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

Quoting Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>:

> On Sun, 8 Aug 2004 01:03:08 -0700, Philippe Caquant
> <herodote92@...> wrote:
> > 3/ There are concepts, at last in modern Chinese, that
> > require two or more written characters, and thus
> > usually the same number of syllables.
>
> Often, this is due to sound changes which caused syllables that were
> previously distinct to be homophonous - one strategy to cope with this
> was to use not one syllable but two syllables with the same or with
> similar meanings, which then become used together.
>
> For example, shen1ti3 "body" < shen1 "body" + ti3 "body".
>
> However, I'm not sure whether some words are analyzable like this --
> especially in multi-syllable animal names such as zhi1zhu1 "spider" or
> hu2die2 "butterfly"; I'm not sure whether "zhi1, zhu1, hu2, die2"
> really have a meaning by themselves (though I think character
> dictionaries usually gloss each one individually as "spider" or
> "butterfly" as well). I think that at least in modern Chinese, this
> hu2 is never used except when followed immediately by die2, etc.
FWIW, my encyclopaedia mentions hu2die2 as an example of a bissyllabic morpheme.

                                                     Andreas