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

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.

> Knowing where
> such a concept begins and where it stops, when reading
> Chinese, can only come from, ehm, learning Chinese,
> because sometimes the blank is really a separator and
> sometimes it is not.
There are no blanks! Chinese is usually written in one big string of
characters, with no spaces. Each character is centred inside an
invisible square box and takes up the same amount of space; ones with
more strokes are simply more cramped, and if you put two existing
characters side by side to form a new one, they become squashed in the
horizontal direction; similarly with two characters one above the
other.

> There is no such system as the hyphen we use for ex in
> French in some compound words
*nods*

> 1/ Chinese IS definitely an essentially ideographic,
> and the only reason to refute this is the discussion
> about the meaning of "ideographic" or "ideogram". If
> the term is not adequate, maybe we could say
> "conceptographic"
I think the word I saw once to describe Chinese is "morphographic",
since each character represents a morpheme of the Chinese language.

> 2/ Alas, Chinese is NOT purely ideographic, since the
> system is polluted by the need of giving a clue to the
> pronunciation.
NB not all characters provide a clue to the pronunciation -- some are
purely ideographic (e.g. the character for "sun" looks a bit like a
sun, that for "tree" like a tree, etc.).

However, most characters (on the order of 85%?) are of the
signific+phonetic form.

> BTW, I wonder: since part of the character
> gives information for the pronunciation, and since
> every Chinese dialect, or sub-language, or whatever,
> uses very different pronunciations for the same
> character, sometimes completely incompatible, then I
> understand that the phonetic information remains
> coherent ?
To some extent. After all, sound changes are usually regular.

> In other words, say that in dialect A, part-of-sign P
> means something like "pronounced like [ta]". Users of
> dialect A will know what this means. But in dialect B,
> [ta] is not at all pronounced like [ta], but like
> [ki]. So can we conclude that there is a strict
> equivalence [ta] -> [ki] in every word for both
> dialects, and users of dialect B will be sure, when
> seeing part-of-sign P, that this means "pronounced
> like [ki]" ?
No, there is no such strict equivalence.

> Or are they situations where :
> [ta](A) -> [ki](B), but also sometimes:
> [ta](A) -> [ro](B), and maybe even sometimes:
> [ta](A) -> [su](B) ?
Though not quite as bad as that.

However, you might have [tik](A) -> [chi](B) or [ti](B) or [che](B) or
[sing](B)  (to pick random examples; I don't think this particular set
occurs).

Bear in mind that the pronunciation parts were chosen many hundreds of
years ago, and that even in the current standard, Mandarin, the
pronunciations have diverged -- so the phonetic part only provides a
clue, and often it can only tell "well, this character is probably
pronounced either 'ding' or 'qi' or 'jie'". But the set of likely
readings for a given phonetic is usually reasonably small.

> In that case, the phonetic part of a sign would prove
> to be very inefficient.
It's better than nothing.

> 3/ It seems (but I may be wrong) that, when modern
> Chinese needs a new (concept / word), like "siderurgy
> plant" for ex, it doesn't invent a new written
> character, but rather uses a compound of two or
> several characters already existing, thus making a
> polysyllabic "word".
Caution! Writing represents speech, not vice versa.

When modern Chinese needs a new concept, it picks a word, then decides
how to write it.

(In your example, it would probably use something like
"iron-process-work-place".)

> - hypothesis a. The process of making new characters
> needs time, much more than a few decades, and such new
> combined, (monosyllabic) characters will appear some
> day, and replace the present compounds ?
I consider this unlikely. Especially since modern Chinese isn't at the
"one word = one syllable" stage anyway, so I don't think there's a
push for more monosyllabic words to "keep the language pure" or
something.

> - hypothesis b. On the contrary, making new characters
> can only result from an autoritary political decision,
> and such characters may appear through one night, when
> such a decision will be taken ?
I imagine so. New characters are created occasionally.

For example, I believe that all chemical elements have a
single-character name, even those which weren't known when most
characters were invented.

Usually, these are formed from a signific - typically "metal" for
metals, "gas" for gasses, and "stone" for non-metals - plus a phonetic
which represents the pronunciation of the element in the language they
borrowed the name from. The (one-syllable) Chinese name of the element
is then (AIUI) derived from a common reading of that phonetic element.

> (Also, the idea of uttering "siderurgy plant" as just
> one syllable would increase the confusion with already
> existing meaningful-syllables, which are naturally in
> limited number).
*nods*

> So Chinese would become more and more
> polysyllabic, simply because there are more and more
> concepts to handle ?
I can well imagine this being the case.

Though often, polysyllabic compounds are abbreviated by choosing
select characters; for example, di4tie3 "subway" from something like
di4xia4 tie3dao4 "underground railroad". (Japanese abbreviates this a
little less, using "chikatetsu" [i.e. di4xia4tie3] from "chika
tetsudou".)

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

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