Re: How to minimize "words" (was "Re: isolating conlangs")

In a message dated 2/24/2007 3:19:09 PM Central Standard Time,
leon_math@YAHOO.COM writes:


>   <<Do we have any native Chinese speakers on the list?  That was
>   one of the languages where it seemed that the notion of "word"
>   wasn't as relevant as the notion of "character", which is sometimes
>   equivalent to the Western notion of "word"; sometimes smaller;
>   and sometimes larger.>>
>
>   I'm not a native nor did I study how the Chinese languages came about,
> but I've always felt that a character was always a word. Then suddenly  there
> were too many concepts to put in characters and the list of  characters was
> growing too long, so they made combinations of  characters to mean a word. When
> I was learning Chinese, I would not  only have to do exercises like "Use
> this word in a sentence" but also  "Use this character in a word".
>
Characters are not the same as words in Chinese (although this was much more
the case in Ancient Chinese).
Modern Mandarin uses characters as parts of words, although many simple,
common words are written with one character.
Bottom line:  "character" does not equal "word".

stevo

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