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

On 24/02/07, Leon Lin <leon_math@...> wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
>   <<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".
>
>   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. Imagine for example, that in English:

1. "cook", "school", and "cool" all ended up being pronounced "cool"...

2. ...so to resolve ambiguity qualifiers were added to clarify the meaning,
leading to:

3a) "cool"1 (from "cook") ended up being "food-cool";
3b) "cool" (from "school") ended up being "book-cool",
3c) "cool"3 (from "cool") ended up being "temperature-cool"

Then of course you have calques/loan translations and neologisms for things
that didn't exist when Old Chinese was spoken, such as "ironroad"
(railway/railroad).

Jeff

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