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

Quoting Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>:

> 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".
Well, true, we can always _redefine_ the meaning of "ideogram" till it fits
Hanzi writing, but then we could make it fit French spelling too. However, the
word was coined to describe a writing system that encodes _ideas_ rather than
speech - hence the very "ideo-" - which is patently not true of Hanzi.

Now, "pictogramme" or "logogramme" aren't exactly fitting either; they best term
to describe Chinese characters is undoubtedly the native _zi_, which, to boot,
is by far the shortest of the lot.

> - 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" ?
This reminds me of an idiosynchracy of my sister's; if asked how she's doing,
she'll answer simply "head-ache" if she's suffering from a such.

                                                          Andreas

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