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

On Monday, August 9, 2004, at 07:03 , John Leland wrote:

> My observation is that while it is true that most Chinese characters have
> a
> phonetic component, it is much more practical to learn to read Chinese
> *as if*
> it is ideographic than to do the same with a language written in a
> conventional alphabet.
*as if* is important. Indeed, one would not read Chinese by analyzing each
character for its component parts and, if you had said "it is much more
practical to read Chinese as logographic" I would agree completely.

> This
> is particularly true in Classical Chinese,
Ah, Classical Chinese.

The Classical style is, as I'm sure you know, very formalized and has,
over the centuries, departed more & more from the spoken language, so much
so that it is not suitable for oral communication. One of the main
problems is the high number of homophones. Y.R. Chao gives an example of a
story written entirely in 36 characters, all pronounced _xi_ in one of the
four tones. The story would make no sense at all when read aloud in modern
standard Chinese, but for some who knows Classical Chinese they story
reads:
"The West Creek rhinoceros enjoys romping and playing. Every evening, Xi
Xi [name of person*] takes the rhinoceros to play. Xi Xi meticulously
practises washing the rhinoceros. The rhinoceros sucks the creek and
playfully attacks Xi. Laughing, Xi Xi hopes to stop [the rhinoceros]
playing. Too bad - the rhinoceros, neighing, enjoys attacking Xi."

*Xi Xi are both pronounced on first tone, but are written with different
characters. The first 'Xi' is the surname & the second the given name.

Whether such an extreme extension of language is still properly called
'language' is debatable (for a discussion of this, see Y.R. Chao "Language
and Symbolic Systems", pages 120, 121).

[snip]
> 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)
One can indeed. In fact I once heard of a person who had taught himself to
read French and could both read and write French fluently, but hadn't a
clue how it was pronounced. He presumably articulated it in his mind à la
anglaise  ;)

More to the point, perhaps, is that not only have some theorists
maintained that, as our spelling is so choatic, english is better read
logographically, but schoolkids in the UK, at least, were actually taught
reading this way two or three decades ago in the 'look-and-say' method. As
you observe below, it's not the most efficient approach in an
alphabetically written language, even in one as irregular as English.

> 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.
Granted - but you're just memorizing a load of logograms and presumably,
if you refer to particular logogram, would give it an English
pronunciation.

> 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.
I don't dispute that for one moment. What I do take issue with is the
unwarranted notion that the same applies to living, spoken Chinese.

Most people now realize the pre-Champollion notions about Egyptian
Hieroglyphics were false. Yet, as I've pointed out, we are in a position
to have a far clearer understanding of written Chinese (after all, some
quarter of the world's population currently use the language - and there
are things about ancient Egyptian that we'll probably never know without
time-travel), yet 17th century notions regarding the Chinese script still
hold sway in some quarters.

There's nowt as queer as folk.

Ray
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"A mind which thinks at its own expense will always
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