Re: Anth Assignment Conorthography

On Tue, 18 Apr 2000, nicole perrin wrote:

> Barry Garcia wrote:
>
> > Hmm, this goes out to those on the list who know (anyone) but:
> >
> > I was wondering, would a system like Chinese Hanzi work for highly
> > inflected languages? I know the Japanese had problems with it, which is
> > why katakana and hiragana were invented. Or is it just a matter of
> > creating affixes for the particles/affixes/etc. that would solve the
> > problems?
>
> Not that I really know, but, it seems to me that a system like that
> would work much more simply with an agglutinating language than with an
> inflecting one, because an agglutinating language would (usually) have
> fewer suffixes, you just stick them on one after another.  An inflecting
> language, on the other hand, would have way more suffixes (or prefixes),
> you know?  But it's really only a matter of inventing characters for
> however many particles you have, at least as far as I can see, so the
> only benefit for an agglutinating system over an inflecting one is that
> there'd probably be fewer characters to make up.  Am I missing something
> big here?
>
One interesting recent theory is that Old Chinese was quite highly
inflecting, but that the speakers simply didn't see the inflections
as important enough to write down, in the same way vowels are not
written in Semitic scripts.

Supporting this theory is that Tangut has a Hanzi-like script, but
was very probably at least as highly inflected as Limbu. Many
alterations in readings in Chinese characters can be related to
Limbu alternating verb stems, too. A second thought is that
the Chinese characters might very well have been derived from
the character script used by a people speaking a non-Sino-Tibetan
language. Add in the concept of areal norms and things get
really complicated. Is Chinese as isolating as it is because
of a non-Sino-Tibetan substrate, one that also works in Vietnamese?
Or is that substrate related to Vietnamese. Is that why northern
Chinese dialects are quite de-isolating nowadays...

Anyway, the relevant article is:
Driem, George van. 1997. 'Sino-Bodic'. in: Bulletin of the
School of Oriental and African Studies, 60:3, 455-488.


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.valdyas.org