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

--- John Cowan, Adam Walker and Ph. D. tried to
explain the neophyt how Chinese works:

So I understood at least 3 main ideas :

1/ Normally, we have an equivalence (1 Chinese written
character = 1 syllable), with very few exceptions. And
every (character = syllable) is usually meaningful,
with few exceptions. Sometimes, the meaning of a
character can be forgotten, although it was clear
sometimes in the past.

2/ A Chinese written character may give both clues to
the meaning and to the pronunciation, and so it is not
only conceptual, as I first thought.

3/ There are concepts, at last in modern Chinese, that
require two or more written characters, and thus
usually the same number of syllables. 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 is no such system as the hyphen we use for ex in
French in some compound words, like "garde-manger"
(larder, pantry; lit. "keeps-food, or "food-keeper"),
or "chauve-souris" (bat, lit. "bald-mouse"; (but other
groups in French don't use it, like in "garde
d'enfants" (nurse, lit. "children-keeper") or "rat
d'eau" (lit. "water rat", some rat living in water
surrounding); that apparently because of the presence
of the preposition "de").

So here are my first, though not final, conclusions
and reflexions :

1/ Chinese IS definitely an essentially ideographic,
and the only reason to refute this is the discussion
about the meaning of "ideographic" or "ideogram". If
the term is not adequate, maybe we could say
"conceptographic", if, as I understand from J.Cowan's
remark, "ideas have no language", an idea would be a
set of concepts linked together by a (human) mind.
Another remark of the same J.Cowan (it is as if we
were to use the same Greek letters to write both
"sphygnomanometer" and "blood pressure meter" (or
French: tensiometre, if I'm not mistaken) conforts me
in my opinion.

2/ Alas, Chinese is NOT purely ideographic, since the
system is polluted by the need of giving a clue to the
pronunciation. So the system is in fact a double,
mixed one. 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 ?
In other words, say that in dialect A, part-of-sign P
means something like "pronounced like [ta]". Users of
dialect A will know what this means. But in dialect B,
[ta] is not at all pronounced like [ta], but like
[ki]. So can we conclude that there is a strict
equivalence [ta] -> [ki] in every word for both
dialects, and users of dialect B will be sure, when
seeing part-of-sign P, that this means "pronounced
like [ki]" ?
Or are they situations where :
[ta](A) -> [ki](B), but also sometimes:
[ta](A) -> [ro](B), and maybe even sometimes:
[ta](A) -> [su](B) ?
In that case, the phonetic part of a sign would prove
to be very inefficient.

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". But it very much seems that, in
the past, some new characters WERE made by combining
simpler ones. So what does that mean ?

- 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 ?

- hypothesis b. On the contrary, making new characters
can only result from an autoritary political decision,
and such characters may appear through one night, when
such a decision will be taken ?

- hypothesis c. Concepts like "siderurgy plant" would
need very complicated characters, with many strokes,
and would be difficult to understand, draw, and
recall, that's why it will always be simpler to use
the present polysyllabic, polygraphemic compounds ?
(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 ?

- other ?

More remarks:

- Chinese seems to be essentially English (or the
contrary ?), since the radical "insect" also can mean
"dragon". Well, what is a dragon-fly in English ?
(French: "libellule", no dragon around)

- the analysis of "da xue sheng" is interesting. As I
understand, "da xue" exists (lit. high learning =
university), and "xue sheng" also exists (lit.hist.
learning born = student, even if "sheng" is no more
understood on its own nowadays). So it seems that "da
xue sheng" is not a mix of "da", "xue" and "sheng" as
I thought, but rather the melting of "da xue" and "xue
sheng" ? Perhaps a literal "English" equivalent could
be high-schol-ar, or high-school-er ? (or
high-learn-er) ?

- 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" ?

Anyway, I clearly have to learn Chinese (just after
Unix, XHTML, XML, JavaScript, Java, MySQL, Zope and
PHP).


=====
Philippe Caquant

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


		
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