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

--- John Leland <Lelandconlang@...> wrote:

 One can also use texts such as
> the Legge editions of the
> Chinese Classics (which give a translation of the
> Chinese
> into English, and the original Chinese
> characters,but no phonetic
> transcription of the Chinese into Roman alphabet)
> and figure out the meaning of most of
> the words (that is, which character represents which
> word.) At one time, I did
> a lot of this; I knew several hundred characters and
> could read the simpler
> and more formulaic passages in the Classics, without
> knowing the pronunciation
> of more than a handful of words. (I  am sadly rusty
> now.)   In theory, of
> course,  one could learn to read English the  same
> way (that is, knowing the
> letters E A T meant "eat" without caring what sound
> they represented)  but that
> would be a very inefficient way to learn an
> alphabet-script-written language,
> whereas it works fairly well for Chinese, if what
> one wants is a reading knowledge
> of traditional texts, not a speaking knowledge of
> Modern Chinese.
> Those early missionaries were mostly trying to
> master reading Classical
> Chinese in order to impress Confucian mandarins, so
> thinking of the script as
> ideographic made
> some sense for their purposes.
> John Leland
>
That's how I read French.  I can guess the meaning of
a passagea amd the wrods therein well enough for my
purposes, but I have little concern for how many of
the letters may or may not have anything to do with
the pronunciation.  French still isn't an ideographic
language.

Adam

=====
Idavi avins patorrechi djinerachunis djul Avramu ad ul Davidu ed avins patorrechi
djinerachunis djil deporrachuni in al Baviluña ad ul Cristu.

Machu 1:17