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

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> I skimmed a little through my documentation. I have for example
> a small notebook entitled "Writing Chinese - the 214 keys". 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".
That's true, but in the case of these particular 214 characters
(I will use this as a neutral term for the units of Chinese writing)
they have a second role, which I will discuss below.

> 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). 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".
Just so.  Whether to call these dialects or languages is a question:
they are about as different from one another as the Romance languages
are, but unlike the Romance languages, they do not have separate literary
and cultural traditions.

> 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.
In fact they use the same sign to represent both a Chinese borrowing and
its Japanese equivalent, so there are multiple possible pronunciations.
It is as if in writing English we were to use the same Greek letters
to write both the Greek borrowing "sphygnomanometer" and its English
equivalent "blood pressure meter".

The Koreans also (used to) use Chinese characters, but only for words
borrowed from Chinese.

> 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, zhongxuesheng = pupil of a
> lyceum. Clearly, in both these "words", the signs "xue" and "sheng"
> are the same, only the first (word ?  character ? syllable ?) differs.
Just so.  There is no exact English or French equivalent for this: in
Chinese it is called a zi4, which is also applied to a written character.
"Meaningful syllable" would be the nearest equivalent.

> Alas, my manual doesn't say what "xue" and "sheng" respectively mean, 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.
They are not.  Except in foreign borrowings (of which there are some,
both ancient and modern), Chinese hardly has any such syllables.

> I understand "daxuesheng" is a compound of three concepts, "da",
> "xue" and "sheng", whatever they may mean.
"Big", "knowledge", and something I don't recognize.

> Are there single Chinese signs pronounced as two
> or more syllables, this I don't know, but I haven't
> found examples yet
There are not.  There is one character that is pronounced -r, so it
is less than a syllable.

> (BTW, I understand that some complex ideograms, using many strokes,
> also are compounds of simpler ones).
The great majority of all such characters are indeed compound, graphically
speaking, but they still represent a single meaningful syllable.  Most
are devised out of two simpler characters on the principle "it means
something like X, but it sounds something like Y."  The 214 characters
referred to above are the ones used as X (the radical, or signific);
about 1000 simple characters are used as Y (the phonetic).  There are
never as many as 214 characters with the same phonetic, to be sure!

Compounding can also be carried further, using a compound character as
the phonetic and joining it with a new radical.

> 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.
They are separate written signs and separate meaningful syllables.

> 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.  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 march?" (cheap) which act exactly as
> they were one single word (*clindoeil, *bommarch?). In English there
> are too, for sure. Is this similar to "da xue sheng" ?
English and French are organized around words, but Chinese is organized
around meaningful syllables; the concept "word" does exist, but it is
a technical term of linguistics, just as "morpheme" is a technical term
of English or French linguistics.  To the Chinese mind, the distinction
between "rewrite" and "again write" would seem completely arbitrary.

Indeed, the most difficult question about writing Chinese in the Latin
alphabet is where to put the spaces.  Spaces separate words, but what
a word is is often unclear.  For another example, "tou teng" can be
understand as the sentence "[My] head aches" or as the noun "headache",
depending on the surrounding context.

If you want to know what the word "jiguang" ("laser") means in Chinese,
you would ask "Ji [and] guang, these two meaningful-syllables, what
do they mean [together]?"  Ji is "stimulated" and "guang" is "light",
reflecting the etymology of "laser" (an English acronym for "light
amplification by stimulated emission of radiation").

> Anyway, at the moment, I can't see why ideograms should not be called
> ideograms any more.
Because they represent not ideas (which have no language) nor words of
Chinese, but rather meaningful syllables of Chinese.

--
John Cowan <cowan@...> www.ccil.org/~cowan  www.reutershealth.com
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