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Re: Korean/Japanese/Chinese (was: Re: FYI re: Greenberg's Universals)

From:Marcus Smith <smithma@...>
Date:Thursday, October 5, 2000, 1:57
Yoon Ha Lee wrote:


>Now I'm just confused. <wince> I think you're right, but darned if I >can figure out what determines *where* the wh-word goes. I'm guessing >that it just straight-out replaces the equivalent word in the >statement-sentence:
That's how Chinese and Japanese work, and I've been led to believe that the same is true of Korean. Just swap the wh-word with the non-question word that would normally go there.
> > Note that if we treated all the people as males and said in English "Taro > > said to Michi that Hitomi likes himself", "himself" could only refer to > > "Hitomi" none of the other two. Quite different from Japanese. > >...which would sound really odd since Hitomi is (if I understand >correctly) a girl's name? <G>
Yup. It is. That's why I said "if we treated all the people as males..." :-)
><parsing> Hmm. (The above looks like Yale transcription, >am I right? I usually use McCune-Reischauer since that's what all the >darn subway sign transliterations use in Seoul.)
Could be. I wouldn't know.
><thinking> Could it? I read this sentence as saying "Chelswu thinks >Suni likes him." Because -nun tells me that Chelswu is the one doing the >thinking. You might have to change casin-ul to casin-un or switch the >particles on Chelswu and Suni, e.g. >Suni-nun Chelswu-ka casin-ul saranghantako sayngakhanta >means to me "Suni thinks Chelswu loves her." > ><tearing out hair> I just don't know enough Korean grammar.
But you are way ahead of me. :-) =============================== Marcus Smith AIM: Anaakoot "When you lose a language, it's like dropping a bomb on a museum." -- Kenneth Hale ===============================