Re: THEORY: Sandhi
| From: | Adam Walker <dreamertwo@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Tuesday, December 4, 2001, 2:37 |
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>From: Cheng Zhong Su <suchengzhong@...>
>Date: Tue, 4 Dec 2001 08:47:08 +1100
>
>Answer: It seemed no rules to apply the phonteic
>system for mandarin language, some one beleive there
>are, but when you find in fact all the 1200 different
>phonetic typse were separate individuals, you may
>understand they can combined each other without any
>limit.
Pardon me if I'm rude for a moment, but Ni you mei you chi cuo yao? Where
do you come up with these numbers and WHAT are you referring to? English
has 400 phonetic types; Mandarin has 1200? As someone else already pointed
out, if you mean phonemes your numbers are way too big for English and
WAAAAYY too big for Mandarin. If you mean syllables your number is
reasonably close for Mandarin (only of by a couple hundred) but WAAAAAYYYYYY
too small for English. Please, explain what you mean.
In English artcle 'a' in front of a vowel has
>to be changed as 'an' but in mandarine, you don't need
>change any thing.
But, Mandarin *does* demand several tens of different words to allow you to
count objects. 1 zhi pen, 1 zhang paper, 1 tou cow, 1 zhi dog, 1 tiao
necktie, 1 wei person, 1 ge student. (I put only the classifier in Chinese
for the benifit of the non-Sinophiles among us.) Of these examples English
does not need an "extra" word for any of them but "paper" -- 1 piece of
paper. English divides its nouns into countable and noncountable categories
which are to some degree logical. Only the noncountable nouns require
"extra" words to be counted. Chinese has, essintially, decided that ALL
nouns are noncountable so EVERY noun in Chinese requires this "wasted"
verbage.
And Taiwanese even has some vestiges of grammar. There are seperate plural
forms of the personal pronouns marked by a sufixed -n -- goa, goan; li, lin;
i, in. Mandarin requires an "extra" word, men, for this -- wo, women; ni,
nimen; ta, tamen. You've got two "wasted" phonemes there AND an extra
character to write!
As for hard to learn, it will depend
>on what we want. If we want knowing more in life time,
>we has to detect more information in every single oral
>actions.
Just not so. There is no connection.
If we just want deal with everyday life, then
>the Phoenician language shall be the best choice, for
>it even regardless vowels.
Phoenician didn't WRITE its vowels. That does NOT mean it didn't have them.
What it does mean is that a dozen semantically realted words could have
EXACTLY the same writing while having a dozen different pronunciations
depending on the exact meaning intended. It was left to the reader to
insert the vowels and recover the meaning.
In this issue, it may be
>no free lunch. After all, when we used to the system,
>it want be a hard job, some tone language children
>even don't know what is a 'tone'.
And the point being?
Adam
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