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

From:Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
Date:Monday, February 26, 2007, 5:55
On 2/24/07, Jeff Rollin <jeff.rollin@...> wrote:
> On 24/02/07, Leon Lin <leon_math@...> wrote: > > > > 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". > > > > A character is pretty well defined. It is one syllable and takes up > > one unit of space in written form. The semantic space does vary from > > one character to another. > > > > The way I (being so NOT an expert in Chinese) understand it is that > double-characters came about because phonological loss in earlier stages of > Chinese was so great that even context and tones couldn't compensate for the > massive increase in homophones.
[snip] That's what I heard as well, but (again: not an export in Chinese) it's not the whole story -- there are double-character words that are not disambiguations of that kind. I think a couple of more-or-less canonical examples are hu2die2 (butterfly), zhi1zhu1 (spider), and whatever the word for "coral" was (shan1hu2?). As I remember what I'd read, the individual characters have no real meaning in themselves; they merely represent one syllable each of the multi-syllable word. (Character dictionary makers have "defined" the individual characters to each mean "butterfly", "spider", etc.; however, as they're only used in those words and never alone, they're more like bound morphemes if anything, and probably not even morphemes of their own at all.) On 2/25/07, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote: [about Chinese]
> The whole point was that "character" doesn't equal the Western > notion of "word"--right. The next question, then, is whether or > not there exists a separate notion of "word"
I believe so -- from what I read, Chinese "ci2" is fairly close to the Western notion of "word", whether written with one character or several. (Distinct from "zi4" or "character".)
> and, if it does, is it > as important as our poorly defined notion of "word", or is the > notion of the "character" more important?
I can't speak for that. However, I think that (what we'd call) dictionaries (ci2dian3) gloss ci2 rather than zi4 -- though there are also "character dictionaries" for zi4. Cheers, -- Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>