese,
> > because sometimes the blank is really a separator
> and
> > sometimes it is not.
>
> There are no blanks! Chinese is usually written in
> one big string of
> characters, with no spaces. Each character is
> centred inside an
> invisible square box and takes up the same amount of
> space; ones with
> more strokes are simply more cramped, and if you put
> two existing
> characters side by side to form a new one, they
> become squashed in the
> horizontal direction; similarly with two characters
> one above the
> other.
>
I said it in a confusing way. As I see from a little
Chinese manual (printed in Peking, 1976) for
English-speaking beginners, there seems to be quite a
lot of compound words, probably more than simple ones.
This books presents the Chinese characters on an
horizontal line, from left to right, and the next line
contains the literal English translation (a more
elaborated translation comes later). Well, the
typography is so, that there are narrow blanks between
parts of a compound word, and brighter blanks between
words. But clearly this is only for foreign students,
and will not occur in a real Chinese book or
newspaper. So we have for example (skipping tonal and
phonetic considerations, 'XXX' representing Chinese
characters) :

XXX XXX    XXX XXX,
Biaoyan    kaishi,
Exhibition started,

XXX XXX XXX XXX  XXX XXX  XXX XXX  XX  XXX XXX...
yundongyuanmen   juzhe    meili    de  huashu...
sportspeople     holding  beautiful -  bouquets...

but I guess that in a Chinese paper I would read
something like :
Biao yan kai shi, yun dong yuan men ju zhe mei li de
hua shu...

and so I would be very much in trouble to know that
there is no stop between "yun", "dong", "yuan" and
"men", but there is one between "men and "ju" for ex.
Except if I knew Chinese, of course.

=====
Philippe Caquant

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


	
		
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