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

--- Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...> wrote:

> --- Ray Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote:
>
> ((many interesting informations about Chinese)
>
> Hmmm. I tried to think this over a little. Being no
> sinolog, I have to start from the basic concepts,
> and
> my main problem is, as it seems, the correspondance
> between the ideograms, or whatever they should be
> called, and the spoken "words".
>
> To me, a Chinese character always meant a concept of
> some sort, this being the main difference with
> alphabetic writing systems, but also with Egyptian
> hieroglyphs, where the sign "Ra", for ex, first
> meant
> "Sun", but later also meant simply "syllab [ra]".
>
What Ray was explaining was that you've got the wrong
idea.  chinese characters are used in exactly the same
way to represent nothing but sounds when
transliterating foreign words and names.

> I skimmed a little through my documentation. I have
> for example a small notebook entitled "Writing
> Chinese
> - the 214 keys".
In English that would probably be the 214 "radicals"
and those, for the most part, are not characters by
themselves, but the "meaning keys" to the characters
which they help to build.  Most Chinese characters
consist of two parts.  The one (usually on the left or
top, but sometimes on the bottom or middle or
surrounding) give a vague clue to the meaning.  (Eg. a
character with the "insect" radical will probably be
some kind of insect [though I know a couple with that
radical that are types of dragon]).  The other part of
the characher gives a clue to the pronunciation (at
the time it was composed and in the dialect of the
composer).

It is entirely in French, I mean,
> they just give the Chinese sign and its meaning,
> without any reference to pronunciation. Clearly
> here,
> the word "ideogram" is fully justified, since I see
> different single drawings, and I learn that such or
> such six-stroke sign means, for example, "insect",
> or
> "blood", or "boat", or "tongue".
>
No, because if it is anything like the plethora of
similar books in English it is VERY misleading about
what is or is not a word in Chinese.  A "word" and a
"character" are NOT the same thing.

> Then I notice, in another book, that the sign
> meaning
> "man" can be pronounced in completely different
> ways,
> depending on the dialect (Peking Mandarin,
> Cantonese,
> Hakka, Suchow, Fuchow, Amoy, T'ang Min).
So?

I can't
> really read the phonetic writing that's used here,
> but
> clearly, several of these pronunciations are totally
> different and not mutually understandable by Chinese
> speaking only their own dialect; but as it seems,
> every Chinese able to read will recognize the
> written
> sign for "man".
>
Yes, but we have divergent pronunciations attached to
the same groupings of letters in various English
dialects too.  that doesn't mean that English writing
is ideograms.

> Then the Japanese also use Chinese signs (kanji),
> and
> very likely pronounce them their own way, having
> probably very little to do with any Chinese dialect.
>
They also borrow Latin letters for occasional uses as
do the Chinese.  Both groups give their own
pronunciations to these too.  That doesn't make the
letters "c" and "d" in CD ideograms.

> Well, so far, the term of "ideogram" seems fully
> justified.
>
I assure you it isn't.

> But, in fact, it seems that the Chinese use many
> polysyllabic words too, and these polysyllabic words
> are represented by several single characters
> following
> each other. For ex (sorry that I use "normal"
> English
> letters): daxuesheng = student,
University student.

zhongxuesheng =
> pupil
> of a lyceum.
Junior high or highschool student.

Clearly, in both these "words", the
> signs
> "xue" and "sheng" are the same, only the first (word
> ?
> character ? syllable ?) differs. Alas, my manual
> doesn't say what "xue" and "sheng" respectively
> mean,
Xueshen means student.  Da means "big, great, large"
and is part of the word "daxue" which means
university.  Zhong means "middle" and is part of the
word "zhongxue" which means (junior)high school.
Elementary school is "xiaoxue".

Xue means "study, learning" and sheng means "born".
It is not possible to decompose the word in a way that
is meaningful today.  I promise you that modern-day
Chinese will tell you that the word is "xuesheng" and
the parts have no meaning.  Well, historically they
do, but in the minds of today's Chinese users the two
characters appearing together make an entirely new
meaning.

> or maybe it says it, but I don't know where. I can't
> believe that these are simply meaning-empty
> "syllables", just like "stu" and "dent" in English.
> I
> understand "daxuesheng" is a compound of three
> concepts, "da", "xue" and "sheng",
No.  It is a compound of TWO concepts --  daxue
(university) and xuesheng (student).  Each of these
were historically compounded of two concepts which are
no longer divisible in the minds of native users of
the language.

whatever they may
> mean. Are there single Chinese signs pronounced as
> two
> or more syllables, this I don't know, but I haven't
> found examples yet
There is only one.  The character you often see on
Chinese wedding announcements and other things
associated with weddings and also the new year.  It is
a special character composed of two of the character
"xi" meaning happiness, joy and is pronounced
"shuangxi" -- double happiness.

(BTW, I understand that some
> complex ideograms, using many strokes, also are
> compounds of simpler ones).
>
> So when we talk about "prefixes" or "suffixes" in
> Chinese, I suppose they are also separate written
> (and
> conceptual) signs placed before or after a main
> sign.
Seperate written characters, but conceptually they are
no more separate than "re-" or "dis-" or "-ment" or
"-ing" in English.  Ask a Chinese person what one of
these "prefixes" mean and they'll tell you "they don't
mean any thing.  You have to put them with another
word and they make the meaning change.  It's very hard
to explain."

> To me, this is not the same as in English or French
> prefix or suffix, where for ex "rewrite" cannot be
> separated into "re" and write", because a word "re"
> doesn't exist on its own (though "write again" is
> split). Of course I might be wrong here, I'm just
> trying to understand the system.
>
The only difference is the writting system.  In fact,
when you use Hanyu pinyin to write Chinese these
"words" are written *exactly* like Western affixes.

> So what is a word in Chinese ? It looks yet more
> unclear than in French or English. In French for ex,
> you have groups like "clin d'oeil" (a wink) or "bon
> marché" (cheap) which act exactly as they were one
> single word (*clindoeil, *bommarché). In English
> there
> are too, for sure. Is this similar to "da xue sheng"
> ?
Similar? Yes, I think so.  I don't speak French so I
can't be sure.  But if "clin d'oeil" means "wink"
doesn't that mean that French is ideographic.  after
all we know that French spelling has no connection
with pronunciation and we have borrowed hundreds of
French spellings into English while pronouncing them
with Engligh pronunciations.

>
> Anyway, at the moment, I can't see why ideograms
> should not be called ideograms any more. I even
> heard
> somewhere that, with the development of Unicode, the
> Chinese might get ahead of us (in artificial
> intelligence for ex), because one single of their
> codes may need 5, 10 or 15 of our own (alphabetic)
> codes to express the same thing.
>
Sorry, for the sarcasm above.  Hope I haven't been too
technical in my explinations for you.

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

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