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

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@...>