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

On Saturday, August 7, 2004, at 01:13 , Trebor Jung wrote:

> Not too long ago, there was a discussion here in which Philippe aledged
> Chinese has no distinction between noun and verb and Ray called the idea
> an
> urban myth. But what I understood before this exchange was that Philippe
> was
> correct. Could someone please enlighten me?
Chinese has no distinction between noun and verb *in exactly the same way
as English*.
Cf.
1. The dog is chewing its bone.
2. This indiscretion will dog you for years to come.

We might also say that English doesn't distinguish between nouns, verbs,
adjectives or adverbs.
Cf.
3. Did you go to the dog show yesterday?
4. Gosh, you look dog-tired.

Indeed, a very great number of words (all?) in English can be used as a
noun or as a verb. But no one AFAIK seriously maintains that English doesn'
t have parts of speech or that English doesn't distinguish between verbs
and nouns. Most people would say that:
- in 1 'dog' is a noun;
- in 2 'dog' is a verb;
- in 3 'dog' is an adjective;
- in 4 'dog' is an adverb.

So why has the 'no parts of speech' myth arisen with Chinese? The writing
system undoubtedly played a part. When Chinese script became known to
Europeans in the 16th & 17th cent. it was widely thought that each symbol
represented a semantic concept, hence the terms 'ideogram' and 'ideograph'
  to denote a symbol which represented not a word or sound, but a concept
or idea. Ideograms are, in fact, widely used in western culture today, e.g.
  mathematical symbols, the Mars-symbol to denote 'male' and the
Venus-symbol to denote 'female' etc.

But - I quote from the entry on 'ideography' in "The Blackwell
Encyclopedia of Writing Systems" by Florian Coulmas, Professor of
Sociolinguistics at Chuo University, Tokyo - "Most modern scholars agree
that no writing ever worked in this way, but in former times writing
systems such as Egyptian hieroglyphics and Chinese were thought to be
ideographic ....."

The misconception about Egyptian hieroglyphics is due to Greeks of the
hellenistic period (who ought to have known better) and survived until
Champollion's spectacular decipherment in the first quarter of the 19th
century. The misconception about Chinese script is due to reports by early
Christian missionary in the 17th cent. But although we are in a position
to know far more about the Chinese script than ancient Egyptian, the myth
is still survives in some quarters.

As the Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao observed:
"It is making a false dichotomy to say that Chinese writing represents
meaning and that syllabic and alphabetc writing represents sound. The
written symbol MAN* represents as much the spoken word _jén_  as the
meaning 'man', the written form _man_ represents as much the meaning
'human being' as the sound [mæn]. The important difference is that of the
size and variety of units."
[Y.R. Chao, "Language and Symbolic Symbols"]

* MAN is not, of course, what Y.R. Chao wrote. He wrote the Chinese symbol
for _jén_ (Pinyin _rén_; Wade-Giles _jen2_); but I can't do that ASCII
     :-)

Chinese script is morphosyllabic.

But, I digress. Let's return from the related 'Chinese ideography' myth to
the 'Chinese has no parts of speech' myth.
 =========================================================================
On Saturday, August 7, 2004, at 03:35 , John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
> Chinese has a firm, not to say rigid, distinction between nouns and
> verbs.
It does, indeed.

> Without that distinction, it would be ridiculously hard to
> parse Chinese sentences, especially serial-verb constructions like
> N1 V1 N2 V2 N3, which mean things like "N1 V1 N2, which V2 N3".
> Morphologically (yes, Chinese has morphology), nouns get noun suffixes,
> some of which are meaningful and some aren't; verbs get verb clitics.
Spot on, except that there are also verb suffixes.
 ========================================================================
On Saturday, August 7, 2004, at 07:13 , Philippe Caquant, in reply to John
Cowan, wrote:
[snip]

> The first argument you give refers to word order. I
> may be mistaken, but I understand it somehow like: "if
> you use word W in place P, that you have to understand
> it like a noun, and if you use the same W in place P',
> than it should be understood like a verb. Which would
> be very close to what I meant.
But that is *precisely* what happens in English! Look at my 'dog' examples.
  Try these:
The flower show was a disaster. [show - noun]
I will show her the flowers.    [show - verb]

The ship will arrive tomorrow.  [ship - noun]
They will ship it in two days time. [ship - verb]

He gave the ball a hefty kick.    [kick - noun]
Did he kick the ball through the window?  [kick - verb]

This play was written by Shakespear.    [play - noun]
My friend will play the part of Hamlet. [play - verb]

etc,. etc., etc. English is just full of such examples. Does this mean
that English does not distinguish between nouns and verbs?

> I'm not too sure about the secund. Are these
> "suffixes" or "clitics" separate words added to the
> nouns / verbs ?
No - they are separate _morphemes_, as in any other language, including
French & English.

> Or are they included ?
Included? Do you mean 'infixes'? As it happens, they do exist, but most
affixes are either prefixes or suffixes, as they are in English & French.

> How is it
> exactly realized, both in oral and written form ?
Verbs, with the exception of _yŏu_ (have, there is) whose negative is
_méiyŏu_, may have the negative prefix (or proclitic) _bù_ ~ _bú_, e.g.
_bùhăo (not to be nice), _bùzŏu_ (not to go), but nouns cannot have this
prefix, e.g. *bùjīntiān (not today) is ungrammatical.

Verbs can take suffixes which show aspect, e.g. zŏule (to have come).

An interesting class of verb are the so-called 'resultive verbs'. The are
characterized being able to be modified by the infixes -de- and -bu-, e.g.
zuòwán (to finish [doing something]) ~ zuòdewán (to be able to finish) ~
zuòbuwán (to be unable to finish)
chĪbăo (to eat [one's] fill) ~ chĪdebăo (to be able to eat [one's] fill) ~
chĪbubăo (to be unable to eat [one's] fill)

Nouns may be distinguished from verbs in that nouns may be prefixed by a
determiner + classifier, a numeral + clasifier, or determiner + numeral +
classifer, e.g.
nà-ge péngyou = that friend/ those friends
liăng-ge péngyou = two friends
nà liăng-ge péngyou = those two friends

Although _péngyou_ may mean 'friend' or 'friend' according to context, we
may, if necessary, add the plural suffix -men if plurality is not
otherwise indicated, e.g. péngyoumen. (We cannot add -men to verbs).

But a proper discussion of parts of speech in Chinese would be too long
for an email. I'll leave it there. Suffice it to say that my "Modern
Chinese: A Basic Course" published by the Faculty of Beijing (Peking)
University is most certainly of the opinion that Chinese has both verbs
and nouns.

BTW I have shown the examples in writing, using the official Chinese
Pinyin system (the traditional characters are a little tricky in emails).
As for pronunciation, the system is (more or less) phonemic & a simple
search should easily find the rules.

Ray
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